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The modern GOP scam explained [1]
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Date: 2022-09-19
We’re all Davids in the story of our lives - most of the time.
“The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Fine words that wouldn’t seem out of place in an episode transcript of disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s program.
Only they are not from Mr. Jones. They come from a man who, for 8 long years, occupied the most powerful *governmental* office in the world.
Time and again, various charts have shown how many of America’s woes started when the guy who made his name in politics advocating against the government was elected to lead said government.
At behest of lobbying groups and corporate donors, with his charismatic, grandfatherly facade Reagan redistributed American wealth to the wealthy, introduced tax cuts marketed as benefitting for all while mostly benefitting the upper bracket, and damned a generation of Americans to astronomically expensive tuition fees in the name of keeping them liberal hippies from hurting his feefees.
All these numbers and facts are out in the open online on the Internets, as Reagan copycat Dubya would say. The real question is this: how do Americans, mainly those on the right, keep falling for it?
A piece I found from the Guardian while researching AstroTurf movements on the right succinctly summarized the issue and nailed it right on the head. From the article:
An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business.
People have a natural penchant for seeing themselves as the underdogs. From David against Goliath to Neo against the Matrix, we love to see ourselves as rebels against a corrupt or unjust system.
What is dangerous — and frankly scary, is when said system tricks people into helping them while thinking they’re doing the opposite. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s completely true in the case of the Tea Party and their backers in Koch Industries:
Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it's good for them. … Most of these bodies call themselves "free-market thinktanks", but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt. The thinktanks that the Kochs have funded devise the game and the rules by which it is played; Americans for Prosperity coaches and motivates the team.
Corporate money in politics erodes our democratic process. It tells the ordinary man their voice is irrelevant to elected leaders. Only billionaires with the luxury of lobbying thousands of dollars for laws that benefit them matter in institutions of power. But when the ordinary man is being used as unwitting pawns to further the ends of these billionaires — no cap bro, that’s scary.
This article was published in the good old days of 2010 when Obama was president, Biden was his VP, and Trump was just a barely famous loudmouthed businessman. Yet nothing’s changed but the faces, the names, and the trends.
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