Monday, January 19, 2009

They weren't inept. They did it on purpose.

It was class warfare, government for the few, a kleptocracy, the crime of the century:
Its purpose was never to make America a better place. Indeed, if we define America as a country belonging to its 300 million inhabitants, then the purpose was actually precisely the opposite. The mission of this ideology was in fact to diminish, if not impoverish, the vast bulk of these citizens so that the already massively wealthy among them could become obscenely wealthy.

Where you or I might have looked at the middle of the 20th century and seen the moment when America finally did justice to its national promise by introducing a measure of serious economic equality for the first time, and thus vastly expanding the middle class, the plutocrats behind Reaganism-Bushism saw a filthy aberration to the natural order of master and slave that had long existed in human history. They therefore set about to overturn that aberration and return to "better times" through a process of class warfare. That meant that labor unions had to go, along with workplace protections, good wages, decent benefits, government protections and a far-too-moderate average CEO-to-lowest-paid-worker salary ratio on the order of 50-to-1, replaced instead by something closer to 500-to-1.
Emphasis added. And yes, they were evil.

If you don't believe me, here’s another take from Philip Agre at UCLA. He asks two simple questions:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years,” says Agre.

P.S. In the "prose too delicious to lose" category, here's a Bush/Cheney sendoff from Meteor Blades:

Good-bye to your rip-offs, your malice, your arrogance, your ignorance, your outlawry, your denial, your deceit, your cronyism and your stubborn refusal to cease pushing the envelope in the department of shameless villainy. Goodbye to the administration you constructed of turdiness and explained with truthiness. To your smirk and your snarl. To your conscienceless cruelty. Good-bye to your corruption, your vanity, your world without grays. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, you insufferable despots, and good riddance.

4 comments:

Lee Roberts said...

Bra-freaking-vo, AD.

This some truthy truth and needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

Thank-you.

Lee Roberts said...

These are the two 'graphs that sounded the bell for me:

In short, if you merely hate the Bush administration for driving the country into penury, making us hated around the world, bringing on a global economic crisis, ignoring when not exacerbating a looming environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions, killing a million Iraqis on the basis of a host of lies, letting New Orleans drown, trying to wreck Social Security, sleeping through (at best) the worst terrorist attack on our shores, allowing -- when not assisting -- the Middle East in going up in flames, or dividing our country internally -- if that's "all" you've got against these guys, then you have no idea how bad it really is.

Because how bad it really is can be found in the same place where one sees the difference between first-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. The latter is a crime of ineptitude, the former one of intent. If you are fooled into thinking -- as I suspect that most Americans have been -- that the Bush administration was just a bunch of bungling ideologues who governed like Keystone Kops, then you will have been duped by the crime of the century. For at bottom these were kleptocrats, pure and simple. They came to steal, not to serve, and -- with the chief exception of their foiled Social Security raid -- they accomplished their mission rather handily. This was class warfare, and we lost badly. The rich in America are now far richer than they've been since 1929, while we and our government are infinitely more impoverished than we've been since the New Deal.

Alna Dem said...

...and, as he notes at the end, I hope you enjoyed the beer.

Hopefully we voters will be paying attention for a generation or so.

Thank god they didn't succeed on Social Security. For this victory I credit Josh Marshall and his meticulous work following the Great Bamboozlepalooza Tour.

Lee Roberts said...

Josh Marshall should have a street named after him, or a national park, or something. He is my hero.