Topix Underground

"...Which, of course, is why rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.

They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, rightwingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw yesterday when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians.

Back before the Reagan Revolution — when things were working well, a third of America had a good union job, our schools were brand-new and well supplied and staffed, college was free, healthcare was inexpensive, and the biggest challenge America had was to put a man on the moon and bring him safely home — there was little demand for a dictator in this country.

Sure, women, Blacks, and queer people were demanding rights and their fair slice of the pie, but they wanted part of a pie that was already working (to mangle a metaphor). For the majority of white Americans to adopt a strongman authoritarian, first the country had to be broken and broken badly.

Republicans and their billionaire donors have been working on this project for decades.

It was originally proposed in a memo by Lewis Powell in 1971, the year before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court and he authored the decision legalizing corporate bribery of politicians..."

Things were working well? Carter and Nixon were before Reagan. We were coming off an oil embargo. I believe the unemployment rate was about 8% under Carter. Interest rates through the roof.

Like the Nazis were?

Nazis had there own sense of control.

G'nite all.

That was before Nixon. People were getting laid off like crazy under Nixon. It wasn't any better under Carter.

Now the GOP and their billionaire backers are more than 40 years into their project:

Breaking our schools and students: Reagan began the process of breaking our educational system, which was once the pride of the world. He ended free college in California, cut federal aid to education by nearly a fifth, gutted civics, and almost singlehandedly created a nearly $2 trillion black hole of student debt that’s dragging down millions in the last few generations. And now rightwing haters are roiling school boards and threatening teachers to further break schools with their lust for banning books they don’t like.

Breaking our workers: Reagan also shattered the compact between workers and employers that had created and guaranteed a strong and stable middle class, the first and largest in the world. He started early in his presidency by crushing PATCO, one of only three unions that had endorsed his presidential candidacy, and then put an anti-union lawyer in charge of the Labor Department (a practice followed most recently by Trump, who put Antonin Scalia’s notorious union-busting son in that job).

Breaking our manufacturing base: George H.W. Bush broke our nation’s job market by executing the Trade Act that went into effect in 1989 and amplified the “free trade” powers of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which was signed by President Clinton. This began the steady migration of good American jobs to Mexico and China, causing over 15,000 factories to close and move, taking with them over 20 million good jobs.

Breaking our wallets: Pharmaceutical and insurance companies scored major victories during George W. Bush’s presidency. Not only did he begin privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam, but he also put into law an absolute prohibition against the government negotiating drug prices with drug manufacturers. As a result, Americans pay as much as ten times more for drugs than do people in other developed countries.

Breaking our environment: Republicans and the fossil fuel billionaires who own them have known since the 1970s that their products were damaging our environment as well as causing tens of thousands of cancer, heart- and lung-disease deaths every year through their pollution. While President Jimmy Carter tried to do something about this in the late 1970s with his solar panels on the White House and his “Solar Bank” program that would have 20% of America’s energy produced by wind and solar by the year 2000, Reagan shut it all down when he came into office in 1981 in exchange for big contributions from the fossil fuel industry. Republicans are still working to break our environment: they regularly lie about global warming and promise to increase our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Breaking our society: Republicans once talked about freedom and individual responsibility, but these were always buzzwords for letting billionaires do what they want and ignoring the needs of the poor. In reality, they delight in pitting Americans against each other, demonizing minority groups (racial, religious, gender), while promoting hateful, racist tropes like the so-called Great Replacement Theory.

Breaking our institutions of democracy: Republicans spent three years promoting the lie that Trump beat Biden in 2020. This is on top of 30+ years of promoting the idea that there is massive voter fraud in America, justifying making it harder and harder for people to vote, when in fact there is no voter fraud crisis in this country and never was (in the modern era).

Breaking our stature in the world: There was a time when Republicans stood strong against dictators: now they embrace them. In a recent rally, Trump openly praised Putin, Orbán, and Xi while trash-talking our actual allies in NATO and the EU. Republicans in the House and Senate are openly opposed to helping democratic Ukraine fight off violent aggression by dictator-run Russia. Allies that long depended on the US are now publicly questioning the wisdom of relying on us for any sort of support for democracies around the world so long as the MAGA faction controls the GOP.

Breaking our public health system: According to the British medical journal Lancet, a half-million Americans died from Covid during Trump’s presidency unnecessarily, all because of the lies he told us to try to salvage the economy for his re-election. Now we’re experiencing outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases because MAGA Republicans like DeSantis have shattered people’s faith in our public health system. From calls to prosecute Fauci to rejecting masks and vaccinations to supporting price-gouging drug manufacturers and for-profit hospitals, they’re causing widespread death and disability and appear to delight in it.

Breaking women and girls: After a 50-year campaign against Roe v Wade, Trump finally packed the Supreme Court with Catholic fanatics who, based on the writings of a 17th century witch-burning English judge, let states again prosecute women and doctors for abortion. The GOP has now brought to the Supreme Court a case that could outlaw all birth control in America, and they’re dead serious about getting women out of the boardroom and back into the bedroom and kitchen.

Breaking our children: for the past 40 years, the GOP has led the charge to fill our schools with guns. They have been so effective at this that bullets are now the leading cause of death among our nation’s children, a horror that has not been successfully inflicted on any other nation on Earth. They’ve also fought vigorously against any effort to regulate social media, which is provoking a mental health crisis among our young people and driving an explosion of suicide.

Breaking entrepreneurs: There was a time in America when a good ticket to the American Dream was to open a small local business, grow it, and hand it down to your kids. The corner dry cleaner, pharmacy, dime store, restaurant, hotel, bank, travel agency, electronics or furniture store, etc. But ever since Reagan stopped enforcement of the Sherman Act and other anti-trust laws in 1983, it’s been all “mergers and acquisitions” all the time: every consequential sphere of American industry is now dominated by a small handful of giants who will squash anybody who tries to start a company in their sector like a bug.

Predictably, now that Republicans and the morbidly rich billionaires who own them have broken most of the social contract and systems that held the middle class together (and our middle class has gone from being almost two-thirds of us to fewer than half of us),.."
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