Government For the Few

There was a brief period in European and American politics, when the governors believed, at least, that they were working for the good of all. In the US, this spanned from the Progressive era to the Great Society.

The end, and the ultimate failure, of the Great Society was the result of imperial hubris: the quagmire of Vietnam. It made the trend toward social democracy unaffordable, while enriching and empowering a few. Many of the new rich financed the counterrevolution against "welfare as we know it," and highly progressive income taxes, and, well, the whole Progressive to Liberal to social democratic tendencies in governance, i.e. government that aids the many who need help, not the few who are privileged enough already.

There were similar movements of reform and social democracy in most of Europe in this same period: some earlier, some later.

But that era is past; it was a short interlude between the thousands of years when governments naturally existed to benefit the very few at the expense, or misery, of the many. The Roman Empire was no egalitarian paradise, certainly. From start to finish, it depended on the labor of slaves, who probably made up well over half the population. Slaves had to be continually replaced. Bad ones sent to galleys and mines only lasted a few years. Even good slaves would have to be replaced after 40 years of service.

Even the vaunted Athenian Democracy, of course, depended on slaves.

Where do slaves come from? Conquest. This was even true of African slavery in the Americas. Europeans conquered Africa first by taking advantage of the absence of effective states (ones that controlled their territories), and the multiplicity of potential allies, as well as enemies. Europeans did, ultimately take over, i.e. conquer most of Africa, no longer to sell slaves, but because they had penetrated the continent in order to buy them, in the first place.

When Rome began to lose territory, instead of conquering new lands, the supply of slaves became more erratic. There were floods of them when an invading barbarian army was defeated, but many more were carried off by successful barbarian raids and wars, and then sold back to the slave-hungry Romans. Attila did that after all his successful campaigns of pillage, rape and slaughter. Slaves were the most valuable spoil of all.

What does this have to do with today? Today's Roman Senators are the billionaires who finance and inspire all the attempts to roll back or abolish all the reforms and programs benefiting the many. Even though they, the one-percent, the .001 percent, have prospered beyond even the imaginings of Hollywood sycophants, they want more, much more. Where can the predators turn now, since government has already given them so many favorable contracts, and breaks in taxes like the hedge funders' "carried interest" clause?

Let's raid Social Security and Medicare! they chorus.

They are more like Attila than they know!

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Caste, Class & Color

Back when men were men and women knew their place, when a white sheet was a badge of honor, there was a region of this country that was ruled, brutally, by a minority--after slavery had been abolished--and after the 14th and 15th Amendments gave all men (not women) the right to vote. Flaming crosses and worse enabled the white minority to rule over 'the colored.' Meanwhile, monopolies overworked white workers in other parts of the country.

The post-Civil War period experienced an explosion of riches--in a few hands, especially the most ruthless. Black people were re-enslaved, through sharecropping, Jim Crow and the prison system.

The post-Civil War period must be the model for the Tea Party, whose activists famously shouted "We Want Our Country Back!" No wonder they see Obama as an abomination: he's like one of those ex-slave, black Senators or Congressmen, run by corrupt carpetbaggers exploiting the South during cursed Reconstruction. Worse, he's better educated than they are.

Post-Reconstruction is the model for the new society they'd like to construct--post-Reconstruction, pre-Progressive Era. It's the reforms and expansions of the franchise beginning with Progressive era that the radical Republicans want to excise.

Before Progressivism, there was no regulation of business: trusts proliferated, monopolies became the industrial norm, and wealth shot upward into fewer and fewer hands.

The great Hudson Valley estates are evidence of their extremes of wealth. Now, our new Roman Senators are more visible on screen than on great estates, but their fortunes dwarf the Gilded Age.

A minority is attempting to rule the rest of us: the Republican majority in the House, elected by fewer votes than the minority Democrats, is holding the rest of government hostage, demanding it "negotiate" with them, i.e. give in to their demands.

If Republicans succeed, if Obama blinks, and uses the occasion to negotiate a "grand bargain" that cuts taxes for the wealthy, cuts Social Security and other earned benefits, as well as further shredding the safety net, then we'll be hurtling back to the 19th century.

We already have monopolies like Monsanto and oligopolies like Wall Street, all of them enabled by government. Unions are almost as helpless as they were before the New Deal. We already have inequalities of wealth as great or greater than in 1900.

Can a determined minority, with money and media, overcome the rights, safeguards and programs Americans won through terrible struggles, starting with the wars on strikers, followed by the sit-downs at factories and later in buses and lunch counters, and despite white terror, won at the ballot box? Will we really let ourselves be poisoned, our land and water despoiled, our labor devalued? Will we allow them to impoverish us?

It happened in Fifth Century Rome; it happened again in the 1870's; it could happen here--with consequences far worse than Romulus Augustulas's defeat, Rome's depopulation, or brutal Jim Crow: think planetary destruction.

Whee! Ain't This Fun!

Guvmint shut down, so we won't have to pay no taxes no more. Guvmint shut down so we don't have to have no guvmint health care. So, poor folks can still die when they're no longer useful. And enterprising people--like us--can still buy the finest healthcare in the world.

You'll see. Everybody will be better off without guvmint--except for keeping gangs in the keeps and off the streets, if you know what I mean, while smart folk in the suites can make off with the green.

The Tea Party represents two elements: racists, who want to prove that a black man should never be President, and 'those people' should stay in their place; and predators, who want all government out of the way, so they can make off with ALL the wealth everyone else produces. The second element funds the first, of course, and primes it on what to say.

So, every day that the government is shut down, and we notice the things that can go wrong when it's not doing its job, the more the Tea Party/Republicans will lose credibility--except with the racist and vengeful 20%. The predators don't lose: they make out like the bandits they are.

The extremism of people like Ted Cruz is not unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda in its nihilism. It's hard to know what a zealot like Cruz or Mullah Mohammed really believe. Cruz gets others to believe, for example, that the Affordable Care Act is going to unleash the apocalypse, although it's an almost Republican attempt at providing universal health care (even Mexico precedes us), so that people won't be in perpetual fear of the illness that loses them their job, their insurance and drives them into bankruptcy. Cruz and the Republican crazies in the House are absolutely determined to stop this potentially extremely popular program from ever happening. They fear its effects: already, in one day, the website insurance exchanges have had far more traffic and demand than either opponents or proponents predicted, with the predictable screw ups giving opponents something to exploit.

Tea Party funders want people desperate, not secure. Consciously or not, they have encouraged the progressive impoverishment of the middle class, because anxious employees will work harder. They won't dare challenge elite rip-offs.

Capital buys technology and dis-employs, but also enables world-wide use of the cheapest labor--and even creates it, since global competition drives down wages--and weakens all those other things self-respecting business leaders despise, like unions.

Affordable Care could actually begin to change that dynamic: it would give employees greater independence: they wouldn't have to fear losing their insurance, possibly their lives, if they changed jobs.

This has to be stopped--says Cruz--and especially, the people behind him. In Rome, these same people, the predatory Senatorial class, drove the Empire bankrupt--and most soon lost everything themselves. And so did almost everyone else: Rome was reduced to a village.