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What is going on in Washington? What is the larger agenda behind the amazingly aggressive right wing moves coming from the White House? According to the people I’ve been talking to and the articles I’ve been reading, the right wing agenda has three main points, each of which has precedents in earlier Republican and Democratic Administrations but which have been pushed to a qualitatively new level by the W clique:
1) Fundamentally change the role of government. In the Nation a couple weeks ago, this was described as going back to President McKinley. In other words, stripping government of all social welfare functions and all economic regulatory activity. Instead, government would revert to the sole role of protecting property and sovereignty through the use of its police/military power. This change will be accomplished in all three branches. The judiciary will be stacked, the legislature will pass the appropriate laws, and the executive will become more centralized and autocratic. The transformation of our budget surplus to endless deficits is part of this strategy – instead of having to argue against specific social programs the right-wingers can now simply say that they’re being realistic and dealing honestly with the real lack of funds. Pushing the fiscal crisis down to state and local levels (whose governments are often constitutionally prevented from running deficits) further spreads the transformation and diffuses opponents’ ability to fight back. Those functions that simply cannot be eliminated will be privatized as much as possible. The end result is an authoritarian state whose main function is repression of all institutionalized (and individual) avenues of resistance, perhaps even of dissent, particularly the labor movement.
2) Fundamentally shifting the burden of taxation from capital (including profits and all forms of “unearned” income) to consumption. The eventual goal is to eliminate all capital gains, inheritance, and corporate taxes, as well as the entire income tax. Before that, it means finding ways to exempt as much as possible – starting with those aspects that primarily hit the “investing classes” (i.e. – the rich). Radical and repeated tax cuts help create deficits (re-enforcing the first strategic goal). They also make taxation increasingly regressive, putting ever-larger burdens on working families and the poor. Since this is happening at the same time that services provided by government to those groups are being reduced, it reinforces the traditional anti-tax feeling among the general population – making it easier to push for still more tax cuts and reinforcing the general anti-government feeling that has always been part of American culture.
3) Fundamentally change the nature of international relations from a “trilateral” world in which multinational elites collaborated on creating an investment-friendly world into a US-dominated “new world order” in which narrow nationalist goals are achieved through unilateral and pre-emptive use of the US’s military power and everyone else is forced to accommodate Washington’s ability to “create facts on the ground.” This involves the radical transformation or withering away of many existing multinational organizations and arrangements and the permanent escalation of US military spending (which helps support the other two strategic goals). It plays to the US’s currently dominating military strength while papering over our economic and other weaknesses. It also serves a domestic purpose of evoking knee-jerk nationalism and concern for the soldiers, which distracts attention other issues and makes it very hard to mount an oppositional movement. Acting like a bully also helps create the type of world that justifies the behavior. In the Middle East, Hamas and Sharon need each other to legitimize their own violence as the only viable response to the extremism of the other side. Similarly, by acting in ways that assume the world is full of terrorists, that allies are untrustworthy, that security comes from hitting everyone else before they can hit you, the new imperialists help create the very conditions they claim to be responding to, which then makes it necessary to act even more aggressively.
read more at link...................................
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06-15-03, 02:50 PM
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