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[Freelancer]

This message was self-deleted by its author (Freelancer) on Tue Jul 23, 2019, 09:23 AM. When the original post in a discussion thread is self-deleted, the entire discussion thread is automatically locked so new replies cannot be posted.

[Make7]

1. I think the owner class likes things pretty much how they are.

Obstructionism is mostly just the politicians following their marching orders.

[HereSince1628]

2. The Kochs certainly want to break the federal gov'ts regulatory power

The republicans long term effort is to starve the federal gov't.

The yeoman calvinists of the tea-party would like to see social programs destroyed.

The religious right go along with destruction of federal scientific agencies to protect their creation myth.

Collectively it all works to make the federal government an boogie man.

[Freelancer]

4. And yet when things go wrong...

They all go running to the Federal Government.

It's illogical

LLAP

[HereSince1628]

5. I saw an article a while back about the most 'socialistic' states

and it had Wyoming as a top 4 state based on per capita receipts from federal programs. It really wasn't what I expected to see.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. I think this is fine for GD.

And we should probably do more of it.

I think it's a moderately complicated situation.

To lay a bit of groundwork, I will start by saying that the government is completely unresponsive to the needs of the public, except insofar as those needs match the desires of the ruling corporations. Thus we were allowed to have ACA but not universal health care because it served the interests of the insurance companies (e.g. guaranteeing them a captive pool of young, healthy people to insure), while incidentally actually doing some good for some of the public. (But many people now have insurance that they can't use because of the copays, deductibles, & exclusions).

Likewise, our Corporate Masters really don't care one way or the other about gay rights, women's rights, etc. because these matters don't much affect their pathways to profit. What they actually care about are things like deregulation, stifling (or, better, absorbing) competition,etc.

To be an acceptable candidate, you have to be "right" on the economic issues, no matter your party. On the social issues you are free to fight it out with the other side. The Big Guys don't care who wins at that level, but it serves their interests to continue the illusion that there are two parties with significant differences between them.

The one social issue that the Big Guys might care about is racial/ethnic discrimination. One of the sickest features of human nature, at least as it is expressed in this country, lies in the fact that some people will put up with almost any abuse or deprivation as long as they are assured that there is a class of people worse off than them, upon whom they might look down. The single best tool for controlling the masses is to play them off against each other. So Joe Sixpack knows damn well who's causing his problems. It's those (color-coded for easy recognition) dark folks down the street with their welfare Cadillacs.

So the parties are left to fight it out on issues that don't matter much to their masters, who really don't care whether it's a corporate Republican or a corporate Democrat as long as they vote to deregulate, keep up the military expenditures, and otherwise behave themselves.

Boehner is known to have declared, back in 2009, that their purpose was to destroy the Obama Presidency. I see it as pure partisanship, fueled with racism. I have no idea if Boehner is a racist in his (alleged) soul, but it doesn't matter; he's playing racist dog whistles to a racist audience.

I see the Republicans as divided into 2 groups: the corporatists and the Tea Party. For the most part, the corporatists are cynical, grandiose manipulators, and the Tea Partiers are largely useful fools who believe their own horseshit.

[Freelancer]

6. I agree -- great post

I'm amazed at the tendency of modern people to take trust from what, under intended conditions, would be a reachable/changeable power (government) and hand that trust willingly to opaque aggregations of power (corporations) seemingly without a second thought. Have people always been so inured to the idea that all power must tip toward money? A legacy of monarchy, perhaps?

[Jackpine Radical]

7. Depends on your definition of "always."

The social organization & modal values of small groups, particularly "preliterate" groups, where everyone knows each other, are very different from modern western society.

They tend to be quite egalitarian, and to place the highest value on sharing of resources. People into self-aggrandizement and accumulation of property tend to find themselves ostracized.

Among the traditional Ojibwe, for example,the highest falue was "good-heartedness." A person who succeeded better than others at hunting would attribute his success to luck. However, luck was not evenly distributed; one got it as a sign of favor by his Guardian Spirit (and how one gets a Guardian Spirit is an entirely separate story). Thus you had to do things to stay in the good favor of your guardian--and what did you have to do to keep the guardian happy with you? You had to be generous to others.

They have a term--Pimadaziwin, which is sometimes translated as "the good life." I think it is roughly equivalent to the Diné (Navajo) idea of "walking in beauty. As one authority puts it, "Pimadaziwin counters such socially disapproved and collectively disruptive acts as inhospitality, stinginess, greediness, and, especially, ridicule."

[MisterP]

8. poli sci has found 4 GOP factions (in fact they're each like their own party, with massive backers

and even their own publishing houses)

1. right-libertarians (vocal, attract racists, self-contradictory, both elitist and populist) ironically founded by fundie Gary North, corpo Hunts and Kochs, inexperienced militarist Heinlein, and some Bioshock villain who used to run props for De Mille and had no idea how to run a business
2. corporatists (pretty authoritarian, but can be pretty socially liberal--when it comes to getting the pink dollar) economically they collide with the libertarians and they LOVE science so they like the fundies more for saying that high wages and pollution controls are tools of Satan--in fact they love science so much they'll ignore everything it says (note that secondhand smoke wasn't just called hippie science, it was called woo); includes dirty-cop whitecoats and techno-utopians, so even the vaguely-Democratish Elon Musk can approach this column when he opens his mouth
3. fundies (pretty recent actually--not even around 1975 when you think about it)
4. militarists (separate from the MIC, actually have the strongest voice in Washington of the four): very bipartisan, going from Richard "Gaza is the new Muscovite superpower" Pipes and bloodsoaked Birchers like North and Secord to Samantha "I'm no neocon" Power; a few of them are "Keynesian" in that they feed sparrows through the horses of the DoD and

so there's no "racist faction," racism is a currency in the flows between them