The Chris Moeller Archives

The bathtub

America's right political wing has done a masterful job of selling government social action as an overstep and an expensive waste of money. The military and defense budget ballooned to $590 billion in FY 2017, and President Trump proposed an increase in that line item to $681.1 billion for 2019. The director of the Joint Staff, Kenneth McKenzie, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee, during a hearing last month, that "anything below $733 (billion) (for 2020) would increase risk" for our nation's military. And then we continue to hear each day from the legislative warriors that protect these battlefield warriors that the government that governs least, governs best.

So that addresses a certain hypocrisy, but what about the concerted effort by think tanks, foundations, and research organizations to destroy government effectiveness and thereby weaken public support for government of any kind? Neoconservative Grover Norquist famously said, with casual brutality, that he didn't want to abolish government, he just wanted to shrink it to a size small enough where he could drown it in a bathtub. (Seriously, what can you drown in a bathtub? A child? A puppy?) Ineffectiveness IS the strategy. Remember that fact when the president speaks-- or tweets-- to you. Slash taxes, create deficits, and finally, step three, decimate public services with austerity budgets. Naomi Klein spelled it out for us in her vital book The Shock Doctrine, and after being tested out on the peoples of Russia, Argentina, Chile, Poland, Indonesia, and a host of other nations, it came home to the country that birthed the idea. It's Milton Friedman/University of Chicago economics. The right wing doesn't want to decrease deficits. It's playing pretend. Deficits enable them to take their desired action.

We're told that bureaucrats and regulations suck the lifeblood out of our economy. Say you're trying to get a building permit at the local zoning office, where the budget has been slashed 50 percent. Only one clerk is available to process your paperwork, and precious time slips away. You blame the bureaucracy of having to secure a permit. We underfund. Things don't work. We underfund more. Things don't work more. This is our public schools in a nutshell. Our public housing. Our meager attempts at environmental protection. They get their government-run health care while they rob you of the same security. Their stenographers in the national news media are eager to print the outline and affirm a new truism. Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are "radicals" because they support single-payer, government-provided health care, which the skeptics in the senate and the house say will weaken the quality of health care, yet not a single one of those legislator-skeptics gives theirs back.

Mother Teresa was one of them. She was a true believer in the starving of the poor. For her, that somehow brought glory to God. She palled around with Charles Keating and the Duvaliers of Haiti. She opened a mission in the Bronx, and because of all of the positive publicity surrounding her public persona, donations poured in. A building was purchased for the price of one dollar from New York City and renovations of it were planned. City regs insisted that an elevator be installed to assist the disabled patrons. Teresa refused the elevator. It was inconsistent with her beliefs about charity and keeping people as sick as possible and nearer my God to thee. Sound like a major political ideology we cope with in this country? The plans for the building fall through because an elevator for the disabled is deemed unacceptable. But then the larger point to be made is how the New York local media in 1990 then handles the entire story. (This NY Times metro article from that period is downright hilarious.) It's "bureaucracy" that killed the plan. "Political correctness" in support of the disabled nullified the best intentions of the missionaries.

Government bashing is relentless here. It's a hysteria. A cult. Armed resistance is not considered out of the question in their verbiage and in their literature, and even congressional members and candidates sniff up to this line. Corporations are permitted to move in and fill the void left by a shrinking government, and that, friends, then becomes the reality of fascism. Remember it's not the actual size of government. Military spending explodes in size. Corporate giveaways are rampant. The main targets are social spending, taxes, and regulations on business. This ineffective government becomes the scapegoat for each of your problems-- and chances are, you have plenty of problems. Can't pay your bills? It's taxes. Didn't get that promotion? Government affirmative-action programs and unchecked immigration. Crime and moral decay got you down? Well, the government forced prayer out of the schools. Won't be able to retire? The government won't let you invest your Social Security in the stock market. One size-- and one product-- fits all. The single cause of anti-government keeps the Republican Party from ripping apart at the seams, separating the have-quite-a-lots from the have-almost-nothings.

Attacks on government are really then an attack on the most vulnerable of ours. Not only does it strip them of their basic necessities, it strips them of their will to fight. It works to strip away a century-long legacy of successful safety-net programs for the protection of the least of us. That makes the anti-government agenda the most radical one that exists in U.S. politics.

posted by CM @ 7:24 PM