Text 2425, 90 rader
Skriven 2004-09-19 17:24:12 av Alan Hess
Ärende: tearing down New Deal?
==============================
Is that Bush's plan?
********

Published on Friday, September 17, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Real Republican Domestic Agenda: War on Roosevelt
by Larry Beinhart
 

If you watched the Republican Convention I'm sure you understand that we will
conquer the world to protect ourselves from terrorists and to give the world
the freedom it craves and deserves. And anyone who questions that is a girlie
man.

But there is also a domestic agenda . It was expressed in one succinct
sentence. George Bush said, "many of our most fundamental systems ? the tax
code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training, were created for a world
of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems."

This is fairly explicit. Yet sufficiently vague, that nobody, not our leading
newspapers, not CNN, not CBS, not NPR, not even the internet lefties, jumped up
and down and freaked out and said "He wants to do what?!"

Granted, it's sort of in code. But the translation is easily available. The
Rosetta Stone is the Texas Republican Party Platform. Think of the National
Convention as the Playboy Magazine version and the Texas document as the
Hustler on-line hardcore version of who wants to do what to whom.

The Texas Republican Party Platform calls for abolishing the income tax,
abolishing the IRS, abolishing the 16th Amendment, abolishing the inheritance
tax ? which they are careful to call the death tax and abolishing corporate
income taxes, payroll taxes and the capital gains tax.

These are to be replaced with a national sales tax.

Now just in case you think this is paranoid ranting, the bill has already been
introduced in the House. It has 55 co-sponsors and it has the support of House
Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

They will also end social security. It will be privatized. They know we don't
like that word. So there's a new word, it is "the ownership society." Instead
of making payments to the social security system you can put your money in
private funds and you own it.

The sales pitch is based on the boundless optimism that in the long run, the
market will always go up. Historically, that's true. Unless George W. Bush is
president.

The reality is that company pension funds, which were running a surplus when
Bush came into office, are in so much trouble now, that they are threatening
the survival of some companies and of the quasi-governmental agency that
insures them. State pension funds, which rely in part on investments, now have
to use extra tax dollars or borrow in order to pay their pensions.

Imagine if you had given up your social security in order to invest in
Halliburton, which was run by Dick Cheney, or Harkness Energy, when George Bush
was on the Board of Directors. If you didn't have the insider information to
sell some of your stock, like Cheney did, or all your stock in time, like Bush
did, you would be pretty well broke now.

Bush mentioned health coverage in that crucial sentence. But there is no known
Republican Plan for Health Coverage. So what's he talking about? What
fundamental system was created for the world of yesterday, that works very
well, just like social security and income tax do, that could be torn down and
looted through privatization? Medicare.

The thing about job training baffled me. There is no big New Deal or New
Frontier or Great Society job training program to destroy. What there is, is
unemployment insurance. Here's the deal: if you lose your job, you will get a
block grant for job training. Three thousand dollars is the number being
floated. And if you get a new job in a week or two weeks, well, hell, you can
keep the money as a "re-employment bonus." The job training will instead of
unemployment insurance.

These guys can't stand to see a pile of money around without being able to grab
it and get rich. Even worse is money that just goes to people who work, goes
right to them for retirement, or to pay their medical bills, or to carry them
between jobs, without a brokerage firm, or an insurance company, or the private
education industry, sucking the cream off the top.

There's more. Lot's more. Including significant evangelical and anti-gay
agendas. But those are the basics.

George Bush has made it perfectly clear his plan for the next four years is to
tear down the New Deal. It's not forward to the 21st Century It's back to the
19th.

Larry Beinhart's new novel is The Librarian, the web site is thelibrarian.biz

--- Msged/2 6.0.1
 * Origin: tncbbs.no-ip.com - Home of the POL_DISORDER echo. (1:261/1000)