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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

> "For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we
can win ... "
>
> That phrase is a gun, and it's smoking. Written by Karl Rove deputy Peter
Wehner in a leaked memo, it establishes as intention what administration
officials have heretofore been most eager to cover up. What the Republican
Party failed to do 60 years ago is to stop any federal program of guaranteed
old-age insurance from existing. Social Security established a principle
unacceptable to many Republicans: that government economic programs help
people, and can become wildly popular. Now, however, Wehner writes, "We have
it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government. ... We can
help transform the political and philosophical landscape of our country."
>
> The smoking gun isn't pointed just at your grandmother.
>
> When Americans have at a minimum almost a third of their retirement
contribution in corporate investments - we now send 6.2 percent of our
income to Social Security, and Bush's plan would have us putting four of
those 6.2 points into the stock market - we will all be part of, in the
apparently benign coinage of Republican propagandist Grover Norquist, the
"investor class."
>
> Blogger Nick Stoller describes the consequences thus:
>
>   When someone like Eliot Spitzer uncovers a major corporate scandal, a
Republican will be able to say, 'He's attacking your retirement fund.'
>
>   When the employees of a company try to unionize, a Republican will be
able to say, 'They are attacking your retirement fund.' " (He will also be
able to say they are attacking their own retirement fund.)
>
>   When a community refuses to let a Wal-Mart build in their neighborhood,
a Republican will be able to say, 'They're attacking your retirement fund.'
> Environmental regulations will be framed as an attack on your retirement
fund. Liability law, too. Corporate taxes, certainly. Maybe even, someday,
child labor laws (that's the brazenness: Conservatives never shy from
putting forth agendas that seemed unimaginable a year ago). People will
presume it is in their interest for the companies in which they hold a
temporary position to goose their stock no matter the long-term cost to the
corporation, to our institutions, to society as a whole - no matter the
long-term cost for all the other classes we belong to, as consumers, as
workers, as citizens. All but a tiny group of big-ticket investors would
benefit far more on a net basis, as they do now, from the maintenance of a
strong welfare state. No matter: The propaganda may prove irresistible.
>
> Breaking Social Security is central to passing Bush's "tax reforms," which
will remove taxes on investment income and shift the tax burden to wage
earners who can't afford to save any money - thereby creating newly outraged
tax-hating constituencies bent on decimating government's legitimacy yet
further. Absent unrelenting Democratic resistance, in fact, the next four
years will establish the leverage to fulfill another of Grover Norquist's
coinages: to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown
it in the bathtub."
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
>
> That's just how the Bushies do things: They plan. Every action is
calculated to set in motion a cascade of consequences, to change the world.
Take "No Child Left Behind," the education "reform" so brilliantly named you
can't be against it without betraying some perverse desire to, well, leave
children behind. It is a stone hustle, meant to lay the groundwork to
destroy the entire American public school system.
>
> Look at it this way. You've heard of the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study, the one that produces those anguished news
reports every four years about all the countries American schoolchildren lag
behind in basic skills. But according to the TIMSS, if Minnesota were a
country, it would have the second-best science scores and the seventh best
in math. By No Child Left Behind's statutorily required benchmarks of
"Adequate Yearly Progress," however, only 42 percent of Minnesota
fourth-graders were proficient in math. And NCLB's test targets increase
every year. So by one estimate, in 2014, some 80 percent of the schools in
Minnesota's world-class education system will be rated "failures."
>
> The benchmarks are insane, you see. If one group within a school out of
the 37 categories NCLB measures "fails," the entire school does. Which
means, according to the president of the American Educational Research
Association, 12th graders should be proficient in math in exactly 166 years.
>
> Which serves the administration's purpose admirably. Failure, glorious
failure: In Chicago, the city must now offer 200,000 students the chance to
move out of "failed" schools - but there are only 500 spaces in which to
place them elsewhere. So now the public school system must be destroyed.
>
> It's only politics. It was the first George Bush who tried to initiate the
privatization of American education but failed; in 2000, Michigan and
California pro-voucher ballot initiatives lost by at least two to one. But
that was back when 43 percent of American parents gave their children's
schools a grade of "A" or "B." By 2004, that number was cut in half. "The
tests mandated by NCLB had ripped back the curtain and exposed a major
national problem," explains Phyllis Schlafly - even, apparently, in noble
Minnesota.
>
> The money has already begun changing hands. "Classroom methods long
believed to work are tossed out in favor of those that a few selected groups
have tested and approved," The Nation recently reported in a story buried -
it's hard to get people to pay attention - on the magazine's web site.
Bush's multibillion-dollar reading grants, the weekly found, are doled out
by "a panel that includes many people with ties to various commercial
curriculums."
>
> Public education "is an ossified government monopoly," explains
conservative intellectual Chester Finn. So it is time to drown it in the
bathtub.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
>
> The fantasy of total control has emerged as central to the Bush
administration imagination. It comes out in the unguarded utterances: the
aide who blurts to a New York Times reporter that he was just one more
sad-sack member of the "reality-based community." ("That's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.") The president demanding during the Iraq debate to
congressional leaders, "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it
with you." A White House aide, to a congregation of Pentecostal ministers,
the "current government is engaged in cultural, economic, and social
struggle on every level."
>
> It shows up in the tautological narcissism of Bush's National Security
Strategy document, which actually uses the phrase "the best defense is a
good offense," and artfully constructs a vision in which whatever the United
States does to preserve its interest is always already "peaceful," even when
it requires war, is always already "democratic," even when it requires
installing governments by fiat, is always already selfless, even as it
establishes only two categories of states, those who cooperate and those who
do not, in a situation of crisis defined unilaterally and whose time horizon
stretches to infinity.
>
> "In the new world we have entered," it avers, "the only path to peace and
security is the path of action." The manifesto takes on ominous overtones
when read alongside the famous post-9/11 draft Pentagon report that
establishes a royalist conception of "sweeping" executive power as the only
way to keep us safe: because "national security decisions require the unity
in purpose and energy in action to characterize the presidency rather than
Congress."
>
> "Unity in Purpose, Energy in Action" - more than one commentator has noted
its resemblance to slogans of fascist movements throughout history.
>
> And of course out of fantasies of perfect control have always sprung the
world's greatest human catastrophes. There will always be things even the
most energetic executive cannot come even close to controlling.
Conservatives used to warn us about the dangers of such utopianism - of the
unintended consequences of hubristic attempts to "socially engineer" brave
new worlds conjured in the heads of liberal intellectuals. Now Americans are
once again learning that lesson, but the perpetrators are ... conservatives.
>
> And their utopia, heaven help them, is Iraq.
>
> What comes next there? For the subject who fantasizes total control, chaos
is only an injunction to more radically confident maneuvers that enlarge the
struggle for control. As always, the parallel is Vietnam. "The
administration's reluctance to recognize the Iraqi resistance as largely
homegrown pushes it to exaggerate the role of foreign terrorists, to blame
anti-American feeling on meddlers from abroad," which spells expansion of
the conflict into Syria and Iran, according to Thomas Powers in The New York
Review of Books. A "radical map change," he convincingly speculates, this
American encirclement of the world's productive oil resources could unify
all our present allies against us in a conflict that "might last fifty
years."
>
> The next four years? Anticipate another possible terrorist attack,
certainly. Tommy Thompson, leaving his post as secretary of Health and Human
Services, used his newfound freedom to wonder aloud why his bosses hadn't
done anything to prevent an attack on "our food supply, because it's so easy
to do." The EPA said an attack on any of 123 chemical plants would threaten
over a million people - then the Department of Homeland Security took over
the job, changed the measurements, and found that only two would do that.
The chemical industry gives a hell of a lot of money to the Republicans.
>
> Although the wholesale collapse of the American economy would be worse.
Nikita Khrushchev used to call the divided city of Berlin, because of its
military strategic value, "the testicles of the West," which he only need
squeeze to make America scream. Now the testicles of the U.S. are the
billions of dollars of American currency held in reserve by countries that
do not necessarily wish us well, like China - in effect, it's the money we
borrow to keep our economy afloat. China is one of those countries that
would likely object to our encirclement of the world's petroleum supplies.
Soon enough, China's oil demand will approach our own. If Beijing chooses to
call in its loans to us and make the dollar a worthless currency, sensible
folks might be looking for someone to impeach. Would Bush's kept Congress be
able to do the job?
>
> At that pass, reflects John Dean, Richard Nixon's legal counsel, who
served time for Watergate, "only the attorney general can select a special
counsel to prosecute." Which takes us back to the beginning, and last week's
hearings. "As attorney general," Dean says, "Gonzales can resist any and all
efforts to prosecute high officials of the Bush administration, absent
photographs of Dick Cheney choking Condi Rice and dangling her off the
Memorial Bridge for messing with his policies."
>
> Welcome to the eve of destruction.