If you’ve been wondering lately who’s been writing the Republican playbook, I think I’ve found him. It’s none other than Lenny Dykstra.
Back in his baseball playing days, Dykstra was a tough as nails leadoff hitter famous for filling his cheeks with huge wads of tobacco and crashing into outfield walls. After his playing days were over, he wowed the world with his stock-picking acumen. Made millions. Drove fancy cars. Owned an $18 million mansion. He even had a sink that cost $50,000. (It’s true.)
And then, it all came tumbling down. He went bankrupt. His house was seized. He was indicted. And what did he do? He broke back into his old house … and stole his prized sink.
Back in November, a new breed of Republican governor was enjoying its own “wow” moment. Rick Snyder was the “one tough nerd” to get Michigan’s financial house in order. Scott Walker was about to take a blow torch to Wisconsin unions. Florida’s Rick Scott won perhaps the most coveted prize on the presidential election map. They were supposed to be the leading edge of the Republican revolution, finally doing what conservatives have long held Americans want their leaders to do: fundamentally recalibrate the way government operates in the public square, and disentangling it from the everyday lives of ordinary people.
But in Sunday’s Washington Post, Norman Ornstein of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute took a moment to detail the woes these boy wonders have since encountered. Rick Snyder’s approval rating is at 33 percent. Scott Walker’s is 43 percent. Rick Scott: 29 percent. [Read the U.S. News Debate: Should Congress Raise the Debt Ceiling?]
Seven months ago they were the toast of the town. Now, milquetoast. What happened?
Well, as Ornstein describes it, the governors launched initiatives aimed at “cutting benefits for the poor and middle class while adding tax breaks for the rich” while also trying to get rid of collective bargaining. As you might imagine, that wasn’t very popular with a lot of people (for instance: the poor and middle class). And, shockingly, it hasn’t done much to balance their state budgets either. So now, according to Ornstein, “the only areas left for meaningful budget reductions are education, Medicaid, and prisons.”
Let’s see: Your approval numbers are in the tank, and all you’ve got left are gutting schools, letting out convicts, and taking healthcare away from disadvantaged kids. I’m guessing, as a re-election strategy, that leaves something to be desired.
In other words: fellas, it ain’t working. And what’s so surprising about all of this is that for some, it’s so surprising. Is it really so hard to figure out that one of the reasons government is its current size and shape is that people have needs that they want their government to try and meet? It doesn’t always work, of course. But frustration over government spending on programs that aren’t working isn’t the same thing as saying people no longer want good public schools. Understanding that distinction is the difference between doing the hard, more complicated work of reforming something that isn’t working as well as we would like, and becoming fixated on an ideological goal that doesn’t end up fixing anything at all.
Which brings me back to Mr. Dykstra and his beloved sink. Now, in fairness, those of us who have been consigned to using standard-issue sinks can only dream about the hydrological wonders of the $50k variety. Perhaps it dispensed nothing but delicious milkshakes. More likely: Even as his world was crashing down, Dykstra couldn’t take his eyes off the one thing he coveted the most. Now it looks like he’s going to prison.
Republicans may be in for a similar electoral fate. Instead of helping the people they were elected to serve, they’ve gone about ruthlessly pursuing an elusive conservative holy grail. Dismantling government—it’s the GOPs $50,000 sink. And they can’t take their eyes off of it even as their house burns down around them.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, June 13, 2011
June 14, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Bankruptcy, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Elections, GOP, Government, Governors, Health Care, Ideologues, Ideology, Labor, Lawmakers, Medicaid, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Voters, Wealthy | American Enterprise Institute, Baseball, Florida, Gov Rick Scott, Gov Rick Snyder, Gov Scott Walker, Lenny Dykstra, Michigan, Norman Ornstein, Poor, State Budgets, Tax cuts, Wisconsin |
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Billionaires are different from you and me, for obvious reasons, including the fact that they buy much pricier baubles than we do.
A sleek car costing $100,000? Why, for them, that’s just an easy impulse purchase. A few million bucks for a Matisse original? Go ahead — it’ll liven up the hallway. How about throwing a fat wad of cash at a university to get an academic chair named for you? Sure, it’s all part of the fun of living in BillionaireLand.
Then there is the top crust of the upper-crust — such megalomaniacal megabillionaires as the Koch brothers. Using money from their industrial conglomerate, their foundation and their personal fortunes, these two far-out, laissez-faire extremists are literally buying public policy. Their purchases of everything from politicians to the tea party help them push the privatization of all things public and the elimination of pesky regulations and taxes that crimp their style.
To advance their plutocratic privatization cause, brother Charles has even gone on a shopping spree for an invaluable bauble that most of us didn’t even know was for sale: academic freedom. And it’s surprisingly cheap!
For only $1.5 million, Koch bought a big chunk of the economics department of Florida State University a couple of years ago. His donation gives him control of a new “academic” program at this public institution to indoctrinate students in his self-serving political theories.
The billionaire gets to screen all applicants, veto any he deems insufficiently ideological, and sign off on all new hires. Also, the department head must submit yearly reports to Koch about the faculty’s speeches, publications and classes, and he evaluates the faculty based on “objectives” that he sets.
Charles has made similar purchases of academic freedom at two other state universities, Clemson and West Virginia. Also, in a May 20 piece at Alternet.org, investigative researcher Lee Fang reveals that Koch has paid $419,000 to buy into Brown University’s “political theory project,” $3.6 million to establish Troy University’s “center for political economy” and $700,000 for a piece of Utah State’s Huntsman School of Business, which now has the “Charles G.
Koch Professor of Political Economy.”
Imagine the screams of outrage we’d hear from the Kochs if a labor union were doing this.
A recent article in The Onion, the satirical newsweekly, printed a downsize-big-government spoof that Charles and David would love to turn into reality. The parody disclosed that President Obama had come up with a surefire plan to balance the federal budget: Rob Fort Knox! “I’ve got the blueprints,” Obama is quoted as saying, “and I think I found a way out through a drainage pipe.”
Unfortunately, with today’s political climate dominated by howling winds from the far-right fringe, there’s no longer any room in American culture for satire. Sure enough, some laissez-faire extremists at such Koch-funded corporate fronts as Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation are presently howling for the government to sell all of America’s gold stored in Fort Knox. Noting that we have billions worth of bullion in the vaults, a fellow from Heritage made this keen observation: “It’s just sort of sitting there.”
Uh, yeah, professor. Like Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, the Lincoln Memorial and other national assets — being there is the point.
Yet these ivory tower ideologues are using the current brouhaha over the budget deficit as an opening to push their loopiest fantasies of selling off all of America’s public properties, facilities, systems and treasures to create a no-government, plutocratic paradise. Just spread our public goods out on tables, like a flea market from hell, and invite the global rich to buy it all.
For example, a fellow from another Koch-funded front, the American Enterprise Institute, observes that the government could raise billions of dollars to retire that pesky deficit simply by selling our interstate highway system. Americans would then have to pay tolls forever to the corporate owners, but hey, he exclaims, remember that tolls “work for the River Styx, why not the Beltway?”
What a perfect metaphor for privatization! In ancient mythology, dead souls must pay a toll to be ferried across the River Styx and enter the depths of hell.
By: Jim Hightower, CommonDreams.org/Creators.com, May 25, 2011
May 25, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Democracy, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Koch Brothers, Politics, Regulations, Republicans, Right Wing, Taxes, Tea Party, Unions, Wealthy | Academic Freedom, American Enterprise Institute, Brown University, CATO Institute, Clemson University, Extremists, Florida State University, Heritage Foundation, Politicians, Privatization, Public Policy, Rich, Troy University, University of West Virginia, Utah State |
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