Meditations on Republican craziness

At the center of all the nuttiness of today’s Republicans is their bankrollers’ fear of regulation… The ceaseless culture warfare is merely a tactic to simultaneously attract and confuse a sufficient number of the ignorant to enable the “one-percenters” to paralyze the political process.

Examined under this light their behavior is anything but irrational: they have much to fear, because the globalized world is crying out for regulation.

An illustrative example:

Much of today’s instability, even terrorism and the drug trade, is caused by the growing number of “failed states”, many of them rich in valuable commodities, whose elites, instead of reinvesting their profits in developing their countries, literally loot them, taking the money to opaque, offshore tax havens. What governance remains in these wretched lands consists of totally corrupt political jobbers and armed thugs. These areas often become safe havens for terrorist organizations and state cover for international drug cartels.

This dynamic, so blatantly evident in the third world is also at work in the most developed and sophisticated economies, starving the governments of the money necessary to provide essential goods and services to their populations. This may sound extreme, but if George W. Bush had been a serious man, he could have done a lot more for the wellbeing of the American people, as well as world peace, harmony and the defeat of terrorism, if, in lieu of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he had invaded Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead.

Solving all the problems that the future has in store will require money and the money is right there under our noses. In short, bringing the oceans of the world’s black money under state control is an essential first step to achieving the general welfare of humanity.

Although with a less picturesque cast of characters, climate change is also an obvious area where the leading states are going to have to cooperate closely to fashion very strict regulations and enforce them with extreme vigilance and severity.

I am convinced that rather than any sincere questioning of the science involved, it is the simple fear of the mere existence of international and state organizations endowed with the power and technical resources necessary to bring world climate change under some sort of rational control that motivate the massive quantities of money spent on questioning the reality of climate change. It is that “rational control” that the one-percent fear and have reason to fear: that and no other is the coming “revolution”. Theirs is a “counter-revolution” before the fact.

An example of the tactics that the “counter-revolution” uses to avoid approaching the issue of common sense regulation: regulating the sale of assault rifles, weapons whose only purpose is enabling a lone individual to kill a large number of human beings in a short space of time.

Now, an active and focused one-percenter can take decisions with his money and the influence that money brings, that can affect the lives of thousands, even millions of his fellow human beings; all his life he lives with the sensation of empowerment just as a fish lives with the sensation of water, he breathes it and swims in it, it is his element, often since birth… just like the fish.

For the average poor slob, probably the only feeling of comparable empowerment available to him in the midst of his general powerlessness is having an AK-47 in his closet with a few banana clips and a couple of thousand rounds of soft-nose bullets… just in case. Threatening that “empowerment” with regulation is a very efficient way of getting him on the same wavelength of the Kochs, Trumps and Romneys of this world.

This is just one example; there are dozens and dozens of others. In the future we might discuss the mental Kama Sutra that allows the supposedly devout Catholic, Paul Ryan, to bed Ayn Rand with Jesus of Nazareth, a blasphemous and perfectly surreal union, which is the proof, if any were needed, of how shameless this counter-revolution is. The “revolution” it counters is, of course, nothing more and nothing less than applied common sense. 

Bottom line: America’s ultra-right and the moneyed individuals that empower them are at war with simple common sense… and from their point of view that makes all kinds of sense. DS