“We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.”
-Paul Krugman, November 3, 2011 [The New York Times]
What exactly is it that Republicans want? You would think the answer is difficult from the problem Tea Party supporters are having picking a candidate to back. But then this is a group of folks who are completely antagonistic to government, naming their party after an uprising that was pointedly anti-corporate, not anti-government. The original tea party in Boston was really against the influence of one giant corporation – The East India Company, which profited from its control of countries such as India for nearly 300 years. This global corporation had so much power that it could actually tell the British government what to do, which it did.
Nowadays, through lobbying and outrageous court decisions like the Citizens United case, giant corporations have more power over the US government than its people do. Through seemingly never-ending buckets of money and extreme right-wing strategists, these corporations’ spokespeople have convinced a lot of ordinary, angry Americans that their problems stem from a government too big to understand them. They have convinced folks that the real problems to get upset about come from social issues, issues that if you think about them, don’t even affect these people’s daily lives.
Unemployment affects people’s lives. Unhealthy air affects people’s lives. Contaminated drinking water, tainted food, unsafe roads or bridges, oil spills, nuclear accidents and crumbling schools affect people’s lives. These are all things that need government to solve because corporations won’t. The previous administration under George W. Bush had the idea to let corporations regulate themselves. And they put forth the ridiculous notion that government regulation is a bad thing. Really? Think of BP ignoring its own studies of containment safety. Think of Halliburton, caring so little for the quality of its work in Iraq that American soldiers were electrocuted at the sinks of their base bathrooms. Think of Enron, included in Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy policy meetings and how many lives Enron later destroyed because all that mattered was the corporate bottom line. These are not isolated incidents. The only time we hear about them is when some government agency exposes them. Oh, but let the corporations regulate themselves. Government interference is killing business. It’s ok, apparently, at least in the right wing conservative view, for business practices to literally kill people.
It was the right-wing strategist, Grover Norquist, who declared the real goal of the Republicans – dismantle the Federal government, make it small enough so that it can be “drowned in a bathtub”. He believes corporations should run the country. Is that what the people in the Tea Party want? I doubt it. I doubt they would want to be left with no protections, no Medicare, no Social Security, no access without a fee to anything they might need, like water. Just ask any resident in California how much access to electricity will cost when companies like Enron get to regulate themselves and do what they want. The United States, contrary to what Republican/Tea Party backers say, is not a corporation. And those who most often wrap themselves in the flag and preach about getting the government off your back, know it.
