Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The merger of billionaire wealth with Republican governance the public be damned threaten the integrity and future of the American experiment"
As we learned from last week's Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.
The modern administrative state, sometimes called the "welfare state" by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.
Outside of Russia, China, and Hungary, this isn't true at all for the rest of the developed world.
Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR's and LBJ's America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens.
For example, Taiwan has the most efficient and comprehensive single-payer healthcare system in the world; Germany requires half of the members of every large corporation's board of directors to come from the ranks of organized labor; Luxembourg has the highest national minimum wage in the world at roughly $19.50 an hour (they calculate it monthly).
All of Europe is pledged to reduce greenhouse gasses to get climate change under control, and they require chemical companies to prove their new compounds are safe before introducing them into food or the environment (the "precautionary principle").
Prisons across the rest of the developed world are committed to rehabilitation and only in America are run for profit; every other developed country carefully regulates the possession of guns; pharmaceuticals are inexpensive at least half, and sometimes a tenth of their cost here in the US in every other developed country in the world.
Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that.
They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions.
They're dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, "deconstructing the administrative state."
Over the years, the GOP has used a series of plans to reach their goal of a billionaire- and-corporate-owned-and-run America with working people turned into serfs and children in factories instead of school.
In 1971, it was the Powell Memo, written by Virginia tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell and delivered to the US Chamber of Commerce. It called for a rightwing takeover of America's schools and colleges; building out a corporate-friendly media infrastructure; packing the courts with pro-corporate, anti-labor conservatives; and the wholesale purchase of Republican politicians at both the state and federal level.
The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and over the next quarter-century he used that position to put many of his own suggestions into law. In addition to decisions gutting the powers of unions and deregulating industry, Powell's major achievement was authoring the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that struck down hundreds of state and federal anti-corruption laws, explicitly allowing corporations and their senior officers to bribe politicians for the first time in American history.
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