March 28, 2016--The Koch Brothers

For a deeper understanding of our current political culture, I cannot recommend anything more revealing than Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

Much of it focuses on the Koch Brothers, whose combined wealth equals $84 billion, and the organizations that they have stealthily founded and funded. Including the innocuously-named Americans for Prosperity, the Cato and Manhattan Institutes, the Heritage Foundation, and dozens of others off almost everybody's radar screens. And of course, from its inception they provide all kinds of support for the many activities of the Tea Party.

In all of this, they follow in the footsteps of their father, Fred, one of the half dozen or so founders of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, who began to amass his fortune by building oil refineries in Germany for Hitler's Third Reich. He so admired the Fuhrer and Mein Kampf that Father Fred visited with him at least 11 times and spoke effusively about him in the years leading up to World War II.

Of course, this "episode" is not included in official histories of Koch Industries. The timeline for those half dozen years is blank.

What is most interesting and less well known are the things the Kochs would like to see happen to America and our government. The reasons they have spent hundreds of million dollars on these organizations.

To summarize their political agenda in a few words--they would like to see the end of government altogether. Literally.

Not scaled back, not pruned here and there, not just contracted in size with the Commerce Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and of course the Federal Reserve and IRS all eliminated. Kaput.

In their mostly private speeches and writings they call for the elimination of all manifestations of government. They would repeal all of the New Deal, including Social Security and unemployment insurance and all Great Society programs. This means, if they had their way, there would be no Medicare, Medicaid, much less any public accommodation or voting rights legislation.

They would eliminate all public funding for education. This means they would provide no governmental support whatsoever for any kind of schooling, from Head Start to college loans to funded research. They also would get the government out of efforts to reduce segregation or end abuses to voting rights. They not only would dismantle the IRS but would eliminate all forms of federal taxation. And they would strike out all regulations that limit corporate life and especially banking.

At the even further lunatic end of the scale, they would not have any public support for police or fire departments. I assume individuals would have to do their own policing and hire private firefighters.

They would also terminate the CIA and FBI. And unbelievably, even our standing army.

They would amend, actually eliminate the Bill of Rights with the Constitution protecting only one right--the right to own property.

They even call for ending the ban on slavery, claiming that it is an individual's right "to sell himself if he so chooses." They are that perversely, consistently Libertarian.

Like Grover Norquist (whose American's for Tax Reform the Koch's fund), they would like to see government so reduced in size that it could "be drowned in a bathtub."

I know you think I'm making this up. If you do, I urge you to pick up a copy of Dark Money. There's more there. And worse.

August 30, 2013--Cruzcare

I'm slow so it took me some time to understand why Republicans can't stand the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamcare.

During the past two years John Boehner has had the House of Representatives vote to overturn it 40 times. Literally, 40 times. It was passed each time in lockstep partisan fashion but has never been taken up in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But every Republican who can't say no to an invitation to be on TV and, more significant, every Republican who sees himself (thus far there are no women) as the GOP nominee to run against Hillary in 2016, is basing his campaign primarily on the promise to get rid of Obamacare.

Never mind that it is based on Republican ideas and practices, from Romneycare in Massachusetts, when he was governor, to the healthcare recommendations of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But when Obama endorsed these policies in his own version of expanding healthcare for the uninsured, everyone on the right who was for it suddenly was against it.

And now during their August recess town meetings back in their home districts, in the embrace of their apoplectic Republican base, the talk by congressmen and presidential aspirants is almost exclusively about this abomination--Obamacare. They can barely get the word out without becoming physically nauseous.

The opposition is so viscerally agitated that one has to wonder about the source of this aversion.

Thus my belated insight--it's because the Affordable Care Act is popularly named Obamacare. After him!

Forget for the moment that it is the very same Republicans who can't look him in the eye and are made physically uncomfortable when in the same room with him who labelled it such, thinking that in itself would doom it--who would want to see a doctor and have that intimate experience tainted by an overt association with him? This in itself, it was thought by conservative political strategists, would be enough for the masses to rise up and demand it be overturned.

But now that even Tea Party folks are seeing their parents' and grandparents' medications paid for by Obamacare (the donut-hole is closing), their adult children covered by their existing insurance policies, and more and more states agreeing to participate, their strategy is backfiring.

Like Medicare, which at first was passionately opposed by the same right-wing elements but quickly became one of our most popular safety-net programs, how awful would it be if the ACA followed the same trajectory and forever was named for Obama?

There's nothing equivalent for Franklin Roosevelt. The Civilian Conservation Corps could have been called the Roosevelt Conservation Corps, we could have had the Kennedy Peace Corps, and the Johnson Voting Rights Act, or the Reagan Tax Cuts--well, we did have them and look where that got us: trillions in debt.

Yes, there is the Monroe Doctrine and the Bush Doctrine. And there is the Hoover Dam, the JFK and Reagan Airports, and the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.

But to have a substantial portion of our basic healthcare coverage named for the Kenyan-American president is too, too much.

Canadian-born Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the reincarnated Joe McCarthy lookalike, who has been in the Senate for just a few months and is already running for president, is basing his entire campaign on opposition to Obamacare. Just as Michele Bachmann did the last time around.

Maybe if we can solve the name thing the issue would go away. If Cruz manages to get nominated (unlikely) and elected (get your passports updated)--calling it Cruzcare would detach it from Obama and the millions covered could feel confident that they would not be thrown off the books and left to fend for themselves.