The Eternal Constant of a Negative Platform

If you're wondering why I keep viewing the Presidential Republican candidates as a massive field of wannabe Active-Negatives, let me make a few notes:

• We're talking about a Republican Party whose base economic platform is mass deregulation of everything, including safety regulations, education guidelines, health standards.  Even though there's been consistent evidence that mass deregulation doesn't help and in fact hurts most Americans.  As well as evidence that deregulation of education is rife with fraud and cheating.
• We're talking about a Republican Party whose base government budget platform is tax cuts for corporations and spending cuts for Medicare, welfare, food stamps, and Social Security.  Even though there's been consistent evidence that tax cuts don't work and that cutting social aid doesn't force Americans to "shape up".
• We're talking about a Republican Party whose base foreign policy platform is bomb anyone with a hijab and mock the French for surrendering to Germany one too many times.  And to not say much of anything about a torture regime that violated a ton of American laws and treaties.
• We're talking about a Republican Party whose immigration policy is publicly "voluntary deportations" where we're expecting migrant workers to happily turn about and drive back to Central America where the jobs are bad and the streets are (more) violent, and where the unspoken policy is to deport everyone who's not Anglo-Saxon via two out of four grandparents.
• We're talking about a Republican Party whose religious platform is to denounce Sharia law while insisting public schools teach Creationism and faith-based history, both of which imposes one Christian church's beliefs on everyone else (and not every Christian wants that crap taught).
• We're talking about a Republican Party that would punish women over private decisions on birth control and abortion, yet claim the national health care risks caused by anti-vaccination families (pushed by fraudulent/dubious science) is a "choice".
• We're talking about a Republican Party whose governance methods don't involve deal-making via compromise or shared sacrifices, but through domination, obstruction, and refusal even consider valid arguments against their positions.

It may look like I'm being flippant, but I'm not.  That IS what the modern Republican Party stands for.  And this is a crusade for them: the Far Right is utterly convinced - through a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and fear - that their way, their ideology is the one pure truth.  Over which they lie, fake, and cheat to defend.

It doesn't matter the temperament - Active or Passive, Positive or Negative - of whoever gets tabbed for the 2016 nomination.  A majority of Republican leaders buy into each part of that list - admittedly more on one topic than another - with no qualms about any of it.  Both because their voting base of Far Right wingnuts insist on it, and because their financial billionaire backers insist on it.

And the danger gets worse.  Because we're stuck with a two-party electoral system, with a 50-50 chance the winner in 2016 can be the Republican nominee.  Even with a platform as Negative as what the Republicans are pushing, they can still trick - there will be no other word to describe it - enough voters into backing their candidate.  God help us.

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The Long October: The Ambitious Damage of The Hollow Men

This is how the world ends...

As I'm typing this, the current news out of DC is that the House, scrambling over the last few days to get any kind of bill up to send to the Senate to end the shutdown, pretty much failed to get anything done.  The Senate is more amenable to getting a deal set up, but there still runs the risk of just one Senator - Cruz or Graham or Lee or another - gumming up the works by delaying the vote on it until the Thursday deadline on the debt ceiling passes.  And there's still no guarantee there will be enough votes in the House to accept the Senate version.

The sentiment right now is that pretty much the House GOP, the Tea Party types and their abettors in the Senate like Ted Cruz, are going to let the nation default on the debt.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow...

I've noted a couple of times that the current Republican Party psyche is geared towards letting the whole thing fail.  They WANT to see what happens if the nation goes into default, they've convinced themselves that it won't be as damaging as all the experts fear it could be.  We're talking about a political party that for the last 20 years or so have been influenced, bullied, led by the likes of Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh and a legion of purity agents obsessed with voting out RINOs and moderates who would dare compromise and govern.  A Republican Party where Norquist could openly pine for the chance to make government small enough - through massive tax-cuts and social spending cuts - to "drown in his bathtub."

Ask yourself this: which political party openly thinks that "government is bad" and which openly thinks that government can be managed and made effective and workable?  The Republicans have been the "Government Is Bad" ideologues ever since the Reagan Era, ever since Goldwater when you think about it.  So which one deserves the blame when government falls apart?  Especially when the branch of government where all the destruction is happening - the House - is the one being run by the Republican Party?

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men...

The Far Right Republicans, the Tea Party faction, the wingnuts... they have expressed before their admiration of Ayn Rand, of Atlas Shrugged and the belief of enlightened selfishness.  They have each of them in their own way expressed the desire to be as brave and noble and correct as John Galt, self-made Hero of the Revolution of the Elite over the base hollow men that seek to bring the Genius and the Artist to heel.  They want to deregulate everything.  They want to privatize every function of public service to corporations that won't answer to laws or accountability.  They want to kill government to let their Utopia become reality.

But these wingnuts have all proved themselves hollow men, all so eager to tear down the world that other better Americans had formed over the last two centuries.  Uncaring, self-serving, scheming, petty.  Hollow to the core.

This is how the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
- TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

UPDATE: the deal's been done, the government's re-opened... but there's been damage done, and the Far Right are still seething. Hollow Men cannot be appeased until they're full of everything they want... and what the Far Right wants is to destroy the United States...

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Meanwhile In Other News From the Crazy Week: This Is What We Get When We Deregulate, People

That other bad tragic event from last week - the massive explosion of a fertilizer factory in West, TX - has this not-so-shocking revelation:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires fertilizer plants and depots to disclose amounts of ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make a bomb, above 400 lbs. The West, Texas plant, West Fertilizer, reportedly held 270 tons of the substance, 1,350 times that limit.
"This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up,"  Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Considering that the factory caught on fire when we were told there weren't supposed to be any flammable chemicals there... Considering that the factory EXPLODED with a force knocking out the surrounding schools and nursing home and apartments... This isn't shocking.  There were clearly flammable stuff there: there were clearly too much nitrate/explosive compounds there.

The reason this all happened was very simple: our nation's system of safety and regulation protocols surrounding dangerous chemicals has fallen apart.  Due to a combination of relaxed laws and serious budget cuts and failure to fully staff our agencies to ensure regulations are upheld, this disaster and other fatal accidents elsewhere have happened.

THERE IS A VERY GOOD REASON WE HAVE LAWS: TO PROTECT PEOPLE.

There is a very good reason why we have regulations: to make sure those laws are enforced.  To make sure the people we are trying to protect - workers, emergency responders, neighbors, entire communities - stay safe.

The arguments for deregulation - they're too expensive, they punish free enterprise, businesses can self-regulate - fall apart after each coal mine disaster, each crashed airplane, each exploding factory, each worker killed.  Every excuse or alternative can't explain away the facts that if we had stricter enforcement of factory safety with chemicals, if that company truly played by the rules, if our regulators like OSHA or the Chemical Safety Board had more budget and more staff, we wouldn't have had that explosion killing people.

And our Republican overlords want to cut even further into our government budgets, weakening our ability to regulate and ensure public safety even further as well.  All because they hate government regulations, and all because they hate raising taxes on the uber-rich to pay for sh-t our nation desperately needs.

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From Balloon Juice, All You Need To Know About Our Corporate Overlords

This is from a comment posted on a thread at Balloon Juice.  The bold text was my addition:

The last election cycle demonstrated that even if you allow Wall Street and the corporations dictate a large portion of the policy, they will still fund campaigns to destroy you because they don’t want their share or ten times their share, they want it all, all the time.They are never going to stop going after social security. They want every single dollar of the education budgets. They do not want to pay any taxes for anything. They do not want any regulation that ties their hands with respect to their workers, the environment, or any other external costs imposed upon the public by their business activities. Oh yeah, and if they screw up and take the economy down, they want the government to bail them out.

I concur.

Until the Greedheads responsible for all the disasters we've suffered over the last three eight thirty years are held accountable and shipped to jail... until all the goddamn Supply-siders get sued for Fraud and selling snake oil to the nation... we are well and truly fucked as a country.

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