Grover Norquist and the John Birch
Society – Part 2
Grover Norquist has stated he’d like
to see the country return to the 1880’s, before unions were legal, before labor
laws, before social security, medicare.
He wants to get rid of unemployment
insurance for those that the economy has thrown out of work.
Nevermind that
having a substantial amount of unemployed workers fits perfectly into his (and
the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers, Tea Partiers – all one and the same[i]) vision of society.
Grover has worked hard over the past
3 decades or so in achieving the Koch brother’s goals, referred to by William
F. Buckley, Jr., no less, as “Arnarcho-Totalitarianism”. He’s done so through
his Americans for Tax Reform cell, funded with Koch money.
Norquist is against any tax.
More accurately,
he’s against any tax that his friends will have to pay.
He’s also for “Free Trade”, because
free trade means ‘no tariffs’, and a tariff is a tax by another name. As we
have seen with NAFTA, it also means a loss of high-paying jobs to other
countries and that, coupled with already high unemployment, leads to desperate
people willing to work for next to nothing.
Which, in turn, leads to an erosion
of economic power in the hands of ‘ordinary’ people – those not of the
moneyed-class. And that is exactly the goal of his union-busting efforts
(witness his interjecting himself in the VW/UAW situation). He knows that
economic power leads to political power – and that cannot be tolerated.
One of the reasons that Mr. Norquist
is successful in his propaganda, is that like the Koch brothers, transparency
is shunned in favor of masking the source of the prolfeed (and funding) that his various
organizations issue forth, coupled with using proxies
to get the message out.
Norquist has once
again used a tactic promoted by the John Birch Society: Public Relations and
Marketing. In the book “50 Years
of Dissent”, C. Wright Mills says this about the right and how they use
media as a weapon:
“Alongside the very rich, and supplanting them as popular models, are the synthetic celebrities of national glamor who often make a virtue out of cultural poverty and political illiteracy. By their very nature they are transient figures of mass means of distraction rather than sources of authority and anchors of traditional continuity.”(It would be easier to show pictures of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the right-wing media darlings.)
This all points to a situation where
the masses are forced to grovel for survival. His vision, or at least what he’s
working toward, is a society where there are very few good-paying jobs, many
fewer jobs overall than what is required for a healthy society at least, no job
security, no relief if you lose your job, no help if you get hurt on the job –
all lead to a population that is in constant fear.
The role of the lower-class
is to be grateful for the few crumbs you are allowed to have.
He claims he only wants the
government to leave people alone, and this is something I think he’s being
truthful about: He wants the government to leave businesses alone when they
make products that harm you, when they pollute the air you breathe and the
water you drink, when it comes time for them to share the burden of rebuilding
infrastructure they use to manufacture and distribute their products – and more.
He also wants the government to
leave you alone when the business practices of his friends leaves you with no
income, no way to feed your children, no way to become healthy again when you
fall ill, or when you are hurt in an industrial accident - because if the government did help you, that would be socialism.
Yet,
he’s apparently fine when his Wall Street friends socialize the risk involved
in their economically dangerous schemes to get even richer.
Without saying it, Norquist and his
Rabid Right friends want to turn the country into a third-world-class nation, with
them and the rest of the clique as the New Barons to oversee their serfs. And,
they feel it is only right that it is they who are in charge and make the
decisions – after all, they’re the ones with the money – and everyone knows the
real Golden Rule.
