Gaia, Forgive Them for They Know Not What They Do

Gaia, forgive them for they know not what they do.

                                 by Marco M. Pardi

Now that it is all but certain that Donald Trump will soon be taking the Oaf of Office I have chosen to release this updated piece.

All comments welcome.  To those readers who have been hesitant to comment or ask questions, please be assured you may do so freely. In recent days several new people have signed on as followers, enabling them to comment freely, and it is hoped they will. All previous posts are open for comment by clicking on “uncategorized”. Reader participation keeps this site vibrant. MMP

————————————————————————

Trump is elected. Never in the history of political science has there been a clearer example of the inherently fatal flaw in the granting of self governance to a stunningly ignorant and proud to be stupid society.

For the record, I have never identified with any political party.  I choose the puppet I vote for by examining the cadre backing him/her.

I will candidly say I am in an economic demographic which would greatly benefit from declared domestic Republican tax policies but as a retiree I will suffer far more from the international disaster a Trump victory would bring to the world financial markets. And,  the completely bleak future for my daughter and grandchildren far outweighs any potential financial benefits, if I receive them, from Republican tax policies.

When the word Fascism is heard in the United States it evokes images of “boots & salutes”, the take-aways from seemingly endless WWII television documentaries showcasing goose stepping troops and raised arms.  But this is only one manifestation of Fascism.  At heart, Fascism is an economic philosophy.

Born into and partially raised in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy (Rome),  owning and reading Mussolini’s autobiography, and studying Gaetano Salvemini’s Under the Axe of Fascism, I feel the underlying agenda of Republicans even pre-dating Reagan is Fascism. Indeed, Salvemini documented in endless detail the dozens of editorial endorsements and sycophantic praises heaped on both Mussolini and Hitler by American chief editors, politicians – including Prescott Bush, the patriarch of the Bush dynasty, business leaders such as Henry Ford, and luminaries such as Charles Lindberg. In fairness, America at the time was struggling to emerge from the Great Depression, a financial collapse brought on by the unregulated Wall Street excesses under Herbert Hoover, the Republican president. The Labor Movement was winning improved labor conditions for workers, sometimes in the face of armed resistance from the robber-baron ruling class. Socialism, even sympathy for Marxist communism, was growing in strength.  Indeed, in Italy the Italian Communist Party, though outlawed, was quickly gaining adherents.  After the war they steadfastly rebuffed Soviet overtures.

Fascism, and especially the Nazi version, was the declared enemy of communism, and by extension even socialism despite the title, National Socialist German Workers Party. It ruling hierarchy was the antithesis of socialism.  

Mussolini defined Fascism: “Fascism is corporatism.” He went on to explain how public funds – taxes – should be redirected to private corporations for them to provide State services. Of course, the corporations selected for this honor would be those most willing to contribute financial support to the Fascist Party.

Reagan (actually G.H.W. Bush the covert president) enacted this through phasing out the Civil Service Retirement System and replacing it with the Thrift Savings Plan. The CSRS was tax funded and government administered.  The TSP took those public funds and invested them in the stock market, favoring those companies most likely to re-pay the administration with financial support for that Party.  A huge transfer of public funds to private corporations done and administered by an unelected official appointed by the administration.  Tax “incentives” for large corporations (“trickle down economics”) rendered these corporations largely immune to costs, shifting the burden for their support and security to the less empowered tax paying citizens, including even the workers in those corporations.  Later, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich brought the U.S. government to an almost complete stand-still in his effort to, among other such moves,  privatize Medicare in the same way. G.W. Bush attempted to do the same with Social Security, but was stopped by people wise to the agenda.  However, Bush revised Medicare with a Part D drug coverage. What went largely unnoticed was the provision that individuals opting for Part D were, and are, unable to singly or as a class negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. “Big Pharma” was handed an Extortion Card, and contributed massively to Republican campaigns at all levels.

Yet, the plan to fully privatize Medicare and Social Security (generated by House Speaker Paul Ryan)  is still afoot, as is the massive transfer of public funds to private companies that own and run prisons; the prison companies have contract clauses which allow them to sue the State if the State does not provide a certain yearly quota of prisoners.  Do you think that has no effect on sentencing?  For several years the American prison population as a percentage of total population far exceeds all other nations of comparable legal and developmental systems. And, of course, the prison companies are major donors to Republican campaigns.

Wall Street, as exemplified by the swelling stock market, is agog with the prospect that Trump’s infra-structure development plans will be another record transfer of public money into private hands, the corporations which, receiving this money, will use it to ensure the continued grip of their benefactors on the reins of power.  At the same time, the decades old Republican effort to cast off regulations of any kind, health and safety, product liability, environmental wisdom, and controlling of the surreptitious financial undermining of competing economies will almost certainly come to fruition. “Defense” contractors are already opening their troughs for the influx of public money into super (and superfluous) weaponry, including the weaponization of space.

The Republicans ousted Richard Nixon for, among other things, creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Their continued efforts at de-funding the agency and enacting de-regulation are crudely advanced by Trump’s claims that “Climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.” Somewhat less crude, and arguably more effective has been their campaign to portray coal and natural gas, especially the latter, as “clean energy”.

The Affordable Care Act, a favorite whipping post for Republicans, was actually modeled on a successful Republican program in Massachusetts.  However, since it was adjusted for nation-wide use by Obama, Republicans disowned it and pronounced it anathema.

Republicans have repeatedly chanted their mantra: Abolish and replace.  Yet, they have never produced a proposed replacement. It seems their plan is to return Americans to the mercy of the insurance industry giants, heavy contributors to Republican causes.

The Republicans stated their agenda was to “make the Obama presidency a failed presidency”.  In other words, they would do all they could to wreck the country if it is not run their way. Their obstructionism of the past years has led many Americans to erroneously conclude that all politicians are at fault and should be replaced by a strongman.  This is how dictatorships are made. What’s that old saying, “He made the trains run on time”?

While some may think they can stage manage Trump in office, as was done with Reagan and G.W. Bush, they fail to realize those who allowed the ascension of Hitler thought the same thing.  Trump’s “arrest and deport” agenda is Hitlerian ethnic cleansing under color of law. Remember that old saying, “They came first for the ____, (and ending with) “and then they came for me.”

Trump’s presumed puppet master, Mike Pence, is a fundamentalist Christian zealot whose extremist pro-birth at any cost position would ensure the return of a large under-educated and impoverished underclass with little choice but the military, the “three hots and a cot” option with free health care and access to paid education.  This makes a “strong military” look more like a military composed of people with no place else to go.

Despite the very recent uptick (particularly characterized by spiraling Hate Crimes against minority targets of the White Trump base), crime rates have fallen dramatically since the legalization of abortion.  This is not saying the aborted fetuses were by nature criminals; it is saying that the hopelessness of poverty and the resort to criminal means of survival can obviously be successfully mitigated through empowering women and families to take steps to prevent the crushing burden of unwanted children or children born with lifelong medical requirements that, under a Republican system would be provided little or no support. 

The long standing Republican hatred of the public school system came up for vote in Georgia through an Amendment which would re-direct tax funds to a private company to take over “failing” public schools.  The privatized prison system is the model. The administration of this school program would be through a governor appointed sole individual, with no input allowed from schools, teachers, parents or students. In Georgia, the daughter-in-law of the Republican governor pushing this program is making a fortune through her lobbying firm for the company which would get the contract.

Now in my mid-seventies, I have seen elections during which people vowed to leave the country were a certain Party to win. Sadly, this is no longer an option.  The Republican agenda, especially its destruction of the environment in the name of economic growth, will bring disastrous consequences to every living thing on this planet.  There will be no safe haven.