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"Starve the Beast" is coming to fruition as the Conservative Republican/Tea Party/John Birch Society strategy for America, the master plan of right wing extremists. This strategy has been used effectively, beginning with Reagan, to gradually destroy public confidence in government and increase the wealth and power of the corporatocracy. Of course, the lack of trust in government fuels domestic terrorism, violent crime, white collar crime and civil unrest. It encourages anarchy, but what better way to justify increasing the power of the police state in which the wealthy are unchallenged and in complete control over our lives - with unions and increasingly ineffective government officials powerless to protect us. Bless the Occupy Movement for standing up to these powerful interests. The "starve the beast" strategy has multiple thrusts and vast implications:
- 1. Reduce tax revenues to but the support of the wealthy and to increase the deficit.
- 2. Wage continuing wars requiring massive military expenditures - to increase the deficit and enhance multinational corporate efforts to control the global economy and grow their markets.
- 3. Offshore America's manufacturing sector in order to break Unions and drive down wages for American workers. Make American workers feel fortunate to have a minimum wage job without benefits - which increases anger government.
- 4. Corrupt federal regulatory agencies by appointing political leadership that does not agree with the mission of these agencies. Corrupt lobbyists and incompetent administrators subvert the missions of these agencies by rewarding those who don't do their jobs, reversing scientific decisions, refusing to make important policy decisions, feeding bureaucratic ineptitude and demoralizing the professionals within the agencies, resulting in their being ineffective - causing the public to mistrust government.
- 5. Creating huge deficits, increasing public mistrust of government and calls for further cuts to the Federal budget, which makes the agencies even less efficient.
- 6. Allowing media consolidation and corporate ownership of all media so that the public receives its news and analysis as a steady drumbeat of fear and lack of confidence in government - all filtered through the vested interests of the corporate media, owned by other large American corporations.
- 7. Increase the corruption of Congress by corporate special interests. Make them all millionaires beholden to corporations for funding their election campaigns. This, again, has a major effect of causing the public to mistrust, if not hate, government.
Conservatives and Tea Party zealots have been starving the Federal budget in order to increase the deficit and force deeper and deeper cuts to social programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, Education, Environmental Protection, etc. One way to do this is with obviously irresponsible tax cuts to reward fat-cat political donors and corporations. This reduces tax revenues just as government agencies are needed to regulate the excesses of unregulated corporations. Tax cuts, always focusing on the most wealthy individuals, is an efficient way to promote this plan because it ratchets up the deficit and endangers our economy. This, they believe, will force Democrats to whittle away at important government programs. Republicans generally do not want to directly propose cutting social programs because that could lose them elections. Paul Ryan's budget is a notable exception. We'll see what happens to the supporters of Ryan's budget and Grover Norquist's pledge in the upcoming 2012 elections.
The power of this insidious, manipulative strategy of increasing the deficit through tax cuts to the wealthy and constant wars, is that the resulting budget squeezes force even Democrats to agree to cut government programs that harm the country. The other prong of this strategy was to destroy government agencies from the inside, appointing anti-government zealots to key positions in Federal agencies, the Federal Courts, including corporate lobbyists and hucksters to discredit and demoralize each of the important agencies and departments of the Federal Government.
In this way, government becomes less efficient at protecting the public's health and managing its safety net programs for the elderly, disabled, veterans and the poor. Government becomes less effective in regulating Wall Street, prosecuting white collar criminals, controlling monopolies, maintaining a healthy and safe environment and workplace, maintaining a healthy food supple and safe medicines. These consequences then cause the public to be angry at, and lose faith in, the government. Therefore, they blame government, and Democrats, and push for even more austerity because they no longer trust the (corporate controlled) government.
Conservatives want, as Grover Norquist so graphically stated about the government, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Conservatives increasingly hate government, but claim to be patriotic Americans. They act as if the wealthy elites are superior beings and that regular people should be completely dependent upon the wealthy for charity and kindness - and not on government programs and unions that guarantee them health care, civil rights, reproductive freedom, food to eat and basic human rights. As for Libertarians, it just seem like they have followed along because it's fun to hang around rich people - and perhaps because they want to see poor people get screwed. Either way, they have done an amazing job cooling out the marks for the Conservatives, brewing more and more anger at government and keeping Democrats off balance. They have served their corporate masters exceedingly well.
I don't care whether this is a vast conspiracy of the wealthiest individuals inside or outside America. I don't care whether this is a provable conspiracy at all. That just doesn't matter. A systems analysis has made these patterns apparent over the past decade - and they need to be changed.
