October 17, 2011

By Steven Jonas

History never repeats itself exactly. But it makes some pretty decent copies. As I write this we are winding down to the end of the so-called “debt-limit crisis,” or the possible end, or the continuation of it, or what have you. Of course what is going on is not really about the debt-limit. It is about the future of the federal government in the United States and its appropriate role. As I wrote in my BuzzFlash@Truthout Commentary on Grover Norquist’s wet dream ( http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12601  [1]), his 25-year campaign is focused only at the secondary level on taxation. It is primarily about his stated goal of “shrinking the federal government to the size of a bathtub and then drowning it in the bathtub,” or as he used to more simply state it: “starve the beast.”

The “beast” for Norquist is of course not the whole of federal functions. His “beast to be starved” does not include the support of the military-industrial complex, the so-called “drug war” and its off-spring the prison-industrial complex, financial support of the investment and banking industries when needed, and the subsidies for the extractive industries and corporate farming. It is, rather, national domestic spending on support of the elderly, the health care delivery system, education, infra-structure, and at the top of his enemies list, environmental and financial regulation.

This is what the current struggle is about. The GOP and its wholly-owned and most convenient subsidiary/front organization the “Tea Party,” serving solely the interest of their single master, the corporate power (a tiny oligarchy, leading their mass support by a clever combination of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and political religiosity), are simply using the current so-called “debt crisis” as a means to force down the throat of the nation its view of what the Federal government should and should not be doing which it would be extremely unlikely to achieve through the legislative process. Of course no one over there ever reads the statement of purpose of the US Constitution, the Preamble. But that’s another story (see my BF Commentary on it at  http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/185  [2]).

Of course President Obama, if he were an old-line Democratic President like FDR, or Harry Truman, or JFK, or LBJ before he was swallowed up his perceived need to polish his “anti-Communist” credentials and expand the War on Vietnam, or even if he were Dwight David Eisenhower, who firmly believed that the New Deal was settled policy and need only to be buffed around the edges, would have made the issue very plain, would have clearly laid it before the nation, would have said something like: