The neoconservative Club For Growth's figurehead Grover Norquist has been famously quoted as saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." The Bush administration's $700 billion Wall Street bail-out plan may finally cause Norquist's vision to be realized.
The Bush administration's plan to bail out Wall Street investment bankers to the tune of $700 billion may be the culmination of the ultimate long-term goal of the so-called conservative movement -- to strip the government of its ability to provide for the general welfare and cement third-world style socioeconomic inequality in this country. It is the ultimate reverse-Robin Hood scenario -- a gigantic plunder of the people's wealth, to be transferred once and for all into the pockets of the super-rich.
As Naomi Klein recently put it on the Bill Maher show, the proposed bail-out is a time bomb set to detonate during the next administration, when a President McCain, or even a President Obama, will sorrowfully inform the nation that there is no alternative to privatizing Social Security, or that we simply lack the revenues to institute meaningful health care or education reform. Why? Because we have to pay down the gargantuan debt with which the Bush administration and cowardly Congressional democrats will have saddled the nation.
This is the kind of vast outrage that ought to inspire a second American Revolution. It's taxation without representation all over again. This time, though, the words "tragedy" and "farce" don't encompass what this is: a final, vast crime that will pauperise the majority of Americans.
Unfortunately, this is where Republicans reap the benefit of the systematic under-edcuation and mass consumer-ification of the American populace over the past thirty years. Do the majority of Americans even know what is about to happen to them? I reckon not.
Grover Norquist and his movement could be about to win it all. Will we let it happen?