Well, as a once mediocre orator and former (thank god!) Vice President of these United States of America once said: "[Go] F**k yourself". That remark was aimed at Senator Patrick Leahy, but today's GOP, more extreme and ambitious than even the Bush administration, seems to have implicitly adopted it as their slogan when it comes to what they plan to do to people like you and me.
The Republicans in Congress, and in states across the country are making no bones about their agenda: they desire to kill unions and worker's rights. They desire to kill the EPA, and kill any regulation regarding worker safety, drug safety, food safety, environmental safety -- you name it. They want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare reform with a thousand cuts until nothing is left but private accounts managed by by their buddies at Wall Street to which you are forced to contribute. They want to privatize prisons and schools.
They want an end to financial assistance to college students and their families (except football and basketball players, of course). They want to kill any investment in alternative fuels and public transportation. They desire the awarding of no-bid contracts to their "friends," i.e., the people who contributed the most to their political campaigns. Oh, and they want to make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, for innovative small businesses to compete with the corporate behemoths that dominate our political landscape. Indeed, without a middle class how can small businesses not dedicated to serving the desires of the rich survive?
In short, the goal of the New and Improved Tea Party Republican Governors and Legislators is to drive a stake through the heart of anyone who still believes he or she is a member of the middle class. As one of their own recently remarked those of us "slobs" in the middle class are a "different breed" the implication being that we are parasites on the body of corporate wealth and power rather than the collective engine of human labor and productivity that made that wealth and power possible.
Let us stop for a moment, now that the Republican "game plan" to dismantle the government and protect their wealthy benefactors at all costs has been exposed in all its naked infamy, and consider what type of country the realization of their goals would create. Imagine a world where there is no safety net. Imagine a country where wages and salaries are steadily decreased. Imagine a country where financial panics and "great recessions" are a regular occurrence every few years. Imagine a country where the water and the food are not fit to drink and eat, and the air isn't fit to breath. To take the lyrics from a popular John Lennon song lyrics out of context, "It isn't hard to do."
(cont.)
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