The Republican plan for America, all along, was Banana Republic.
A nation of poorly educated renters and workers, ruled by their betters — the wealthy five percent who own everything worthwhile, control all the capital, rule over the government, dictate laws in their own favor, stack the courts with their own judges, and send out the police and army to enforce those laws.
The Republican plan for America is the Five Percent Solution — move all money and power into higher, tighter, whiter, righter hands.
What Grover Norquist and the GOP really want to drown in the bathtub is a free people. They need renters, they need peons, they need blind believers, they need economic slaves.
They are succeeding in their quest.
Peak Oil is upon us. Cheap energy is now an oxymoron. We will never pump more oil than we do right now, and the price of everything touched or served by oil will rise from here on — yet every economy, company, and living human being on Earth wants to grow, every coming year, from now on. It won’t happen because it cannot happen.
Yet, at the very moment in history when the American people need to pull all together to redefine and reprioritize as a nation, need to move from planetary policeman to an energy independent nation that sees to its own people before its global empire, these Republicans have Americans deeply divided.
They use immigration as a bogeyman while they reduce every working American to the status of immigrants.
They use faith-based social services to break government services — and when those government services are thoroughly broken they will stop funding faith-based services.
They starve and constrict the public school system to break it, driving people toward vouchers for religious schools — and when that public school system is thoroughly broken, they will stop funding religious schools.
They use Christianism to break Christianity, turning it into a State religion for control of the restless poor, just as Emperor Constantine used it in 325 AD to control the restive masses and hold on to a failed and fading Empire.
They use corporate deregulation and self-regulation to rape the environment, despoiling the very air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat for the further profit of a few. That air, water, and soil will belong to your grandchildren, and we allow it to be permanently poisoned for the sake of one corporation’s profits in one fiscal year. That fiscal year matters more than our grandchild’s health and happiness?
And we, the people, are to pay for it all, as with the Savings and Loan scandal, as with the Vietnam War, as with the Iraq War, as with the next war, and the next.
Making off with government pensions, corporate pensions and Social Security by bankrupting corporations, local governments and the Federal government itself is the Republican plan.
Keep moving moolah to the top five percent of the population, the five percent who already own over half the assets and capital of this nation. Go forth to tell the public to live in fear, tell the public they are being attacked from without and within, tell them outright lies, but just keep moving that moolah to the top five percent.
The Five Percent Solution is upon us, yet we sleep, eat, and work, and think it cannot happen here. We march to the nearest Diebold voting machine now and then to cast our sacred vote into the whirlwind, never to be counted or to count again.
We cannot bring ourselves to believe that they are after our freedoms and funds and future — and after us. Not us. Not we, the people.
They’re just a political party. They’re not gangsters, thugs and thieves. Surely they do not mean us any real harm. Surely it cannot happen here. This isn’t Argentina.
Yet.