2 Sep 2023 1:00 am
The Heritage Foundation is an associate member of the State Policy Network, a network of conservative and libertarian organizations financed by the Koch brothers, Philip Morris, and other corporate sources.Punch » 01 Sep 2023, 6:10 pm » wrote: ↑
This is a killer article and all of it is true. I just posted some highlights. Read it in its entirety.
The shocking Republican plan to dismantle the American government | Opinion (msn.com)
As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule. The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.
Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR’s and LBJ’s America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens. For example, Taiwan has the most efficient and comprehensive single-payer healthcare system in the world; Germany requires half of the members of every large corporation’s board of directors to come from the ranks of organized labor; Luxembourg has the highest national minimum wage in the world at roughly $19.50 an hour (they calculate it monthly).
Prisons across the rest of the developed world are committed to rehabilitation and only in America are run for profit; every other developed country carefully regulates the possession of guns; pharmaceuticals are inexpensive — at least half, and sometimes a tenth of their cost here in the US — in every other developed country in the world. Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that. They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions. They’re dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, “deconstructing the administrative state.”
The Heritage Foundation bankrolled Reagan who adopted over half of their suggestions and in some cases went even farther, cutting enforcement of our anti-trust lasw; ending the Fairness Doctrine; slashing the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent; declaring all-out war on unions; gutting the EPA, Education, and Labor Departments; and selling off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to mining and drilling operations.
