I would encourage everyone to read Jude Wanniski's explanation on how this works. He wrote it 1976, and Republicans bought into it. The strategy has been working for them ever since.
Here's a taste of the essay:For example, we could say that Republican leadership in Congress and the executive branch, over the past thirty years, has generally led to:1) Foreign wars propped up by lies and motivated by the desire to steal resources.
2) Attempts to reduce many government welfare-type programs which are genuinely beneficial.
3) A tendency to encourage/allow increased environmental destruction.
4) An alliance with the Christian conservatives which can have some unpleasant results.
5) Collusion with big business/ultra-rich to loot the taxpayer via vastly bloated government contracts.
6) Deregulation and even encouragement of certain business practices with negative overall results, for example predatory consumer lending.
7) Expansion of the fascist police state, exemplified by the Patriot Act.
8) Economic exploitation of other countries, especially emerging markets, via the IMF and other underhanded tactics (see John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man or Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.)
9) This often leads to or is accompanied by various incursions into national politics, up to and including assassination of political leaders. See for example the various color-coded “Revolutions” throughout the former Soviet states, or the U.S.’s long history of meddling in Latin America:
10) Aggressive attempts to disadvantage U.S. working classes via lax immigration policies and promotion of “outsourcing” to foreign countries.
11) The phony “War on Drugs” (the CIA is the U.S.’s largest drug importer), combined with a vast expansion of the prison-industrial complex, providing a huge resource of prison slave labor forU.S. companies.
12) Bank bailouts and other outright looting on the vastest scale.
http://newworldeconomics.com/the-two-santa-claus-theory/
Last edited by Just Fred (2/07/2018 11:58 am)
