The Great Reagan Pyramid Scheme Comes Crashing Down

The Republican Party that Nixon invented melded the moneyed classes of
the Northeast with the white evangelicals of the South. This odd couple
went on to simultaneously steal from and oppress the rest of us. The
moneyed classes were happy to let the New Puritans impose their
stringent morality, since they could always just buy any licentiousness
they wanted, regardless of the law. And the New Puritans were so
consumed with cultural issues such as homosexuality, abortion, school
prayer and (yes) fighting school desegregation that they were happy to
let the northeastern Money Men waltz off with a lion's share of the
country's resources, consigning most Americans to stagnant wages and
increasing debt. The Reagan revolution consolidated this alliance and
brought some conservative Catholic workers into it.

These
domestic policies at home were complemented by wars and belligerence
abroad, which further took the eye of the public off the epochal bank
robbery being conducted by the American neo-Medicis, and which were a
useful way of throwing billions in government tax revenue to the
military-industrial complex, which in turn funded the think tanks and
reelection campaigns of the right wing politicians. The Reagan
fascination with private armies and funding anti-communist death squads
contributed mightily to the creation of al-Qaeda, blowback from which
fuelled even bigger Pentagon budgets, spiralling upward and feeding on
itself. Terrorism is much better than Communism as a bogey man, since
you can just intimate that there are a handful of dangerous people out
there somewhere, and force the public to pay over $1 trillion to combat
them. In fact, of course, less US interventionism abroad would create
less blowback, and genuine threats are better addressed through good
police work by multilingual FBI agents than by a $700 billion Pentagon
budget.

As a result of the Second Gilded Age and its serf-like subservience to big capital, most corporations in the US don't pay any income taxes, despite doing $2.5 trillion annually in business.

The
Reagan Revolution included the stupid idea that you can cut taxes,
starve government, abolish regulation of securities, banks, & etc.,
and still grow the economy. The irony is that capitalist markets need
to be regulated to avoid periodically becoming chaotic (as in 'chaos
theory,') but the people who most benefit from regulation are most
zealous in attempting to abolish or blunt it.

What those
policies did was create the preconditions for a long-term bubble or set
of bubbles that benefited (for a while) the wealthiest 3 million
Americans and harmed everyone else.

The average wage of the
average worker is lower now than in 1973 and has been lower or flat for
the past 35 years. That's the condition of the 300 million or so
Americans.

In the meantime, the top 1 percent has multiplied
its wealth many times over and now takes home 20% of the national
income, owning some 45 percent of the privately held wealth in the US.

The
Right keeps promising us growth, but it turns out that "growth" is
mainly for them, i.e. for the 3 million (and indeed mainly for about
100,000 within the 3 million).

Those 3 million are a new
aristocracy, lords of the economy, who reward each other with tens of
millions in bonuses for ceremonial reasons that have nothing to do with
the jobs they actually perform. Bush has been trying to make them a
hereditary aristocracy by getting rid of the estate tax.

That is why banks are refusing the government bailout if it restricts the salaries of the top officers-- you don't mess with the feudal lord's prerogatives.

The
enormous wealth of a thin sliver or people at the top of US society
allows them to buy members of congress and to write the legislation
that regulates their industries.

Congress capitulates to this
'regulatory capture' because its members have to buy hugely expensive
television ads to remain competitive in elections. So they fundraise
from the rich, and the rich have expectations (as Keating did of
McCain).

These problems could be fixed with a graduated income tax and a closing of tax loopholes ( after
we get out of the recession or crash or whatever this is); by
legislation criminalizing regulatory capture; by requiring mass media
to run political ads for free as a public service (the public owns the
airwaves); and by much shortening the election season (please).

A
lot of America's fiscal and educational problems were caused by
congressionally mandated fixed sentences imposed on judges with regard
to marijuana possession, as a sop to the New Puritans that make up 1/3
of the Republican Party. You have a lot of people serving 5 years in
jail for having small amounts of pot. The states had to build new
prisons to hold them all. They took the money out of the budget for
higher education, abolishing the whole idea of state universities and
causing tuitions to rise.

So you've got more ignorant people
(because people can't afford even "state" college), and fewer high-tech
firms are founded; and you're feeding and housing large numbers of
harmless potheads with your tax dollars instead. The US maintains a
vast gulag of nearly 2 million prisoners, putting us in the same league
as Putin's Russia. No country in Western Europe incarcerates a similar
proportion of its population.

Mexico's
president wants to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of
drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin for personal use, though an arrest on possession charges would require entry into a program to kick addiction.

Decriminalizing
possession of small amounts of drugs; decriminalizing marijuana
altogether (and taxing the resulting industry); removing mandatory
federal sentencing requirements; and letting states go back to
educating their children instead of putting millions in jail; would
solve another big batch of America's problems.

So there you have
it. Abolish puritanism in government policy; go back to using the
government to regulate industries and finance and provide services; and
fight terrorism with better public diplomacy and better police work
instead of with militarization-- and you might get out of this thing
intact.