Remember that one episode of The Sopranos where Tony systematically pillages Davey Scatino's sporting-goods store and destroys 100 percent of Davey's life? Davey was Tony's good friend from high school, tight for 25 years or more, but Davey owed Tony a debt he couldn't pay, so Tony slowly but steadily took everything Davey had. In the end Tony didn't bother pretending to apologize to the now-bankrupt Davey. Davey was the one who let things fly out of control. Like Tony told Davey, he was just being true to himself. It's my nature, he said, the frog and the scorpion. This is my bread and butter.
For six years, I've been telling everybody within earshot that this is exactly what modern movement conservatism, as represented by the once-mighty, now-invisible Bush-Cheney-DeLay Administration and their heavily indicted K Street money funnel, has done to this country since the Republican restoration of 1994. For 15 years now, milk has been flowing unabated from the public teat. Just like Tony's bust-out of Davey, it has gotten much more heavy-handed and overtly criminal over time. These days, half the government's biggest growth sector—our projection of military and paramilitary force into foreign countries—has been privatized and as a result is totally unaccountable to the American public. Defense contractors receive no-bid contracts and pocket billons of dollars. Regulations, the only checks on antisocial corporate behavior that exist in our society, are eliminated or ignored. Statutes are passed and judicial doctrines formulated for the obvious purpose and to the clear effect of preventing individuals from seeking redress against governments and business interests.
You can't expect anything different, and I'm not saying anything new. Tom Frank has a new book about this, if you like that guy; the basic point is that government doesn't work under Republican rule because the defining feature of the modern GOP is their all-consuming hatred of government. At his first inaugural, Ronald Reagan, without exaggeration a saint to many modern Republicans, announced that government's not the solution, government is the problem. We've all heard Grover Norquist's line about shrinking the government down until it was small enough that he could drown it in the bathtub. More recently, we had the failed effort to retake the mountain from Franklin Roosevelt by phasing out Social Security. (They haven't given up on that.) Most of all, it's the relentless, anti-human mania for more and more freedom for businesses to pursue economic agendas and less and less freedom for individuals to follow personal ones. The fundamental GOP vision of the U.S. government is a military and prison system that repurposes the minute additional revenue generated by its regressive taxation structure into bidness subsidies and maybe gives a little help to farmers. Converting the government's property and resources to their own and leaving the public with nothing comes naturally to these people.
Anyway, that's the crow's nest from which I've been watching this week's events unfold on Wall Street and in D.C. I see an enormously unpopular, discredited administration, about slink out of town with their tails between their legs, and they and their good friends in the American financial industry are asking Congress to give them $700 billion in laundered walking-around money as a going-away present. Am I being cynical? Once we account for the current spate of bailouts, we will have doubled our national debt in the last 10 years.
It turns out I'm not the only Ranting Crazy Man on this subject. That doesn't make me feel any better. I hope we're all wrong, of course. Whatever the end result, to me the Sopranos symmetry is inescapable, even if the analogy breaks down when you consider that Davey Scatino was not a completely innocent party; he borrowed far beyond his means. We can all agree that was irresponsible. Tony certainly thought so. That was how he forgave himself for immediately pouncing on Davey's weakness and tearing out Davey's throat. But the American public didn't do anything to forces of Capital except try to live out our days in peace in a country with a functional government. But I know the Republicans can't help it, it's their nature, the frog and the scorpion. This is their bread and butter.
UPDATE: I wrote this post before I read this. Like I said, I don't think I'm the only person who's drawn this conclusion.
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