Check out Sidney Blumenthal's Salon piece
today about the end of the Rovean empire, which supplements what I said in my post earlier today. He thinks Rove and DeLay have overreached. Maybe so. But the trend toward a crony capitalist oligarchy is not
just about these two thugs. They've just been riding the wave, and the wave keeps rolling even if these two guys get tossed. The important thing is to understand the nature of the wave, not the personalities who ride it.
Here's the key graf in Blumenthal's article:
Macro- and microeconomic policies are subordinate to the circular alliance of oligarchy and oligopoly. Government expenditures have raced to the fastest pace of increase under Bush since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But the spending is not intended to prime the economic pump. Nor is it invested mainly in public goods such as infrastructure or schools; nor is it used to expand the standard of living of the middle and working classes, whose incomes and real wages are rapidly shrinking. Instead it is poured into military contracts and tax cuts heavily weighted to the very wealthiest, who do not in turn invest in productive capital. As a result, the largest budget surplus in U.S. history has been transformed into the largest deficit, whose bonds are principally held by Asian banks, a shift that presages a strategic tilt of global power and long-term threat to national security. The illusion that as the post-Cold War unipolar power the U.S. faces no countervailing forces is undermined by the administration's constantly draining deficits. Thus 21st century Republicanism reverses the policies that brought about the American century.
Blumenthal is pointing to the story that needs to become the central focus here, which is the wave that is carrying us into the future right now. We need to focus on the underlying structure of power and wealth. And as Walker point out in his comment to the previous post, you don't have to be a raving radical lefty to be alarmed about what's going on. It's just a matter of common sense.