nickqt
Diamond Member
The Lewis Powell Memo in the early 1970s was a blueprint for corporate America to bring back the gilded age. Neoliberal think tanks to vomit up right-wing economic propaganda designed to brainwash "consumers", deregulation to move industry overseas, deregulation of financial laws to allow for the mega rich to become oligarchs. And maybe most importantly, the sustained attack on "Elites" and education/critical thinking (if critical thinking is a liberal mindfuck, then don't do it, just go with your gut like the Republican who tells you what to believe wants you to). I've posted about it before. This has been a coordinated attack on the US government's ability to ensure that the rich don't have a boot stamping on the face of the middle class, forever.
Hmm, something happened in the 80’s that I just can’t put my finger on.
What it has become is Inverted Totalitarianism. I'm not a Republican Thought Leader, so I'm not going to pretend it can be summed up in a sentence for easy repeating, but it's essentially the idea that corporations control the government without having to bother with running for office (instead writing laws and donating hundreds of millions of dollars in "campaign contributions") and that our society is effectively managed, with people having little-to-no say in policy because the politicians we elect don't give one fucking shit about us, focusing instead on their paymasters.
A 17 year old article on Inverted Totalitarianism. You can find much more modern articles and definitions, including Wikipedia, but I like this because it shows just how long this transformation from near-sanity of late 90s/early 2000s to RIGHT NOW has been going.
Inverted Totalitarianism
How the Bush regime is effecting the transformation to a fascist-like state.
www.thenation.com
Thatcher in the UK, and Reagan in the US, put the Powell Memo ideas into motion. Cutting taxes so that the rich can hoard even more money without needing to reinvest it back into their business. Removing tax incentives to keep the factories within the US paying workers decent wages, and instead, move them offshore to pay foreigners pennies on the dollar with lax environmental regulations. They also began working to deregulate the financial industry so all that extra cash not reinvested could be used by Wall St. criminals on stock buy-backs, gambling-via-derivitives, and of course the creation of bubbles for massive ROI before the crash. Gingrich helped to start the radicalization of language to demonize "liberals" in the late 80s/early 90s (Language: A Key Mechanism of Control https://uh.edu/~englin/rephandout.html) And curled up in all of this, was Reagan strangling to death the Fairness Doctrine, which invited propaganda loudspeakers like Limbaugh to start shitting directly into the skulls of Republicans who wanted to be told exactly what to think. By 1996, Roger Ailes' vision during the Nixon Administration of a GOP TV became real with the creation of Fox News.
By dragging the fucking Overton window to the right, and after the USSR collapsed, removing the impetus to keep American labor even remotely happy, it all shifted to neoliberal economic policy (deregulating the economy and letting the private sector regulate itself) paired with neoconservative foreign policy (open those foreign fucking markets for cheap natural resource extraction and cheap labor while laying off American workers who want to be paid for a living) in the 1990s and going forward.
Clinton was everything a Moderate Republican was supposed to be, and the Republicans fucking hated him for it. They shifted even further right.
Bush II was a booster shot of Reaganism right into the amygdala.
Obama was a small dose of versed and a bump of methadone.
Trump has been a fucking brick to the back of the skull.
Collapse has been happening around us for decades. It can be traced to the 1970s, and the toppling of Rockefeller Republicans (read: sane, reasonable conservatives who wanted to actually govern based on conservativism) by Movement Conservatism (which simply seeks power by any means necessary, to inflate power to those in the in-group to absolute power).
The Lewis Powell Memo was the lightbulb. Reagan was the fucking bulldozer. Again, this isn't the 4th year of the Trump Administration, it's the 40th year of the Reagan Revolution.
