Now that we know the Republicans have settled on a campaign strategy pledging to "defund" health care reform if they win back Congressional power, it's time to take a look at what that actually means. Could it be a precursor to a Republican showdown with President Obama repeating the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns?
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he thinks the Republicans are hinting at shutdown with their promises to defund everything.
"They want to shrink it to where it doesn't work, and then when it doesn't work, they go, 'Look! It doesn't work, get rid of it.' And that's been their strategy all along," Trumka told TPM Thursday after speaking to reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "They don't talk about how to make things effective; they talk about how to get rid of them."
Rich Trumka is dead right on this but he doesn't follow through on the natural, logical progression. If the federal government's duties involving basic domestic infrastructure and social services are removed as per the GOP plan, the need for those services will still be there. Somebody will have to fill them, and that's the second half of the plan: privatizing as much of the federal government as possible, Pentagon military contractor style.
It's disaster capitalism on a Federal scale: to do what Bush and Cheney did to our military, stuffing its ranks full of private contractors on the take and corruption to no end, and do it with the domestic duties of the federal government. Imagine the corruption of Blackwater spreading to all aspects of the government: infrastructure, police and fire, roads and bridges, sanitation, you name it, all capitalized with the goal to make a profit rather than to provide a service.
Won't that be fun? That's what's coming. Rule by corporation.
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