Corroded Corruption & GOP's RGA

(D)ude: Man! Fortunately, Flint, Michigan’s mayor, Karen Williams Weaver, is a Democrat elected to the position on November 9, 2015. Otherwise, I don’t think the water contamination crisis would have surfaced as it has, Mayor Weaver diligently declaring a city emergency once in office and seeking emergency declarations by state and federal officials, and securing one from the President of the United States Barack Obama, effectively transferring the responsibility for disaster relief from the state to the federal government.

(M)an: Dude! The Republican Governors Association is implementing mass killings across the United States with Flint, Michigan just one of several hard hit crises constructed by the RGA and the status quo’s supply-side economics hang-up to place blame upon the federal government specifically, whilst the Republican Party operatives in the 32 states with GOP governors have been busily helping themselves to their state’s finances and the finances provided to them by the federal government.       

D: Man! What sort of supply-side economics hang-up do the RGA and the status quo exhibit?

M: Dude! Well, many hang-ups actually! First, the RGA and the status quo believe in no regulations by government in a free market economy, and, secondly, they espouse Carthaginian Peace, the total destruction and degradation of an enemy force by the victor, or winner, as a way to resolve unrest, including warfare and subsequent enslavement of the defeated.

D: Man! In that case, wouldn’t fatigued workers working without a living wage be considered instances of class warfare and enslavement in the United States?  

M: Dude! All the more reason for American workers employed without a living wage to vote for the Democratic Party in the 2016 presidential elections. Face it, protests cannot singlehandedly wipe out the socioeconomic divide in the United States. One world. Last chance. One vote. 2016! Otherwise, the working and middle classes will have succumbed to the 2% and submitted the 98% of US to rest in peace!

D: Man! Speaking of supply-side economics enthusiasts like the RGA, how do they manage to take from the municipal, state, and federal levels of government?  

M: Dude! The Governor of Michigan from 1983 to 1991 was James Blanchard, a Democrat. Keep in mind that the last time Michigan had had a Democrat for governor was back in 1963. So James Blanchard, taking the reigns of governorship on January 1, 1983, embarked upon not just reducing the 1.7-billion-dollar deficit that he had inherited from previous administrations, but facing that challenge alongside plunges in federal aid availability. Governor Blanchard’s achievements included balancing the state budget every year for the eight years he was in office, and doing so while producing a surplus and encouraging small businesses; as well as establishing the first tuition guarantee program in 1986 for families to pre-purchase tuition at any public community college, university, or college in the State of Michigan, a model that is now popular across the United States. And in the case that the beneficiary was unable to attend or won a scholarship, the benefits are refundable or may be transferred to a sibling or first cousin of the beneficiary.   

D: Man! Oh! I get it! After Governor Blanchard balanced the budget consecutively and built the surplus that followed, the Republican who succeeded him obliterated accountability and it has been open season essentially with these emergency manager laws?

M: Dude! Not quite. The Republican who succeeded James Blanchard as governor of Michigan, John Engler, mismanaged the surplus through privatizing government services in the state—reducing the income tax while increasing sales tax; implementing welfare and education reforms that got rid of general welfare assistance for able-bodied adults; closed down state mental hospitals; and reshuffled environmental programs that he claimed were unaccountable and inefficient. Plus, it was Governor Engler who fought against organized labor in Michigan. He also enforced rules restricting the rights of school teachers to protest, specifically targeting strikes.  

D: Man! Privatizing government services and programs is just another route to hundreds of billions of dollars falling into the private sector comprised of financial institutions which gamble the hundreds of billions of dollars on Wall Street for their chief executive officers, like at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, and the public sector comprised exclusively of political chief executive officers like Jeb Bush (who worked at Lehman Brothers after having been governor of Florida, during which time he entrusted the investment bank with everything from pension funds for cops, teachers, and firefighters, to making additional investments in the bank’s mortgage-backed securities at expense to taxpayers since Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in 2008) and Ted Cruz (whose wife continues to work at Goldman Sachs as he campaigns as a Canadian-born Jeb Bush presidential surrogate, as all the Republican candidates are, because they are intimately tied to either Bush 41 or Bush 43, a strategy being applied by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Reince Preibus for the purposes of ushering another Bush, this time the jabbering Jeb, and themselves into the White House for the pursuit of more oil infrastructures in the Middle East and Eurasia for the exclusive purposes of building their untaxed private wealth in the Cayman Islands or elsewhere outside the United States).   

M: Dude! Governor John Engler served three terms before being succeeded by Democrat Jennifer Granholm, who unsurprisingly inherited a 1.7-billion-dollar deficit from the preceding Republican administration as Democrat John Blanchard had had from the Republican administrations preceding his time in office.

D: Man! According to the International Business Times, Jeb Bush left Lehman Brothers for Barclays, a universal bank (with headquarters in London and assets totaling 2.42 trillion in US Dollars as of 2011) that took over the North American business concerns of Lehman Brothers when it declared bankruptcy in 2008. Soon thereafter, with the crude and blabbering Jeb Bush as an adviser, Barclays too began to suffer likewise. Already steeped in the controversies of financing apartheid government in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, and continuing to finance Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe—even today—despite Mugabe’s human rights abuses and the sanctions placed on Zimbabwe by the European Union, Barclays added onto its list of vices, according to the Guardian: tax avoidance schemes involving the Cayman Islands and tax havens in Africa; money laundering dating back to involving the financial transactions of the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo from 2004 to 2009; and financially backing Iranian cultural interests in the United States up until 2010 despite international sanctions prohibiting such transactions.

M: Dude! The world does not function as fluidly as is implied in sanctions because the countries sanctioned become isolated and vulnerable targets for predatory business interests such as the GOP Tea Partiers. The GOP Tea Partiers infiltrate the sanctioned nations financially by either bribing or threatening the leaders in nations like Iran by arming opposing political forces within the country.

D: Man! Governor Rick Snyder received words of encouragement from fellow Republican Jeb Bush today on ABC’s This Week. When inquired as to what he made of the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, Jeb Bush insisted, “We’ve created this complex, no responsibility regulatory system where the federal government, the state government, a regional government, local and county governments are all pointing fingers at one another.” Jeb then went on to propose a “21^st century system of rules; whenever you see a problem it should become public. There should be transparency instead of trying to cover it up.”

M: Dude! Jeb Bush is himself a contemptible, double-dealing monstrosity. Rick Snyder considers himself a “one tough nerd” on his Twitter account, but is nothing but a coldblooded killer.  

D: Man! Rick Snyder committed genocidal horrors in Flint, Michigan! He is the Mugabe of Flint, Michigan, and the Daniel Francois Malan of Detroit Public Schools!

M: Dude! I’m reminded of the Jonathan Kozol must-read from 2005 entitled The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America! According to Kozol on page 257,

“Legal actions on their own, as attorney Theodore Shaw observes, cannot create the ferment needed for a serious political upheaval, for a ‘movement,’ for ‘a mobilization,’ in the terms Orfield has described; and Shaw insists upon the need for activism outside of the legal process and preceding it. ‘In the Montgomery bus boycott,’ he notes, ‘litigation didn’t lead the movement. It came afterwards and served it… When lawyers think they can lead a movement in their role as lawyers, they are doomed to failure, because courts themselves are socially reactionary institutions,’ and he said he meant ‘reactionary’ in both of the common senses of that word. ‘Then, too, because the litigation process is so slow and so complex, it can turn activists into bystanders far too easily. Lawyers like Gandhi and Mandela can awaken and create a movement but not in their roles as lawyers. You need to create a climate of political momentum first. That, then, is the challenge.”

D: Man! Feel the Bern! Last chance! Vote in the Democratic Party presidential primaries! 2016!