Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Big Government, Budget Deficits, Entitlements and the “Centrist” Ploy

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, April 5, 2010

Big Government, Budget Deficits, Entitlements and the “Centrist” Ploy

by Edward S. Herman from Global Research (originally from ZNet Magazine).

There were no Tea Party-like campaigns to protest this growth in government and attack on constitutional (and state’s) rights in the Bush years because the growing and encroaching government was in the right hands. It is only when it gets into the wrong hands and there is the threat that government will serve the undeserving poor, or even the middle class, and neglect the corporate community and National Security that business, the military-industrial complex (MIC), and right-wing protest cadres get agitated about Big Government. I refer back to my old definition of Conservatism: “An ideology whose central tenet is that The Government Is Too Big, except for the police and military establishment.”