Via Kottke, Jess Piper explains how the Magats are destroying good government from the inside out. She uses the plight of Medicare expansion in Missouri as an example:
Missouri GOP lawmakers opposed Medicaid and Medicaid Expansion. While they couldn’t keep folks from obtaining health insurance by blocking the program outright, they could keep people from qualifying by not answering the phones. And, when people are able to stay on the phone for hours, and finally reach someone to help, that worker is so overwhelmed that application delays still go on for months.
It’s not a new tactic. Defund an agency. Claim the agency doesn’t work. Privatize the agency.
That is the plan with Social Security. And Medicaid. And Medicare. And the Department of Education. And the FAA. And so many more.
We knew this administration would do this and we fight it at the federal level like we’ve fought back at the state level.
It’s a crystal-clear distillation of what is happening. The Magats are gutting nearly every aspect of the federal government from the inside out so that all of the services it used to provide, the tasks it used to accomplish to keep our economy and society healthy and running smoothly, will stop working. No worries! A private company will take over and we will transfer billions of tax dollars into the hands of new and existing oligarchs! Yay!
Or: No worries! We don’t need the EPA (or forest service, or NOAA, or whatever) anymore. It was a failure anyway, and stood in the way of profit for private industry, so we’ll just kill it dead. No problem!
Piper suggests that Missourians understand how to fight this because they’ve already lived through it, but how has that fight at the state level worked out? Not that well when the Magats control all levers of power. The gist of her post is that armchair activism — phone calls, letters, posts on social media — aren’t going to work to stop this. The fight has to be in the streets.
Why aren’t we out there?