The President Controls the GOP (Gangrenous Old Party) Except When He Doesn't
Just reading some poor political reporting and analysis this Sunday morning in the Washington Post. The reporters do a decent job of laying out some of the facts, but are prevented from reporting and analyzing the heart of the matter by a directive, explicit, or tacit, consciously or subconsciously received, it doesn't really matter: The directive is real that prevents these reporters from mentioning the crucial player in this sad, tawdry, predictable episode. (The other explanation, far less probable, is that the reporters--despite the fact that they are reporters-- are so deeply ignorant of what is really going on that they just didn't know how to properly report this story.)
Scene 1: At the White House last month the president meets with Democratic congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure. The president and Democrats agree to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure over the next 10 years.
Scene 2: Congressional Republicans-- the ones MSNBC, the Washington Post and New York Times are constantly telling us are in the president's vise grip--run away from the agreement. Plutocratic interests deploy servile, paid public-opinion-shapers to taint the tentative deal by moving the question away from whether America must tend to its infrastructure, to whether the president is being tricked into harming his reelection chances by agreeing to raise taxes. Plutocrats also assign their official representatives to publicly present the plutocratico-libertarian ideological point-of-view on increased infrastructure spending: Before agreeing to spend more money on infrastructure the government must first eliminate all wasteful spending (as defined by plutocrats), eliminate all unnecessary regulation (as defined by plutocrats) and forget about raising taxes to pay for infrastructure.
Scene 3: After the initial infrastructure meeting with Democrats, the president, who probably really wanted a deal on infrastructure for the very good reason that such a deal would be likely to improve his reelection chances, begins echoing Grover Norquist's story line that the Democrats are trying to trick him into raising taxes on the middle class so that an enraged populace will throw him out of office in 2020.
Scene 4: The president walks out of a scheduled second infrastructure meeting with Democrats saying there can be no legislation with investigation.
The evidence available to the public despite the corporate media's refusal to adequately cover these stories suggests that prior to the president walking out of the second infrastructure meeting the plutocracy had made clear to the him that there would be no infrastructure deal that involved raising taxes--which means that it had made clear to the president that there would be no infrastructure deal. Walking out while saying no legislation with investigation was the obvious political countermove of blame-shifting: the sad dregs left to the president after the Koch Network was done with the infrastructure issue. Did it even throw him a bone?
Now it seems likely that by Tuesday, November 3, 2020, the president will have signed no major legislation that could plausibly be deemed to be beneficial to ordinary Americans. This probably presents a bit of a problem to the Koch Network since they must understand that achievement of their remaining objectives is tied as tightly to the president's fate as the president's base is tied to the president. When the Network denied the president any legislative achievement that ordinary Americans would believe was good for themselves, they hurt the president's reelection chances and probably knew that they did, but felt that it was a trade-off they had to make. Now the Network and Fox News must double and redouble their (lawful?) efforts to ensure that the president is reelected despite his record of zero achievement on behalf of ordinary Americans, and his lengthening record of negative achievement.
Postscript: Note that the plutocratic attitude toward America's infrastructure is the same as its attitude to Planet Earth's Natural Infrastructure which at this moment is undergoing a critical failure in its climate systems. The plutocratic attitude to both infrastructures seems to be to hell with them. Is this the will to dominance as manifested in old men near the grave? If I can't continue to live then neither shall you?
