Republican creep Eric Cantor, the U.S.
House of Representatives Majority Leader (second highest House post
below the Speaker of the House) lost the GOP primary in his Virginia
Congressional district to an ideological “economics” professor
who opposes the minimum wage and who ran against immigration law
reform and “crony capitalism.” This fellow, named David Brat, was
promoted by right-wing media extremists such as Rush Limbaugh and
Laura Ingraham.
The U.S. media establishment and
political elite pronounced itself “stunned” by Cantor’s defeat
in an election with a very low turnout (the kind susceptible to
victories by motivated cadres of ideologues and small political
movements). The words “stunned” and “stunning” have been
repeated innumerable times by the corporate broadcast and print media
in the U.S. in stories about Cantor’s fall (and on U.S. government
radio propaganda network NPR). One factoid they keep mentioning is
that it “is the first time since the Majority Leader post was
created in 1899 that a Majority Leader lost an election.” Well, if
that’s so, it’s about time.
The “stunned” reaction of the
elites is a symptom of their smugness. They really believe their grip
on power is unassailable, or should be, which is an even worse
attitude. They think entrenched members of the political nomenklatura
should never suffer the indignity of being voted out of office by
mere citizens. Having proclaimed the Tea Party movement dead,
defeated by “establishment” Republicans, to the great relief of
the establishment, now they’ve changed their tune, and once again
see the Tea Party (not an actual party, but a movement with a faction
within the Republican Party) as a threat to “establishment”
(sometimes called, absurdly, “moderate.”) Republicans. They
identify Brat as a Tea Partyer, although Brat himself eschews the
label.
The split between “establishment”
Republicans and Tea Party types is partly a small capitalist vs. big
capitalist split. Turns out that not all capitalists have the same
interests. (It’s long overdue that small capitalists realized this.
Big capitalists have been playing them for saps for decades.)
Cantor’s biggest donors were Wall Street high finance firms. [1]
The Tea Party types, who partly reflect
the resentments of small capitalists, hate deficit spending and
social programs, and feel the “establishment” Republicans are
phonies in their stated opposition to big government debt. But they
go farther. They see the massive tax breaks and government subsidies
and sweetheart contracts for large corporations, and the indulgence
of finance capital and its massive bailout by the government, as
causes of the large government debt (which undeniably they are) and
as examples of corruption and favoritism that is antithetical to true
free enterprise. Tellingly, the very next day after Cantor’s
defeat, the stock of Boeing, a large war corporation, plunged, wiping
out its gains year to date. The New York Times ran a lengthy
article about big business and their lobbyists breaking out in cold
sweats over Cantor’s defeat, and rushing money to help reactionary
Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran beat back a Tea Party challenger for
the GOP Senate nomination in that state. After Cantor’s primary
defeat, Washington lobbyists for big corporation held a snap
fundraiser for Cockran, raising $800,000 on the spot. (Spare change
for their corporate masters.) And Michael Bloomberg Billionaire gave
Cockran $250,000 in May, the article reported. [2]
The usual GOP
scapegoat for government deficits and debt is social programs that
actually help people. These too are bete noires of the Tea
Party ideologues. But the TPers aren’t committed to walling off
corporate welfare from scrutiny, cuts, and elimination, unlike
“establishment” Republicans, nor are they so hot on endless U.S.
imperialist aggression, not because they are anti-imperialist (i.e.
morally principled) but because they don’t want to pay for it. As
colossal military spending is a pillar of the U.S. power structure,
this attitude is another “threat” from the perspective of
establishment scum.
The “stunning”
and “shocking” unseating of Cantor from his Congressional perch
(don’t worry about him, he’ll go on to magnificently munificent
sinecures, still securely nestled in the bosom of the corporate
oligarchic power structure) should be an occasion of glee and joy for
the rest of us. Shed not a tear for this hitman for the ruling
classes in their endless class warfare against the rest of us. And
it’s a class war the U.S. wages globally.
There’s another
current event that is discombobulating the U.S. political elite- the
sudden seizure of Mosul and other Iraqi cities by the “Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria,” a vicious Islamofascist armed
organization. But that’s a topic for another essay.
1] The
boss of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, went on CNBC, a cable TV
channel devoted to fawning over Wall Street executives and acting as
a platform for stock shilling, to praise Cantor and call his loss-
yes- “stunning.” See “For Business And the GOP, A Cantor
Effect,” New York Times, June 15, 2014, page 1.
Goldman Sachs is
the preeminent parasitic finance capital firm, and it controls the
U.S. Treasury Department. And I mean directly; for example Bush the
Younger made the then-chairman of Goldman, Henry Paulson, a man who
had amassed a fortune of $700 million while contributing nothing to
the human race, Treasury Secretary, from which position he made sure
the government made good Goldman’s losses in the financial calamity
of 2008 caused by the unregulated mega-speculating and mortgage
frauds Goldman itself engaged in and aided and abetted, and helped
stampede Congress into voting for the $700 billion bailout for high
finance to save it from itself. Both the regimes of Bill Clinton and
Bush the Younger filled the power positions in the Treasury
Department with corporatchiks from Goldman Sachs.
Goldman
Sachs executives planted in key U.S. government positions in the
Bush II regime.
2]
NY Times, ibid.
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