Bringing the government to its knees

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Bringing the government to its knees serves not only to punish but also to profit. Beyond the doctrinarian obsession of the conservative right to keep the federal government under control, trimming its prerogatives, size and expenditures, is the pure and harsh calculation of the entrepreneurial miracles that can be accomplished when the executive power is on its knees.

The story is old. Frequently, the advocates of a weak government repeat the same medieval arguments of those feudal lords, those barons of noose and knives who fought the powers of unification to the death.

Under the cloaks of pious religiosity and points of honor, behind the fanatical defense of priorities and ancestral rights hid the earthly ambitions and the vulgar greed, the desire not to be prevented from fleecing the taxpayers, and the reluctance to share the fruits of plunder by paying taxes to a king.

The same is happening today, except that the barons of contemporary capitalism and their learned neoconservative spokesmen wield arguments that are even more hypocritical and ethereal, such as, “that’s what the Founding Fathers established” and “that’s how it was consecrated in the sacrosanct and unchangeable Constitution.”

But it is not only in the elegant salons that this is done, and it is not only the academicians of the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation who daily sell us the prescription that justifies placing the squalid and weak governments in the hands of the big sharks of finance and the American corporations. Also in the states, laws are constantly passed to tie the hands of the federal government, to prevent what is called “Washington’s meddling” in local affairs.

Especially now that the administration of Barack Obama, by a margin of only seven votes, managed to pass the health reform act and is intent on placing Wall Street under the nation’s control. And here, as might be expected, and how Don Quixote warned, things will be different, or, in other words, “Beware, Sancho, that we’ve stumbled upon the Church.”

As the Cuban saying goes, “it’s OK to play with the chain but not with the monkey.” Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise us that a wave of nostalgic theories that praise Reaganism and strange initiatives in state legislatures are combining in the political spectrum of the United States with the heated and angry shouts of the shock troops known as the Tea Party Movement, which only projects an image that there is a spontaneous popular opposition to Obama’s policies.

Without this background, we cannot understand why Arizona has passed that nasty immigration law that not only criminalizes those who harvest tomatoes, clean the streets and look after the old people their own relatives abandon, but also pushes against the ropes the “Cabinet of change and hope,” which, among its promises, hoped to normalize this complex facet of the nation’s life.

Now, the situation is worse than before, a lot worse, for example, than under the government of George W. Bush. The persecution is not limited to chasing wetbacks but also professors with strong accents and banning programs of multicultural education. As if to show those “damn Yankees” who’s boss down here.

Sarah Palin, the Madame Royale of the conservatives looking to the 2012 elections, and who is being promoted as a defender of womanhood, a woman of the people, incorruptible and vibrant, a good speaker and brilliant politician (everything that she’s not), has declared defiantly that “we’re all Arizonans now.” And maybe she doesn’t take it too seriously, burdened as she is by the exhausting duties imposed upon her by her chic populism and the spa sessions.

Meanwhile, other state legislators, in Florida for instance, do believe it is necessary to follow her example and introduce initiatives (spontaneous, they say) that, if approved, would fragment and Balkanize the federal policies on current national issues that could be vital to the American Union.

At the end of this foreseeable process and this new modality of the implacable, total war against Obama, who shall emerge strengthened? Shall it be the idea of finding order amid economic and social chaos, of reducing the huge prerogatives of consortiums and banks, of the voracious financial speculators whose aberrant expressions are symbolized in the scandal involving Goldman Sachs and Fabulous Fab (Goldman executive Fabrice Tourre), its cynical icon, or, on the contrary, those who profit from the selfish disorder with the greatest impunity?

At the rate we’re going, and the way we see the stripping, branch by branch, of the once robust central power in the United States, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to admit that a program at first sight delirious such as the one sketched by Newt Gingrich in his book “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine,” which eventually would include “the replacement, not the reform” of federal institutions by others, according to the old reductionist dream of neoconservatives might eventually come true peacefully – something that Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy futilely sought by force.

At that point, nobody should be surprised at the fulfillment of the old, secret dream of the Cuban far right in Miami, always so friendly and cooperative with all the retrograde forces that dissolve the nation, especially when it comes to obtaining quotas of impunity and freedom of action for their own purposes. Needless to say, these people have never been loyal or respectful to any country other than their wallets.

Should the boat sink, or the refeudalization of the United States occur (the objective of those in the shadows who want profits without law, freedom of enterprise without limits and fortunes without social responsibility or taxes), we can expect that the ultra-Cubans and hard-line patriots, both young and old, will try to steal both the saint and the alms box.

Or that, in a rapture of romantic patriotism, they will proclaim the Independent Republic of Miami, the nation that would have never returned little Elián. There, the illustrious Posada Carriles would be legally elevated to the rank of Father of the Nation; the TV shows of Oscar Haza and María Elvira Salazar would be part of the schools’ study programs; “Comandante” Frómeta would be appointed Minister of Defense, and Miguel Saavedra would be Presidential spokesman.

In a situation like the one today, the most hallucinatory dreams could come true. A mixture of unbounded desires and hidden ambitions, concealed behind highfaluting declarations of principle and the torn garments of vestal virgins, could put an end not only to a government but also to the United States we know and the world’s precarious equilibrium.

To bring Obama’s administration to its knees could be extremely desirable and even profitable for many, but we have asked ourselves: Why didn’t the same forces ever rise against George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, which was so unconstitutional, meddlesome and destructive of citizens’ privacy? Why didn’t anyone at the time dare to pass a law like the one in Arizona?

“Things thou shalt see, my Cid, that will make the stones tremble.”

Elíades Acosta Matos, a philosopher, doctor in political sciences and writer is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.