The â€˜free marketâ€™ threat to freedom

“Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like ”¦ Since people won’t cooperate, won’t act for the public interest voluntarily, we’ve got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work ”¦ but terror.” ”“ “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, 1957

Forget Star Trek. That quotation from “Atlas Shrugged” is the Republican Prime Directive: Control Americans by instilling fear. Thanks to Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, NeoCons, and Tea Partiers, America is well on its way to becoming an armed, third-world country.

Considering the rapid passing of the Patriot Act immediately after September 11, 2001, Bush signed it on October 26, 2001, and the subsequent War on Terror, it’s important to understand where the concept of this war on terror came from and whom it was directed against. Spoiler alert: Anyone who suggests that this war and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were to eradicate Al-Qaida is wrong. The War on Terror was always intended to be a Republican war on Americans.

In the first eight months of the Bush Administration, prior to the horrific attacks on our country, The Bush Crime Family led by the boss of all bosses, Dick Cheney, was spying on Americans, intercepting e-mails, reading our snail-mail, and listening to land and mobile phone conversations. All of this was done, without FISA Court approval, and according to W in typical, Orwellian, newspeak fashion, “to protect our freedoms.” In fact, the Republican agenda is to do away with the middle class and any social construct involving freedom. Sadly, Tea Partiers and non-union workers are helping Republicans achieve their goal, especially here in Maine.

There was an inherent disconnect between the Bush Administration’s words and their actions. The Patriot Act takes our freedoms away without doing anything to protect Americans from an overreaching government. In fact, this is one area where Tea Partiers and Liberals actually agree. However, where were these folks who want to “reclaim America” when it was being taken from us during the first decade of this century? Speak with any Tea Partier and their clear lack of knowledge regarding American history, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution is appalling. Still, this is America and, I suppose, they are entitled to their ignorance.

Bush and Cheney practiced disaster capitalism to advance the Republican agenda; the phrase comes from Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” Essentially, this is taking financial advantage of both natural and man-made catastrophes to make money. The former includes the present-day scouring of Haiti after the earthquakes by offshore, financial interests. This also means the intentional dislocation of hundreds-of-thousands of indigenous coastal people after the 2004 Pacific tsunami to make way for high rise condominiums and hotels. The Bush war of choice in Iraq and the C.I.A.’s, and Milton Friedman’s, involvement in the assassination of freely elected Chilean President Salvatore Allende in 1973 are prime examples of man-made disasters. And the reason for coups and wars? To make money, of course. Chile provided Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago School of Economics and a hero to present-day NeoCons, with an opportunity to set his economic theory into practice. His theory, simply put, is this: Elimination of the middle class leads to cheap labor and, thus, higher profits for business.

This concept is quaintly couched in the Republican/Wall Street phrase, The Free Market Economy. With the coup and murder of President Allende by Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet in consort with the C.I.A., Pinochet took over a country that had a 5 percent unemployment rate. Within a year that reversed, and unemployment hovered near 96 percent. Profits for business, however, were astronomical for a selected few. It did not matter to Pinochet or Friedman that poverty was universal, disease ran rampant, and tens-of-thousands of Chileans died. The unions were broken and workers were forced to underbid their neighbors for menial jobs. Stillbirths rose and weakened children were riddled with deformities. Pleas for help went unheeded. Friedman worked similar black magic in Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Hundreds of thousands died worldwide but a few made money and that, of course, was all that mattered.

Hurricane Katrina gave the Bushies a twofer, a natural and a man-made disaster. Most horrific was the intentional, Republican neglect of a predominately black city as it was drowning. The deaths of thousands went un-noticed in a conservative-controlled press but the tragedy presented financial opportunity. And so, they made money.

“The public be damned,” says Hank Reardon, a protagonist in Atlas Shrugged. “The public be damned,” wrote Milton Friedman in 1963. “The public be damned” is how Republicans view real Americans. After all, nothing will make their system work but terror. And they can always make more money.

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