March 26, 2005
Bunch of Social Raiders
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made Flesh. What that means, I think, is that nothing is real for man until he gives it a name. And the name has to be a proper one--one that relates to the identity of a person or thing appropriately.
When one is inventing a new language, the fit of sounds and symbols to things might not be quite right at first. But in a language like English, which has roots in many tongues, the right word just has to be found by trial and error.
Just so, there has been considerable effort lately to find a proper designation for the people who seem to have hijacked our democracy. While some of them refer to themselves as neocons, short for neo-conservative, that's not an appropriate designation. What they are about is neither new nor conservative.
Others have identified them as the Religious Right or part of a right wing conspiracy. But, though they most surely conspire to achieve their ends, there's nothing religious or right about how they deport themselves. Wing, on the other hand, suggests a fleeting presence--one we might hope for but have little reason to expect.
Perhaps it's their current agenda to destroy our Social Security that's led me to name them the Band of Social Raiders. The characteristics that define them are stealth and sleaze and while one of their spokesmen, Grover Norquist, had visions of drowning government in the bathtub, their ambition has grown considerably. Now it's the whole nation that's to drown in a sea of red ink.
That red we see spread across a map of the American heartland is the stain of bankruptcy. We used to talk about the rust-belt, but before the rust set in, our industries were driven into bankruptcy. Then it was the turn of small business, the life-blood of our small towns and the family farmers who labored on the surrounding plains. Slowly but surely traditional enterprise has been destroyed and the vultures who come to pick clean the carcass would have us believe that a lack of individual effort has done it in.
It's probably no co-incidence that promoting the agenda of the Band of Social Raiders has been handled by the associates of Tom Delay, using the name Red Sea, LLC. There's no doubt what they are about. The destruction of political aspirants under the aegis of the Club for Growth was just a start. Social Security is next and then it's the body of law that's to be overturned. While stealth and sleaze are their trademarks, the stench of corruption seems to attract them like flies to the corpses of Fallujah.
As Stephen Moore, Executive Director of the Club for Growth and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute outlined quite clearly in a recent speech at the Hudson Institute:
" we must seize control of the next generation of wealth. In the next 10-20 years, trillions of dollars of wealth will be passed on through trusts, foundations, and inheritances. The Left is looking to create the next generation of Ford and Rockefeller Foundations with these massive wealth holdings. We must protect against this and insure that money that is meant ot build-up free market institutions isn't intercepted and used to tear them down."
In other words, the Band of Social Raiders have already targeted the wealth of the nation as their own. Free market institutions obviously cost money. So, the only sense in which they are free is that they operate in a lawless environment. Which of course, is why raiding the body of laws is next, funded, no doubt, with the revenue stream USANext aims to divert from the pensions of our elderly population.
Nothing conservative there. Just a bunch of raiders planning their next heist.