blogging it real

NoRightTurn is firing on all cylinders:

ObservatioNZ describes the present National party as "Muldoon with monetarism". WHile I think this is a perfect description of Brash - his autocratic leadership style, populist Maori- and beneficiary-bashing, and adherence to market fundamentalism - I'm not sure that it's entirely fair to the party as a whole. After all, National isn't just Brash - it also includes talentless born-to-rule tories, inbred rural consevatives, panty-sniffing monarchists, capitalists without a conscience, and "mother knows best" paternalists. Shouldn't they get a look-in too?

Bloody brilliant. And based on my time in Canada I can report that many of the same tropes appear in the Conservative Party there, albeit with rather more in the way of "Biblical literalists and assorted crazed theocrats".

In addition, NRT points to the entirely manufactured nature of the "social security crisis" in the US ... a crisis only exists if savings cannot be touched (e.g., if they have been obliterated by tax cuts for the rich).

Bush wants to get the government out of the social security game by privatising it - otherwise known as the "let the elderly starve" solution. ... But the only way this can be a "crisis" is if the trust fund can't be tapped - in other words, if the US government decides to stiff one of its largest investors and refuse to pay out on [bonds purchased with Social Security payroll taxes].

What would the Bush Administration gain from this (apart from a global economic meltdown)? It would be able to make its tax cuts permanant. Those tax cuts of course flow almost entirely to the top one or two percent of Americans - and will now be funded by stealing money saved for retirement by the bottom eighty percent. In other words, it's Robin Hood in reverse: robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

Nice work. Such wonderful rants against the right remind me of what Russell Brown said yesterday about that hapless collection of space-alien channelling MPs claiming to represent the ACT party: "tax is theft … spend more!", and "build more prisons … but not here!" Yeah, whatever, fuck off dicks.