Meditation on Madison: Dictator Reagan Deposed After 30 Years of Rule!

A conservative friend of mine seemed shocked when I likened the revolt in Madison, Wisconsin to the uprising in Cairo, Egypt. "That's absurd" he said. We don't live in a dictatorship. Why, you even have Obama as president!"

I granted him that things did appear to be different on the surface. We have freedoms of speech...in theory. We have freedom of the press...in theory. We are an open and tolerant society...in theory. And, importantly, we have the rights of free association and assembly...in theory.

But beneath the theoretical surface of rights and freedoms, there has been a collusion of powerful forces working to fundamentally alter everything that we are taught is great about this country: a generation ago, C Wright Mills called them the Power Elite. The Occult Right-Wing calls them The Illuminati. I call it The Reagan Revolution. The bad news, folks, is that they won 30 years ago and have been instituting changes so fundamental that our freedoms are now merely symbolic gestures under a capitalist and corporatist dictatorship. In that context, President Obama is merely the caretaker of the fundamental power structure put in place 30 years ago that reduces citizenship to consumerism, speech to money, free association to the marketplace and labor a simple commodity in the provision of service. The 'social contract'? That has been reduced to a mere side agreement of the greater duty of society to serve the profit interests of corporatist strategists, planners, lawyers and CPAs.

The good news? Madison, Wisconsin.

The service class has become the slave class. In a world where manufacturing competes with 3rd world salaries and the corporatist benefits from high unemployment to keep wages and salaries low, labor is a bargain and the Dictatorship of Corporatariate wrought by the Reagan revolution wants to keep it that way.

The Republican Party, the Party of Reagan, has now become ideologically pure--beyond even Ronald Reagan's imaginings. I don't think, in fact, that Ronald Reagan would approve of what his Party has become. He was, after all, a genial proxy for a lot of powerful forces that revolved in, out and through his administration.

The transformation of the Republican Party is the important work of high-level corporate manipulators and capitalists with no particular ideology other than greed who have struck an alliance with ideologues and libertarians to frame the speech that reduces the social democrat's world view to a joke. "Where from the government and we're here to help" Hahahaha. Funny. "Government IS the problem" Reagan famously said. In so doing, he effectively neutralized the ONLY social institution with the power to provide checks and balances to the corporatists whose agenda is to privatise profit, socialize costs, and turn Americans into an uncritical mass of drones and consumers. The only regulation that the corporatists want to see are the toilet habits of their workers and spending habits of their consumers. Under the Dictatorship of the Corporariate the only questions the Elite want you to ask is 'what's on sale', 'what colors do they come in', and "how much to supersize?"

Under the Reagan Revolution life became precious in the womb, but once that fetus exits the womb, he or she better not ask for the right of free assembly, the right to collectively bargain, the right for decent health care or the right to a decent pension. Under the Reagan Revolution the Supreme Court has determined that money is a form of speech and Corporations are the same as persons. Thanks to the Billions contributed by the Corporatists (like the Koch Brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife) they have pushed the Reagan revolution and its lexicon into media echo-chamber and a manufactured patriotism that, ironically, serves the interests of a crown corporation (BP) more than the Commonweal. The Tea Party serves like the Jack-booted thugs of the Dictatorship. The likes of Limbaugh, Palin, etc. are the propaganda ministers. But guess what. It isn't going to work. The era of Reagan is coming to an end.

The people who refused to join the manufactured revolution of the Corporatists are summonsing an old-fashioned American populism that we haven't seen for some time.

We are seeing it in Madison, Wisconsin.

The Dictatorship of the Corporariate under Reaganovich and the Republicanskya has gone about as far as astroturf, money and borderline personalities can get them.

The Reign of the Dictator Reagan is ending in Madison just like we saw Mubarak fall in Cairo. And just like Cairo is inspiring revolution throughout the Middle East, I pray that Madison inspires the same throughout America.