the Nation: It's not a government shutdown; it's a right-wing coup

[Grasswire2]

[link:https://www.thenation.com/article/its-not-a-government-shutdown-its-a-right-wing-coup/?fbclid=IwAR1CZlLtRRmsPmaokSEc0-dmeJm4RkEQDvtq6Pm97X4FrBwYRKylxOK6_IQ|

snip

What we are really facing is a liberal government shutdown—which is to say programs designed to help the vulnerable and poor are gutted, while institutions designed to serve the rich and powerful remain unscathed.

If the last “shutdown” is any guide, the military, Trump’s luxurious vacations, soft power, our bombing of seven Muslim-majority countries, NSA bulk surveillance, agencies that prop up the oil and gas industry, the CIA’s arming and funding of Syrian rebels, and the FBI’s entrapment regime will remain entirely untouched. The parts of government that serve the poor and working class, however, will be first on the chopping block: libraries, tax collection, national parks, labor and safety regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (which oversees the derivatives market), environmental regulators, financial regulators, welfare, and WIC will all be axed. Indeed, the one time the government got remotely close to undermining, even briefly, a pillar of the right-wing state, the powers that be arbitrarily decided to leave the Defense Department virtually untouched.

In principle, the criteria of what is and isn’t “essential” is determined by unelected agency and department heads using guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget based on a Department of Justice opinion authored in 1980 by then–Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. That determination, according to McClatchy, defines “essential” activities as those that “protect life and property”—a fundamentally reactionary (and curiously unexamined) criterion that elevates property over justice, feeding people, and protecting the vulnerable.

More at link

[PatrickforO]

1. Our justice system has always valued property over people.

Or, more accurately, profits over people. Republicans have been trying to gut the New Deal for 80 years.

[2naSalit]

2. Many of us

have been calling it just that for at least two years now.