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GOP plan to kill off rural America
How's that for retribution?
The FB post below deserves a wider audience. Sara Robinson is a futurist friend who's written for Orcinus with David Neiwert and for America's Future and AlterNet. She commented a few weeks ago on Vivek Ramaswamy's plans for "revolution" in Washington, D.C.
Ramaswamy's pitch is another riff on Republicans' and the Heritage Foundation's plan to "Schedule F" away the "administrative state" both by replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA ideologues and by killing off entire agencies. Think of the Trump administration on steroids.
For the MAGA faithful who still believe their spray-tanned savior was cheated of his rightful kingship by the deep state, eliminating 75 percent of the federal workforce may hold retributive appeal. Robinson spells out what that really looks like out in so-called "real America."
"The people who will be hurt most by the this are, of course, rural Republicans," Robinson writes, in small towns already clinging to life supported by government presence:
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Every last town with the lights still on is doing it with large amounts of either state or federal money. They're the county seat — so they have the courts, the jail, the hospital, and the community college. There's a military base, a dam, national lab, prison, or some other large piece of infrastructure. Or a state or national park nearby that draws in tourists and employees. They're the port town on this part of the river or coast, built long ago and still maintained on ample public investment; or they're fortuitously sited near the intersection of two interstates or railroads that funnel in traffic and money to support private business.
The props take a lot of forms, but the source is the same. Apart from a scant handful of places where the old factory or mine hasn't yet been closed up and shipped abroad, we have yet to find a surviving small town that isn't standing on an economic foundation of some kind of government investment.
A lot of conservatives listening to Ramaswamy hear him promising the death of the deep state — without realizing that what he's really talking about is killing dozens or hundreds (or, in a base town, thousands) of the jobs that are the last thing sustaining their own local economies. If he gets his way, the last people in town with a college education and/or a middle-class wage will be forced to move on. Schools and hospitals will close. Real estate values will crash. And their town will just become another boarded-up, desiccating, depopulated blip on a county highway.
Unable to think past FOX-planted stereotypes, they think that "government jobs" are universally held by Those People — the non-white ones, the ones in the cities. It never seems to occur to them that it's their own neighbors — the nurse at the county hospital, the state trooper, the guy who manages the local airport, the woman who runs the ranger station up at the state park, the fish-and-game guy, the farm bureau staffer, the sweet kid who teaches their son's first-grade class — who are going to take it in the neck here as the money that funds their jobs dries up. And when they go, so does the tax base that literally keeps the streets paved and the lights on.
When they're gone — well, to paraphrase one of their heroes, "you're not gonna have a town any more." They think they're winning. But they're the ones with the actual targets on their backs. Ramaswamy's plan is their pathway to a future of destitution, drugs, and deaths of despair.
Think beyond negative partisanship for once, neighbors. Look over your shoulder into the mirror for the target the right stuck to your back.
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