29 October 2010

REACTIONARY? WHO'S REACTIONARY?

Reactionary? Tea Partiers? Ultra-conservative tendency toward outmoded public policies treating humans in an inhumane way? How about the idea of dealing with a social problem solely by heavy-handed laws and police enforcement? Have we not had sufficient nauseating examples of this in American history?

Take the Arizona anti-immigration law as an instructive example. An NPR news investigation (link below) has revealed that the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private-prison company in the country, was heavily involved in drafting the document that became, nearly word-for-word, the Arizona statehouse bill. CCA sees the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of illegals as a potential growth industry, paid for, of course, by taxpayers.

This should satisfy the limited-government, private-enterprise (and uber-nativist) Tea Partiers while they congratulate themselves for a problem efficiently solved. In reality, though, it would be a big step toward a police state--with the stars-and-stripes waving over the guarded compound.

Why would someone say there are reactionary forces stalking the land? After the Tea Partiers, in Congress, vote to gut social programs and vote down or filibuster the raising of the debt ceiling, we could all rejoice in the scorched-earth policy of bringing government and governmental social programs to a standstill. Nothing reactionary in this.


<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130833741>

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