What it is
Ad-hoc Lecturer, the semi-Strategic Corporal Question & Answer at the Older Americans for Limiting Freedoms:
A)...interesting question. Obviously a Mixed System. I would have to say that it is a 'Corporatist' system. And 'Corporatism' itself is international... Now, the other part of your question was about the Republican Party... Beginning in 1963; but moreover from 1980 the Republican party moved away from Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower to a kind-of combination of Jefferson Davis and Standard Oil with the religious zealotry of a William Jennings Bryan who ironically was otherwise a liberal Democrat.
Q)-- Get to the point, please...
A)...ok. I think by its tenor, the way it uses propaganda... I would say 'neo-Fascist'...
[Groans, indistinct rebuttals]
Q) What about the Democrats?
[Shout from audience member:] Dems are gutless; 'Pubs are mindless!
A) [laughs] ...I don't pay that much attention to them. They don't seem able to use propaganda as effectively, and their policy efforts seem compromised by timidity ... -- but, regardless of outcomes, in power or out, the Republican party has driven much of the political agenda in this country for the past 30 years: Despite the extension of aid to failed and failing financial institutions, the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush Administrations have favored the light hand of regulation and taxation. Believing that the {global} market place knows best. Obama’s views differ only by degrees.
[ indistinct complaints]
Q) What about all that environmental... -- and Obama's Health plan?
A) The Environmental Protection Agency was a product of the Nixon Administration... By the way, is there anyone in this room who believes that unspolied resources in our world are infinite? Has there been more or less environmental legislation over the last 30 years? ... -- And let's look at a health care system requiring mandatory private health insurance as its standard. Again, this was first proposed by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1972, and proposed again by Republicans in the Senate in 1993. An effort to control costs by following the money from pocket-spent to pocket-kept would have been regarded as 'class warfare' or 'social engineering.' As is, a middle-of-the-road bill agreed to by politicians in receipt of contributions from the health care industry was called socialism; that's what I mean by effective propaganda. -- Political leadership has been more sensitive to making Health Care profitable than affordable... By the way, in a Machiavellian sense, using the mob on behalf of oligarchs is political genius.
Q) Hasn't the Republican party done some good in the last 30 years?
A) Modernized the Armed forces; though I'm leery of the privatization that's going on in national security... Thirty years ago an average person could pay a year's tuition at a public college for approximately two weeks pay. Now that cost is between three and six month's gross pay. Forty years ago an average person could spend 5 days in the hospital for between two and two and half week's pay. Today five days of uninsured hospitalization could cost six months to a year's gross pay or one's lifetime earnings -- with no foreknowledge until the bill is actually produced. So, average people can no longer send their kids to college out of savings or afford hospitalization without insurance. And we insist on using as our economic model a self-regulating market-place even though the one we actually have has been glued together with government funding, fiat money and influence peddling ... Illusions make for bad philosophy. -- That's about all the time I have...
[Grumbling]