Violence caused by the Neoconservative and Neoliberal Destruction of American Society

Painting of the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960

The violence against black citizens by police is the culmination of a planned restructure of  American society by billionaire think tanks.    

When five partisan Republican Supreme Court Justices overturned the American presidential election in 2000 a new wave of racially hate filled policies and laws were instituted by the George W. Bush Administration.  The gains made during the Civil Rights movement were systematically dismantled and replaced with white rights legislation by members of the GOP.  Bush is a staunch worshiper of Ronald Reagan, an extreme racist whose dog whistle campaign was launched in 1980. 

 Limited government power and unlimited corporate power

Reagan chose the Neshoba County Fair to give his speech on “state’s rights” a place that was located about 7 miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with the 1964 murders of civil rights workers.  In his speech Reagan said “I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.”

Reagan promised a restoration of power to states and local governments appealing to Southern white voters much like Nixon’s divide and conquer Southern strategy.  Today’s GOP is funded by billionaires like the Koch Brothers who demand limited government power and unlimited corporate power.  In the 1970s RAND Corporation released a study that concluded, when services such as police and fire protection were withdrawn, the numbers of people in the neglected areas will decrease.

Bush’s $6.6 trillion tax cuts and “planned shrinkage”

The Bush tax cuts and No Child Left behind were designed to achieve “planned shrinkage” by  slashing city services such as police patrols, garbage removal, street repairs, public education and fire protection, from neighborhoods cause urban decay, crime, and poverty.  According to Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Kaye Johnston the Bush tax cuts cost American families $6.6 trillion from 2001 through 2012, one-third of the country’s GDP.

According to Johnston, "We're not investing in the future of America, because we have less revenue, we are not putting the same money we used to put into research, infrastructure or education.”  "The empirical evidence that tax cuts produce jobs just doesn't exist."  When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993 the GOP, unable to override a veto, shut down the government.  

Those taxes funded over 20 million good paying jobs.

Classroom to prison pipeline

Barack Obama, also a Reagan devotee not only embraced Bush’s No Child Left Behind but expanded it with Race to the Top creating a classroom to prison pipeline wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. According to the ACLU, “For most students, the pipeline begins with inadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments.”

In Republican run States like Wisconsin and Michigan the “planned shrinkage” model has the Detroit public schools facing bankruptcy and in Milwaukee the GOP repealed the 1938 residency requirement for police and firefighters removing them from the communities they serve.   The neoconservative and neoliberal policy must be abandoned.  Until the Bush tax cut are repealed and investments are made in America’s greatest resource, our people, the violence we see on our streets not only continue but it will escalate.

By Patricia Baeten