GOP plan to kill off rural America

Created
Tue, 12/09/2023 - 00:30
Updated
Tue, 12/09/2023 - 00:30
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: 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…