(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . You Can Have 'Small' Government, Or You Can Have Security. You Can't Have Both. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-28 You can have small, low cost, government that doesn’t ding the wallet, but you can’t ask a low cost government to take on the responsibilities of being a globe-spanning power, a Make America Great Again nation, but on the cheap. Anyone that tells you there’s a private replacement for protecting the national interest in the defense of Democracy is lying to you. And there are plenty of people looking to scam Americans into believing their government is ‘too expensive’ simply because there’s waste in government spending. Yes, there IS waste in government spending! There, we said it. If we want any type of ‘extremism’ in government, let it be an extremism* we can all get behind: Accountability and transparency to eliminate wasteful government spending...to the extent possible. From the county level to the US Congress. Few will argue against eliminating wasteful spending, and I’m not writing this diary to pretend there’s no wasteful spending going on. But ‘wasteful spending’ is not why government costs what it costs. With that out of the way, let me explain why I did write this diary: Investigative journalist, Dylan Farrow, has written an important piece in the New Yorker, detailing how much of the global communication infrastructure that American government agencies depend on, to fulfill policy commitments, like air traffic control (FAA), like EV charging station monitoring (DOT), like battlefield comms in Ukraine (DOD/DHS/CIA), are dependent on the cooperation of a single individual. More specifically, the private owner of such a globe-spanning network, called Starlink. Someone named Elon Musk. "The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new," observes Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. But Elon Musk is in a league of his own, he adds. Farrow's deep dive into Musk's life and career begins with a look at how his SpaceX satellites became a pivotal component in the Russia-Ukraine war, and how Musk used that leverage to full advantage in talks with US leaders and possibly even Vladimir Putin himself. "There is little precedent for a civilian's becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space," writes Farrow. The headline refers to Musk's "shadow rule." Now, a lot of Kossacks already know about Elon Musk and his owning of Starlink, the name of a constellation of communications satellites encompassing the globe, and that the Ukrainian military has been dependent on Starlink (and therefore, Elon Musk) since the beginning of the war, for critical battlefield communications. That’s not ‘news’ for us. And plenty of us Kossacks talk (and write) about the billionaire donor class, and billionaire influence in our public institutions (see, Thomas, Clarence, SCOTUS Justice). That’s not really news for us either. But what does bear reminding are the implications of what Musk, SpaceX, and Starlink mean to American governance under the Constitution. Leave it to Dylan Farrow to force the issue onto the front pages of the msm with a particular company and a particular billionaire, that was smart enough to identify where the needs of American government were getting nickle-and-dimed by decades of fake ‘government spending’ concerns, that it forced the privatization of a critical government resource: a global, orbital, communications infrastructure. [Now we just need to get Farrow to do a story on the nexus between billionaire-funded gerrymandering and the intentional vandalizing of American government by their proxies, donor-funded Republican representatives.] The ‘moral’ of the (Dylan Farrow’s) story? You pay for the government you need. You’re not supposed to sacrifice that need to score political points, as the GOP has done for decades with it’s (donor-funded) insistence that there’s a constituency for privatizing swathes of modern American government, fulfilling public needs that result in public obligations. Like a social safety net. Like a modicum of public healthcare. Like national security and the ability to fulfill the nation’s responsibilities to itself and it’s allies. And Farrow’s investigative reporting shows us the growing consequences of Government forced into fiscal compromises caused by unserious domestic politicking and, in turn, how such unserious politicking can affect basic national security needs. How do you know what you need? In a functional democracy, you tell your voters the truth, based on some facts, and then you have free and fair elections. You trust the American public, that they know what they expect Government to do in informed public policy, and that that policy is being discussed because it will likely require some kind of public investment, either in basic research, or in building out infrastructure. That goes for building out the civil service to administer programs like Social Security and Medicare; or funding the Manhattan Project to prevent our enemies from being the first to deploy nuclear weapons; or being the first to land on the Moon; or the deployment of a Starlink orbital communications network required for the responsible management of our global security assets. Done right, that creates a need for skilled jobs, and creates value expressed in a consensus-based public policy. [Compare that with “Build the wall”, a slogan for massive infrastructure masquerading as public policy. Had it been built, not only would it have been a mega-scale policy boondoggle of wasted tax dollars, it wouldn’t have addressed the problem that created the slogan: Immigration!] Because some government functions, or public utilities, or the military’s ability to communicate — a critical aspect of securing our national interests, both domestically and abroad — shouldn’t be outsourced to unelected, unaccountable, billionaires with a penchant for ketamine use ‘to relax’. * * * *This is what partisan gerrymandering exchanges. If you decide districts should contain people who share resources paid for by tax dollars, you’re choosing for an electorate that cares about government transparency and accountability regarding the management of those resources and tax dollars. If you decide districts should contain people who share a partisan loyalty, you’re choosing for an electorate that cares more, on balance, about partisan loyalty instead of transparency and accountability. By continuing to allow gerrymandering to be nominally legal, we’re exchanging an ‘extremism’ of accountable government for an ‘extremism’ based on partisanship and loyalty. You can argue there’s a built-in baseline consensus — extremism, if you will — in every district, based on the criteria used to populate that district with registered voters. A free and fair election is really about why does this or that voter inhabit a particular district? If it’s because they share resources through their tax dollars and they happen to be majority Republican? That’s fair. Let there be a Republican district voting for Republican leaders. The same goes for Democrats in blue districts. These will be Republicans more concerned with government transparency and accountability — something they share with Democrats in other districts, even mixed districts — than Republicans chosen for their partisan loyalty to inhabit a district. In a gerrymandered district designed to deliver predictable elections, ‘Loyalty to party’ will be the baseline consensus, instead of loyalty to the Constitution, or to transparency and accountability. That’s why the Republican Party is dead. They created an election strategy, with the help of Thomas Hofeller’s research, that was based on the abuse of the constitutionally-mandated privilege of state legislators, to draw and certify the boundaries of state and federal districts in their respective states. And they announced their intention to abuse their apportionment privileges on 3-4-10, in the Wall Street Journal, called “The GOP Targets State Legislatures” (aka ‘REDMAP Strategy 2010’, since updated to ‘2020’) with the subtitle “He who controls redistricting, controls Congress”. Intentionally or not, the GOP created a machine that encourages political extremism with a strategy that manufactures districts around voters that exhibit partisan loyalty. Trump’s MAGA base. Expressing unearned political power through partisan representatives from gerrymandered districts. And that ‘loyalty’ has become a national security threat. What else is a security threat? A MAGA-friendly, Putin fan-boy, Elon Musk, questioning why he’s providing critical services to the enemies of Putin and Russia. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/28/2189999/-You-Can-Have-Small-Government-Or-You-Can-Have-Security-You-Can-t-Have-Both Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/