The Midas Cult strikes back
Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to.
His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them:
- They want to get rid of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, a major reason why cars made in the 1970s got under 20 miles to a gallon, but ones made now get over 40. The Heritage Foundation, in a detour to Alice’s Wonderland, says fuel efficiency has “negative consequences for air quality.”
- They blame the deadly, underregulation-driven failure of the nation’s only independentpower grid, in Texas in 2021, on “pressure to use 100 percent renewables,” which somehow forces installation of power lines that can’t access electricity from any other source. The solution? Support diversity by sticking to “coal, nuclear, and natural gas.”
- “Eliminate or Reform the Dietary Guidelines,” because those tables we used to read on the sides of cereal boxes when we were kids might become Trojan horses for “objectives unrelated to the nutritional and dietary well-being of Americans” such as “the health of the planet.”
- “Transition the Safer Choice program”—a voluntary perk allowing companies to slap a label on cleaning products indicating they meet EPA safe product standards—”to the private sector.” On the bright side: If industry chooses the standards, many more will volunteer to participate.
“Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.”
There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.
One of the ways Catholicism builds its influence within so many diverse societies around the globe is “syncretism”: emphasizing church teachings that resemble sacred beliefs of its host culture—like enslaved Brazilians being told that Catholic saints were a lot like the panoply of spirits in the local version of West African religion. Here, Heritage deploys a Catholic version of our sacred symbol: individualism. Not the good, liberal kind, where people choose their values from their own experience and self-reflection; that’s a heresy.
I’ve reflected plenty on our need to sanctify profit-making, another sacred belief of American culture. It’s a principle reason the Midas Cult is determined to divert the hundreds of billions collected for Social Security or spent each year on public education to the private sector:
It’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.
That perspective is reflected in Project 2025 as well. The Project 2025 team will move to privatize more taxpayer-funded services and (one way or another) make them fee-for-service. Among them, free weather reports:
Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.
[…]
Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)
Michael Lewis in his 2018 book “The Fifth Risk” explains that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it:
Donald Trump’s administration came to Washington to upend that system. Not to improve it, but to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the New York Times review explained, “like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”
And next the National Weather Service. Lewis followed the Barry Meyers-NWS saga in “The Fifth Risk.” Severe thunderstrorm warnings you get for free on any of your devices (at a cost of roughly $4 per person per year) could disappear if a Project 2025-driven second Trump administration has its way. Kiss those hurrcane warnings goodbye too, Floridians and Gulf-dwellers. Perhaps Heritage will spin off management of the GPS system from the Department of Defense to Barry Meyers. Because in Heritage world there’s no public good but the private good.
Something to look forward to under the dictatorship of the MAGAtariat.
As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi says: Don’t agonize, organize.
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