I recently read the Heritage Foundation Budget on a PDF thingy, and wrote down a consolidation of a majority of their points. My interpretation is as follows:
Privatize everything; Medicare, Social Security, education, transportation, trade agreements, the USPS, national parks, police, fire fighters, fill in the blank It's perfectly fine to dig up every square inch of the US for minerals and oil - the opinion being that it's there for the taking so why not exploit it.
Tamp down on renewable energy efforts.
Cut spending for the poor for legal services, like Violence Against Women.
No more free lunches for poor school kids.
No more CO-OPS, REA for instance.
Force Yucca Mtn, Nevada, to take nuclear waste.
Cut FEMA. No more loans to victims of natural disasters.
Cut funding to the Securities Exchange Commission. Translation; cut Wall Street oversight.
Cut (eliminate) the Affordable Care Act.
Cut funding for all abortion givers.
Obstruct the formation of unions.
Eliminate OSHA's past records - they might injure a major corporation's reputation.
Defund any world-wide efforts toward climate change.
Cut construction worker's salaries. (huh?)
Don't restrict mining company's right to dump slag anywhere they want to. (Poor people don't need clean water.)
Big Oil is king, which means that no one has the right to protest their contamination of air, water, and land.
There have been snippets of conversations, opinions, or proposals at various times which have reinforced every single thing on this list. (In fact, this was David Koch's platform when he ran for VP.) One, for instance, is Standing Rock. Along with Big Oil, the Koch Bros, and Trump, there are 17 banks, world-wide, that have billions riding on the completion of this pipeline all the while cavalierly ignoring the fact that pipelines always leak. Or, for another, how about the elimination of CO-OPs - there's money to be had there and those stupid farmers, electric companies, etc, are in the way of the 1% glomming onto it. Or, let Wall Street and the big banks police themselves. After all, they did such a bang-up job in between the repeal of Glass Steagall and 2008, not to mention all the crap they've pulled since then.
With the exception of the Cristshun men and their Gawd-given right to force women to be brood mares, all of these points are designed to continue the flow of power and money upward. In 1857, Fredrick Douglass wrote; "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Since Reagan, the erosion of our rights by the 1% was, for them, painfully slow. They sought a solid, recognizable platform to promote their program and their wishes were answered in the form of the Tea Party followed by the ultimate blessing, Citizens United. It simplified everything. They now had the freedom to just buy Congress, judges, and entire states like Kansas, tax deductible.
The trouble now is that their blatant purchases have been noticed by more and more people who are starting to ask questions, and demonstrate, and hold rallies for whatever cause they support. Sadly, we have too few great leaders fighting for we, the people, and they need our voices more than ever to combat the reign of all the bullys, bigots and toadies we are faced with, the ones who can't wait to put the Heritage Foundation budget into effect. Pushing that rock up the corporate hill towards democracy has become almost impossible. We, the people, need to keep on pushing.
