Gingrich-Gore Fascist Hand
Behind `The Plan'
by Jeffrey Steinberg and Carl Osgood
Liberation is at hand.... A paradigm-shattering revolution has just taken place. In the signal events of the 1980s—from the collapse of communism to the Reagan economic boom to the rise of the computer—the idea of economic freedom has been overwhelmingly vindicated. The intellectual foundation of statism has turned to dust. This revolution has been so sudden and sweeping that few in Washington have yet grasped its full meaning.... But when the true significance of the 1980s freedom revolution sinks in, politics, culture—indeed, the entire human outlook—will change.... Once this shift takes place—by 1996, I predict—we will be able to advance a true Hayekian agenda, including ... radical spending cuts, the end of the public school monopoly, a free market health-care system, and the elimination of the family-destroying welfare dole. Unlike 1944, history is now on the side of freedom.
—Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.), Policy Review, Summer 1994Like all true revolutions, the Information Revolution is also a revolution of power. Miniaturized technologies miniaturize institutions. In time, the microchip will destroy the nation-state. It will give small groups and even individuals the capacity to employ violence in ways that could overturn governments and destroy large organizations.... Invisible machines programmed through artificial intelligence could literally force anyone to behave any way the ultimate programmer wished.... Slavery could return.... Slaves will be anyone without control of nanotechnology, and they will do anything that might have been asked by Aladdin when he rubbed his lamp.
—Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Great ReckoningWe need to understand that the scale of revolution that we need is so great and it is so dramatically different.... This is a real revolution. In real revolutions, the defeated faction doesn't tend to convert. It tends to go down fighting.... I mean, if you look at the Bourbons, in France, they didn't rush in and say, "Oh please, can I join the revolution?" They remained Bourbons. In fact most of them learned nothing and forgot nothing, and 50 years later were looking into a world that was dead.... I am a genuine revolutionary; they [the Democrats] are the genuine reactionaries; we are going to change their world and they will do anything to stop us, they will use any tool, there is no grotesquery, no distortion, no dishonesty, too great for them to come after us.... The future of the human race for at least a century rests on our shoulders. If we fail ... then Bosnia and Rwanda, Haiti and Somalia are the harbingers of a dark and bloody planet.
—Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Jan. 20, 1995Now that the transition from the Second Wave to the Third Wave is under way, the GOP can enjoy its moment in the sun. The GOP is the party of the Third Wave. History is on our side.
—Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), Jan. 20, 1995
The ink had hardly dried on Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" when the newly installed Conservative Revolution-run U.S. Congress, in April 1995, rammed through legislation creating a "Big MAC" financier's dictatorship over the nation's capital. The District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority, more widely known as the D.C. Control Board, was a joint venture of the Conservative Revolution fanatics in the Congressional Republican majority, and the Al Gore "Third Way" Democrats inside the White House and the Congress.
It was this coalition of "two Republican parties" that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) had forcefully attacked in a National Press Club speech in January 1995.
On Capitol Hill, District of Columbia Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton worked hand-in-glove with the Gingrich-Gramm self-described "Jacobins" to push the initial Control Board legislation through Congress. Holmes Norton personified the "Republicans in Democratic clothing" that Kennedy had singled out as a threat to the General Welfare; for Holmes Norton was no stranger to "Big MAC" austerity and bankers dictatorship. According to her Congressional campaign website, she served, during 1970-77, as Executive Assistant to John Lindsay, who was Mayor of New York City during 1965-73, and who paved the way for the original "Big MAC." New York City sources have confirmed that Holmes Norton played an active role in "economic affairs" while she was Lindsay's executive aide.
Although it was President Bill Clinton who signed on to the Control Board scheme, peddled by Holmes Norton, Gingrich, Gramm, and House Republican Majority Leader Armey, it was Vice President Al Gore, who ardently advocated the scheme, according to well-informed sources. Gore's Y2000 campaign finance chairman, Steve Rattner, was, at the time of the Control Board legislative fight, head of Lazard Brothers in New York (he later set up his own "boutique" brokerage house). In 1996—the same year that Gore and Roy Cohn-clone Dick Morris convinced President Clinton, against his own better judgment, to sign on to Gingrich's welfare-to-work slave-labor law, a core component of the Contract on America—the Gore-Morris duo got the President to bring in Franklin Raines as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Raines had spent the previous 11 years at Lazard Brothers in New York, ending up as a partner in the firm. Raines was designated as the Administration's point-man for dealing with the D.C. Control Board.
A year later, on July 30, 1977, Gore-man Raines pushed through an even more draconian "rescue" plan for Washington, D.C.—which gave further dictatorial powers over the District to the Control Board. Like the original April 1995 legislation, the National Capital Revitalization and Self-Government Act of 1997 was a joint venture of the Lazard/Gore gang inside the Clinton Administration and the Gingrich-Gramm "conservative revolutionists" in the Congress.
Lazard man Raines had first floated the idea for the Control Board vise grip over the District budget and major social service agencies at a Jan. 14, 1997 press conference, at which he vowed to administer "tough love" to a city whose elected officials had failed, in his opinion, to impose enough austerity. The final version of the bill was passed as a rider to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, another piece of Schachtian austerity strait-jacketing. It gave the Control Board dictatorial control over Fire and Emergency Services, Public Works, Administrative Services, Corrections, Human Services, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, Employment Services, Housing and Community Development, Personnel, and Procurement. Public Schools, Police, and Financial Management had already been turned over to the Control Board in the initial 1995 legislation.
When the final version of the 1997 plan was sealed, in a midnight "compromise" between the White House, Gingrich, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the Washington Post the next day gloated, in banner headlines, "D.C. Rescue Agreement Strips Barry's Power," a reference to Mayor Marion Barry. That compromise had been orchestrated by Holmes Norton and Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), who at the time headed the D.C. Appropriations Subcommittee.
In an Aug. 2, 1997 open letter, Holmes Norton portrayed herself as a heroine, for having forced Faircloth to drop his demand that the District's elected mayor be replaced by an appointed city manager. "My only recourse," she pleaded, "was to appeal to the Republican leaders to accept my counter-proposals rather than Faircloth's in order to preserve home rule." Her counter-proposal, in fact, endorsed the Congressional/Control Board rape of the District, preserving only the fig-leaf of a powerless mayor under the hypocritical slogan, "home rule."
Mayor Barry had a clearer sense of the reality of what had just transpired. "Senator Faircloth," he wrote, "who has led the effort to re-colonize the citizens of the District, has raped democracy and freedom. Apparently Senator Faircloth and other Republicans feel free to trample over our rights with impunity."
Former City Council member H.R. Crawford went one step further, daring to point a finger the infamous "Plan," the Federal City Council and KKK-Katie Graham's dream-scheme for driving the poor African-American population out of the District in sufficient numbers to restore white majority rule. "We were doomed from the start with this limited home rule," Crawford told the Post. Congress was never going to let control of this nation's capital slip away. It feeds the idea that the city would be returned to Congress and the majority will move back in." He continued, "There's always been an undercurrent that this city would eventually become the Manhattan of the South and Prince George's County [Maryland] would become the old Harlem. And that's exactly what's happening now. You can see the shift in population, already."
