Duo Of Destruction

Fresh off creating the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, and contemplating a Repb takeover of the House, Representative Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota on July 22 told a gathering of the GOP Youth Convention in Washington, D.C.

Oh, I think that’s all we should do. I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership because the American people’s patience is about this big.

This is no idle wish from the hard-right Republican. Representative Darrel Issa of California is now ranking Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and probably would become chairman if his party wins a majority of seats in the House in November. Politico reports he

has told Republican leadership that if he becomes chairman, he wants to roughly double his staff from 40 to between 70 and 80. And he is not subtle about what that means for President Barack Obama.

At a recent speech to Pennsylvania Republicans here, he boasted about what would happen if the GOP wins 39 seats, and he gets the power to subpoena.

“That will make all the difference in the world,” he told 400 applauding party members during a dinner at the chocolate-themed Hershey Lodge. “I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing.”

While Issa is more likely than Bachmann to wield the gavel (and subpoena power) that would threaten to paralyze the Obama administration in the second half of its term, it appears their motives are similar. The Californian assured his audience "I won't use it to have corporate america live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything." Bachmann is no less subtle, telling the conventioneers

So we have to make sure that we do what the people want us to do because one thing that you should is that the most dramatic story that’s happened in the last 18 months is that the federal government – before 18 months ago, the private economy was 100 percent held in private hands,” she said. “But today 65 percent of the economy is now held in government’s hands – either in direct ownership or in control we’re talking about. So we got to unravel that and we got to get the private sector back to being private and the government back to being government.”

The near-destruction of the American economy by Wall Street wasn't quite enough for these Republicans, for whom the corporate domination of the nation is still insufficient. It's anyone's guess as to where she gets her figure of 65 percent of the economy now being in "government's hands." Perhaps she and Issa are unaware that

In 1995, the assets of the six largest banks were equivalent to 17 percent of G.D.P.; now they amount to 63 percent of G.D.P. Meanwhile, the share of all banking industry assets held by the top 10 banks rose to 58 percent last year, from 44 percent in 2000 and 24 percent in 1990.

But then, they probably do know of this growing concentration of power in the hands of a relatively few, unelected, individuals. And their verdict is: not enough.

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