Sunday, September 21, 2008

What McCain, Palin Have in Common with The Third Reich

Albert Speer is credited with having said that Nazi Germany was built upon empty, meaningless platitudes. The same can be said of every GOP 'reign of terror' --be it Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or, more, recently George W. Bush. It is can said, as well, of the McCain-Palin campaign --the triumph of vacuity over substance, idiocy over intellect, greed over good, and cruelty over caring.

The rule of law means nothing to the GOP but that matters little to goppers. GOP demagogues have even less to offer. As a Reagan devotee swooned at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston: "Ronald Reagan made us feel good about ourselves".
During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly.

--Naomi Klein, Free market ideology is far from finished
During booms and bubbles everyone is an advocate of the 'free market', the 'invisible hand', 'laissez-faire' capitalism. When the bubbles burst, the first in line for a government hand-out are the very architects of disaster. They will get the bail-out, the hand out, the free ride! They always do! And they will get it from the same hypocrites who have derided the working classes and the poor for daring to ask for an even break!

The very term 'free market' is intended to deceive you. Markets were never free but, rather, skewed, like Casino rules, to favor the 'house', in this case --the big investors and the big lenders, brokers and insurers who cater to them. When regulations are introduced, it is only when they are favored by the 'insiders', the big money that literally controls every financial market.

As Bush conspires with the GOP financial base to bail out the money barons, Americans have already picked up the tab with their jobs, their homes, their educations, their futures.
RENO, Nev. - A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared — people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" — an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

--MSNBC, homeless advocates report rise in encampments
Times have not been so bad since the regime of another stupid, vapid, platitudinous GOP regime -- that of Ronald Reagan.

Double-digit inflation had been all but defeated by the time, the recession of 1982 sent millions of Americans to tent city. But that fact has not kept the GOP from trying to blame Carter for a recession that showed no signs of life until the effects of the Reagan tax cut --benefiting only the upper quintile. Blaming Carter for a recession that began in Reagan's second year is an absurd stretch. The GOP will always blame its critics and its victims.

Within 108 days of his taking office, Reagan had passed a budget remembered for its so-called 'supply-side tax cuts' --the most evil and pernicious of all GOP slogans and platitudes.

The tax cuts were to be phased in over three years at ten percent per year. David Stockman later blamed a 'noisy faction of Republicans' for the tax cuts though he is credited with having produced a computer simulation that proved the 'supply side model' would result in a 5 percent growth in 1982. It didn't happen. Instead, the nation was plunged into the worst 'depression' since the great depression of Herbert Hoover, another 'free market, cheap labor Republican'.

Reagan was not content to let the 'tax cuts' carry the banner of 'free market capitalism' alone. The administration 'slashed and burned' existing federal regulations, unleashing upon the world a free market Frankenstein of their own creation.

With growth at a NEGATIVE 2.2 percent, 1982 was the worst year since Hoover's 'Great Depression' of 1929.

The GOP still blames Carter --though Carter was not President and 'double-digit' inflation had already been controlled before Reagan's tax cut was effected. Check out the timeline:
Inflation (1)

1979 11.3%
1980 13.5
1981 10.3
1982 6.2
1983 3.2

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U (1982-84=100)

Omitted from GOP fairy tales is the fact that Carter is among the four Democratic Presidents whose performances are best since World War II.

The polls are closer than they should be. No rational person should be supporting the GOP, given its disastrous records since the Great Depression. The GOP should never get more than about thirty percent of the vote, the percentage of every population estimated by Carl Jung to be certifiably psychopathic.

The support now enjoyed by McCain-Palin --the most absurd ticket in American history --is, therefore, completely irrational.
Yet even with the influx of millions of former conservative Democrats, the Republican Party -- particularly following Watergate -- seemed in disarray and entirely out of touch with the nation's direction: rapidly evolving progress in the fields of education, arts and sciences, civil rights, women's rights, environmental concerns, workplace safety, industrial and corporate regulations, and much more.

But then a strange combination of events turned things around for the conservatives. The tumultuous 60s, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the continuing and seemingly never-ending Cold War, a misfiring economy, the rapid expansion and politicizing of evangelical Christian sects, combined with uninspired leadership at all levels of government culminated in a national crisis of confidence in the mid and late '70s. Democrat Jimmy Carter, certainly one of the most decent human beings to occupy the White House, inherited this malaise, but was unable to turn it around on the basis of his administration's philosophies: honesty, openness, rationality, and long-term planning.

By 1980 the voters had grown impatient with Carter, and turned their hopes, dreams and trust over to a Hollywood B-movie actor. Ronald Reagan had not even taken office before he betrayed that trust. But he got away with it, and he would set the stage for a hostile takeover of American government by the nastiest, most ruthless political animals the nation has ever known: the conservatives.

--Conservative Myths
In the meantime --becuase the GOP it completely out of touch with reality, millions of voices are repressed with the GOP police state, an ultimate instance of 'blame the victim'.


The Fascist GOP Police State Demands Your Obeisance

That there are ANY 'red' states defies logic, common-sense and 'self-interest'. The dwindling support now enjoyed by the McCain/Palin ticket is completely irrational and insane. No one should be a candidate for VP UNLESS they are also qualified to be President. Would any sane person make the case that Sarah Palin is qualified to be PRESIDENT?? As I wrote earlier, Sarah Palin put McCain's age back on the table. Now -- if you believe that being able to see Russia from a front porch makes one an expert on foreign affairs, then I would suggest you consider the fact that getting help is the only patriotic thing left you. Your vote will only harm the nation!


3 comments:

SadButTrue said...

What we have here is nothing more or less than a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the über-wealthy - from an administration that has made that transfer job#1 since its inauguration, from a party that has been obsessing on that transfer since Reagan. With this latest 'bailout' of the wealthy on the backs of everybody else they completely lose whatever shred of credibiltiy they ever had. As Glenn Greenwald said yesterday, " If there is any "pitchfork moment" -- an episode that understandably would send people into the streets in mass outrage -- it would be this. "

Obviously the election shouldn't even be close. It seems as though the American public are lining up to see the wrong movie.

http://thumbsnap.com/v/6a8WjiFM.jpg

SadButTrue said...

Don't know why that Glenn Greenwald link didn't work. Here, try this: G. Greenwald on the Wall $treet Bailout

Unknown said...

Thanks for the Greenwald link...another MUST read.

Certainly --the 'elites' will come out of all this enriched. That is the very raison d'etre of the GOP.