Showing posts with label nazis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nazis. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The Mask of Wotan

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Jung's influence has been keenly felt among screenwriters, novelists, and 'literati' who often speak of a "character's shadow", one of several "archetypes", a mirror image of what writers call the "higher self".

Related to Jung is the work of Russian folk tale expert, Vladimir Propp, who thought of "archetypes" as "masks" deliberately worn by "characters". Masks are worn in both stories and in life for one of two purposes or both: to reveal and/or to hide.

In most cases a benign public mask is worn to hide facets of the personality with which the character has not yet made peace. It is a mistake, however, to equate "the shadow self" with evil. It is merely the hidden self —the object of one's search for oneself. All "quest" stories are symbolic of this process.

In both Propp and Jung, the idea is to peel away this "social facade", this "mask". The metaphor "peel away”, however; suggests that the process is an easy one but that is rarely the case. Masks are the gestalt of one's various defense mechanisms and unconscious anxieties. "Peeling them away" reveals an "authentic self" that is often difficult to reach and more difficult to confront or deal with. Throughout the 50's existentialists and other "beatniks" talked about getting down to one's "real self". Jung believed that this “real self” was the source of vitality and creativity lurking behind a "neurotic shield" —a mask!

Jung was influenced by numerous mystical religions and Taoism where terms like "inner room", "the great void," the "realm of essence," the source of things", the "Id", the "Creative Unconscious" are common.

The biggest obstacle to objective truth is one's own self image or "mask". We are inclined to believe whatever is consistent with whatever belief system makes us feel good about ourselves. In America, an entire political party espouses what was once called “supply side” economics but now more often referred to as “trickle down” theory.

The theory is discounted by almost every reputable economist upon abundant objective and verifiable data. That this theory continues to be popular suggests that it's appeal does not lie in objective truth. “Trickle down” economics is most surely a convenient rationalization of an increasingly self-absorbed life style catered to by the mass media. Has modern America become a culture premised upon mass denial?

In 1936, Jung was trying to figure out what was happening in Germany —just as many are trying to understand what is happening in America today. Jung wrote an essay called "Wotan" and in it, he tried to understand developments under Hitler, in terms of the mythology of the god Odin, a.k.a. the Germanic god Wotan. Jung wrote: "We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement." I am not sure what "gods" have come to life in America —but I am more inclined to characterize them as fallen demigods, if not demons. Gods or Demons, they are but manifestations of the human personality. There may be a "Wotan" in all of us.

A “mask” is but the smiley face we show the world; it's origin is the lie that we tell ourselves. I recently watched a PBS documentary about a Japanese sergeant who "supervised" British and Australian POW's in Southeast Asia during WWII. Though he had been convicted of war crimes in connection with the treatment of the POW's, the man —some 55 years after the fact —still denied that thousands of POWs had been literally worked and starved to death under his supervision. He denied that he had beaten many of them himself with wire whips.

There is an old saying that the truth will set you free. But here was a man who by his denial had made himself prisoner to the lie —his own lie. In Jungian terms, his life --premised as it was upon the falsehood that he told himself --was "inauthentic".

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist at Nuremberg, came to some conclusions based on his experiences keeping Nazi war criminals alive until final sentencing could be carried out. He said that he had come to understand the nature of "evil". Evil, he said, was an utter lack of empathy. I might add: that empathy with another is only possible if one has come to terms with one's own "shadow", one's own "source of creativity", one's own humanity. One who cannot see humanity in him/herself or in another is a Nazi in spirit; and “Nazism” typifies what Jung would have called the "inauthentic" life, a life lived upon lies and denial. A life lived behind a false mask.

Monday, August 13, 2012

How Citizens United Subverted the Rights of Real People and Created a Fascist State

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

I've often written about the detailed and vivid account of A. Hitler's meeting with top German industrialists --Krupp, Thysen, I.G. Farben et al. It was in that meeting that German fascism was made real in terms of an agreement between the Reich and its 'fascist' sponsors, the huge corporations who would benefit from aggression, death and destruction.
The meeting may not have defined the word 'fascism' but it most certainly birthed a Nazi regime in which corporations were given and promised not only privileges but, most importantly, big juicy contracts.

From a lesser known source is another detailed description of the nature of Hitler's fascist partnership with big business:
"From now on, the government in Berlin will allocate large sums to industrialists so that each can establish a secure post-war foundation in foreign countries. Existing financial reserves in foreign countries must be placed at the disposal of the party in order that a strong German empire can be created after defeat. It is almost immediately required," he continued, "that the large factories in Germany establish small technical offices or research bureaus which will be absolutely independent and have no connection with the factory. The bureaus will receive plans and drawings of new weapons, as well as document which they will need to continue their research. These special offices are to be established in large cities where security is better, although some might be formed in small villages nears sources of hydroelectric power, where these party member can pretend to be studying the development of water resources for benefit of Allied investigators."

--Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile, Paul Manning [PDF]
Some have said that the 'brand' of fascism now emerging in Western democracies, the U.S. in particular, is a completely new phenomenon. I disagree! The odious 'Citizen-United' decision, in which SCOTUS decreed that corporations were 'persons', is an open and odious declaration that a corporation may utilize its wealth, riches and privileges to enslave a population of 'real people' whose humanity is as self-evident as were the principles Thomas Jefferson had declared of 'real' persons in our own 'Declaration of Independence":
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
Earlier, John Adams had written of the same concepts in somewhat different words:
All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
Now, of course, we know that these rights extend to women as well. Surely --even our crooked court must understand that. Even so, the Roberts court cannot be trusted to defend the rights of men or women, or, indeed, the rights of REAL persons of any color, creed or sex. Our court cannot be trusted to uphold the law when it was respected. Nor does it recognize an even older and more venerable position: that governments derive their power, and rights of power from the peole who are ---alone --sovereign!

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Fascist Origins of 'Corporate Personhood'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Many sources support my assertion and emerging thesis: the concept of 'corporate personhood' has Germanic, fascist roots. Herr Schlegel, for example, wrote an essay entitled “Signature of the Age” (Signatur des Zeitalters, 1820). Amid his attacks on British-American "parliamentary government" may be found his Mitt Romney/SCOTUS-like descriptions of a "machine-like", ideal state.

Schlegel describes his ideal with the term "organic" --though it is not! Schlegel also used the term 'Christian' to describe his 'fascist' state. His 'Christian corporations', he said, were 'living wholes' and he described them in terms not unlike that of the corporatist (fascist) philosophy that had been espoused/advocated by Hegel.

Some hard background: in England, ‘the Crown’ has been regarded as a 'legal entity' for centuries. But that is not to say that the 'Crown' IS 'a person'! It simply does not follow that because the 'Crown' may exert power and/or authority it is a 'person'.

Likewise, it simply does not follow that because 'corporations' may enter into contracts that the said 'corporation' is a person. In the case of the 'Crown', for example, it was said that it was both a source of law and the means by which it was enforced! This, it is said, put it above 'laws' --laws which people, real people, are expected to obey. Ergo: the 'state' is, likewise, not a person.

It is said that 'all modern societies' recognize the 'legal existence, as persons, of companies or corporations'! Again --many things may be asserted! It was often asserted that the world was flat; saying so did not make it true.

Corporations do not procreate sexually; corporations do not grow, fart, belch or have babies. Corporations do NONE of the things that define 'real people' either biologically or psychologically. A 'corporation' is nothing less than a paper contract outlining how and possibly when they may interact with 'real people' and with other corporations. NONE of these 'privileges' imply or bestow upon a 'corporation' either a sexual or asexual means by which they may procreate; NONE of these 'privileges' have either the evolutionary power or the 'God-like' power of bestowing upon a mere paper contract the status of 'personhood'.

SCOTUS was wrong and wrong-headed and so are those members of the GOP who bought the scam!

Some have said that a corporation is an 'artificial' person! But a 'real person' is ...uh...a 'real' person! A corporation is not by definition! Black's Law definition is disingenuous. Neither dictionaries nor ill-informed legal decisions can make people out of what are --in fact --mere contracts. Existence precedes 'essence' and it is 'essence' which defines! People are what they are upon birth. Corporations share none of characteristics which define what it means to be a person!

Contracts which, in effect, create a 'corporate entity, differ from other contracts only because they are normally on-file with a Secretary of State somewhere. But that hardly makes of them a 'real person'. They simply outline the legal scope of responsibilities of those party to the contract. See the quote by St. Thomas More who said of them that they were, in fact, '...conspiracies of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth'!

When the Sec of State in Delaware (for example) affixes his SEAL upon the articles of incorporation he has performed in a manner PRECISELY described by St Thomas More in his classic "Utopia". Ergo --corporations are better described as being 'legalized conspiracies' than as 'real people'.
“I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.”

- Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Words fail to describe the depths of lies, propaganda and sophistry indulged by the likes of A. Scalia who --laughingly --believes himself to be 'too smart for the court'!

Most advocates of 'corporate personhood' indulge false analogies because 'false' analogies may be their last redoubt. Clearly --real persons are not so easily defined or summed up having attributes of consciousness and volition that may never be duplicated in unimaginably large super-computers let alone a mere scrap of papers with a seal on it. Simply, 'personhood' cannot be duplicated artificially and most certainly is not duplicated in mere 'legal abstractions' of any kind.

I deny many right-leaning assertions that "modern societies recognise the legal existence as persons of companies or corporations"! If what is said in defense of corporate personhood were true, TRADE UNIONS would, may and should claim 'personhood'. Should they do so, GOP hypocrites would scream bloody murder, foul, no fair!

By simply refusing to tolerate such an outcome, the GOP will have demonstrated its hypocrisy, its disingenuous assertion that corporations are people. Alas --the GOP has historically sought to have it several ways but right.

In the meantime, I urge those who make cars for a living --ORGANIZE AND INCORPORATE!

I urge those who make steel for a living --ORGANIZE AND INCORPORATE!

I urge those who work in any way with respect to the production of oil and/or petroleum related/derived products --ORGANIZE AND INCORPORATE!

In that way, you are guaranteed that you will be treated like REAL PERSONS while, previously, actually BEING a real person would have guaranteed your enslavement to MOLOCH.

ORGANIZE!!!

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Please explain what difference there is between Republicans and Nazis!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

When Ronald Reagan became President, his party declared a 'revolution'. He was hailed by American right-wing “reactionaries” as our armed forces –a so-called volunteer army –became an organization of paid mercenaries characterized by increasingly militarist, corporatist attitudes.
We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists.

--Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial
George W. Bush provided the nation with a political spectacle --a conservative champion assuming office under a cloud. He did not achieve a majority vote, let alone a mandate. Unprecedented in American History, the U.S. Supreme Court executed the Republican strategy: stop a legally mandated recount while Bush is still ahead in the count.

With timely help from the U.S. Supreme Court, the fait accompli became a coup d'etat. Public servants --who had been court-ordered to recount votes –were physically assaulted as 'white shirts' attacked vote counters in Florida. This gang committed numerous counts of assault and battery if not treason. Photographed and identified by the Washington Post, this lawless gang should have been prosecuted but were not and that they were not was a warning that the rule of law would mean less, perhaps nothing to the new regime. Thus was begun a process by which the American GOP would resume an agenda that had been on the table in Nazi Germany.

Under Hitler, 'Jesus' prayers became mandatory in all schools. Abortion was a crime. Homosexuality was criminalized.

--Anonymous
Clearly, the GOP agenda might have been supported by Herr Hitler, were he alive and in the US. Hitler put into practice the current Republican platform. Albert Speer asserted at Nuremberg that the entire Third Reich was premised upon “meaningless platitudes”. And so it is in America where the GOP speaks political babble, a smorgasbord of code words, slogans and utterly 'meaningless platitudes". It was the GOP convention in Houston nominating George H.W. Bush that almost made me puke. A Republican on the convention floor opined: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves!"

BARF!

Hitler had done as much for 'good Germans' many years earlier. Hitler had shown them the way!

Some 60 years after World War II, critics of the right wing agenda are criticized for “thinking logically”. Since 911, millions ridicule 'truth' itself. Anyone daring to advocate a real, fair and exhaustive investigation of 911, for example, is called a 'truther', a 'toofer', a 'troofer'. It does not matter that those using those absurd terms sound retarded; they ARE retarded! But –truth matters. Lies matter. There is, in my view, no legitimate state without truth. If truth does not matter, nothing matters. Those regimes premised and maintained upon lies are illegitimate. The recent Bush regime was illegitimate, the result of illegal force, intimidation, a stolen election.

Thus, despite the ascension of Barack Obama to the White House, the GOP has left in its wake a delusional society on one end, a disillusioned society at the other. The 'United States' itself is now premised upon false beliefs supported and argued fallaciously by ideologues who desire nothing less than the creation of a right wing state in which the environment, education, equality, peace, civil rights and responsibility itself are eschewed and demonized outright. Environmentalists are called 'tree huggers' and obstructionists to progress. Peace activists are called traitors, accused of failure to support the troops. These outcomes are the result of GOP tactics, in fact, NAZI tactics.

In Texas, a right-wing 'lab', education is reserved for the very rich as support for public schools increasingly becomes a low priority. Naturally, as a result, the corporate-owned prisons have swelled to over-flowing with the influx of those who are deliberately robbed of both education and opportunity. The great gains made by the civil rights movement are undone. Poverty, like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is an equal opportunity offender, laying waste to brown, black and white! The GOP are a different type of bigot favoring only the dirty ink green on money!

The Collection of Claptrap that Defines Two Parties

Hitler premised the Third Reich upon a collection of claptrap and muddled-thinking called: “Mein Kampf”. The truth about Hitler is found elsewhere. To The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I would add prosecutor Robert Jackson's summation to the jury at Nuremberg. It may be found in its entirety in Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury by Michael S. Lief, who writes of Jackson's summation:
It is difficult for the mind to come to grips with the Holocaust. The sheer enormity of the crimes is so beyond ordinary human experience that there is no context in which to begin evaluating the defendants' misdeeds, assess blame, and then move on to assign punishment.

--Michael S. Lief

Every crime perpetrated by the Third Reich had it origins in a lie and its corollaries: the belief that Jews and other non-Aryans were subhuman, the belief that Germans were a Master Race!

Efforts to shape a society upon a finite set of “lies” did not end with the Nazi Goetterdamerung. Nuremberg did not inoculate the world against fallacy, error and ordinary bullshit! Today, there is a voluminous encyclopedia of insidious claptrap and fallacy that is paid obeisance to, circulated, and repeated by the Religious Right, the NRA, and a virulent, corporatist right wing that has seized control of the Republican Party.


Taken collectively, these falsehoods, myths, and dogma consist of dangerous economic propaganda, conscious efforts to revise History, deliberate distortions of Constitutional Law, and efforts by powerful lobbies and special interests to coerce, bribe, and unduly influence the Constitutional process for personal and corporate gain. Amid all this, the voice of the individual is lost, shouted down and ignored. And with it –the voice of reason.

So what difference does it make if Republicans--as a class--espouse a pack of malicious lies? So what? Simply, the sane and insane alike act upon what they believe to be true and those actions invariably affect us all. What good can possibly come of an action that is premised upon a lie?

None!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Why People Believe the Official Conspiracy Theory of 911 and Other Weird Crap!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Author Michael Shermer wrote a book that Amazon.com now says is out of print. The title is intriguing: Why People Believe Weird Things. Though Shermer deals with UFO's, allegations that NASA faked the moon landing, and the flat earth, reviewers have said his best chapter was about Holocaust Denial.

More recently and sadly, though, Shermer has ceased to be a skeptic. Last time I checked, Shermer was still touting the weirdest of many 'weird things' --the official conspiracy of 911! It is as if when the numbers nine, one and one are mentioned switches are turned 'off' inside the brains of millions: skeptics become devout followers of officialdom; scientists subscribe to voodoo; hard-nose lawyers forget the meaning of 'probable cause'! These people, and Shermer the one-time skeptic, have this much in common: they are victims of trauma and official blackmail! In a phrase: millions 'believe' the official conspiracy for the same reason Christians believe the scriptures: there is hell to pay if they don't!

The Official Conspiracy Theory is Weird

It is weird and completely unbelievable on its face, unsupported by physics and happenstance. The only explanation is that Shermer fell for it because it was official. Perhaps Shermer succumbed to the blackmail that was put on all of us! Perhaps the official conspiracy theory just made him 'feel good about himself' just as Ronald Reagan's 'economic policies' made Republicans feel good about being greedy, untruthful and self-absorbed. Indeed, it was at the GOP national convention in Houston in the earlly 90s that a Republican was recorded swooning of Reagan: "He made us feel good about ourselves!" But republicans ought never to feel good about themselves. And we have a responsibility to make sure they never do!

A mixed bag, Shermer managed to explore dark psychological reasons that people adhere to claptrap: prejudice. Holocaust Deniers are comparatively easy to spot. David Irving, a British Holocaust denier, sued American professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in a 2000 London trial that made headlines around the world. A reading of the transcript of the court proceedings is clear enough it would seem: Irving was completely discredited.

Irving's long running campaign to exonerate Hitler and the Nazi regime consisted of fabrications, misrepresentations of fact, convenient omissions of evidence, and a consistent and convenient pattern of discounting as liars any eyewitness to any atrocity associated with the Holocaust. I predict that apologists for George W. Bush and the GOP as a whole will continue to wage a similar campaign of lies and propaganda on behalf of the utterly failed and wrong GOP!

Allow me to add a personal note. I have spoken in depth with a survivor of Auschwitz. There is no room to doubt this moving, personal history confirmed as it is by reams of documentary evidence, available independently of my source and in no way influenced by it.

What is conveniently forgotten is that Hitler's theory about Jews was, likewise, 'official'. The conclusion is inescapable: like Hitler's 'theory' re: the Jews of Europe, the official version of 911 is still widely believed because it makes people feel good about being prejudiced against Muslims. It makes people 'feel good' about being ignorant and/or stupid. Like Hitler's racial claptrap and GOP economic crap, the official theory of 911 makes people feel good about being rich and self-absorbed.

'Terrorists' just hate us, it is believed, because we are 'free'. Are we? Are we free when we are lied to? Are we free when we are so easily manipulated into 'believing' a load of clap trap for which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever? Are we free when we are clearly trained not to question authority? Are we free when lies become the basis for foreign and domestic policies? Are we free when as a result of right wing policy just one percent of the U.S. populations owns more than the rest of us combined? No!

We are not free until we accept responsibility for our own beliefs!

There is, for example, absolutely no credible or verifiable evidence to support any part of the official conspiracy theory of 911. It is not my purpose here to repeat the numerous refutations of every part of the official theory. It has been thoroughly refuted and debunked and ridiculed and only idiots have not gotten the message: no part of it is true, no part of it is supported by either fact, logic, or admissible evidence. It is thoroughly refuted.

Most recently the very existence of the alleged flights had been debunked with the government's own data! There is no wreckage traceable to Flights 93 or 77; the government's own data --BTS --indicates that Flights 11 and 77 had been mothballed! There was no wreckage traceable to any airliner found at the Pentagon. No hijackers appeared on the official autopsy report of Pentagon victims --the only official shred of evidence relative to the Pentagon. There were no airline passengers or 'hijackers' buried at Arlington National Cemetery. There is absolutely nothing to support anything said by Bush, the 911 Report or the many media minions who parroted this outrageous and absurd conspiracy theory.

Yet --it is believed but only because it was 'official' and espoused by a sitting 'President'. But it was a 'president' who stole his office. We believed it because we were blackmailed not because it was either true or support by facts. Bush's 'warning' was an overt threat! We were told that 'outrageous conspiracy theories' would not be tolerated! We were told that anyone daring to question the official conspiracy theory was a traitor, was un-American, or, less belligerently, they were just stupid!

It was the common 'argument from authority' fallacy turned into a decree. Anyone daring to question the Bush version of events was called a 'traitor'. Bush himself said: “If you are not with us you are for the terrorists” --a fallacy and a threat! Skepticism was made a crime by decree. This is --in fact --a defining characteristic of the police state.

As the trial of David Irving makes abundantly clear: people are prepared to believe anything that makes them "feel good about themselves," and the illogic that this leads to is not confined to the poorly educated. Consider the following from a distinguished economist, Milton Friedman, who became the "conservative's" intellectual when that movement was desperately in need of one:
The 1980s have been no kinder to the earlier Keynesian models. In the U.S., inflation was brought down drastically, accompanied by a temporary increase in unemployment to a peak of nearly 11 percent—-a short-term reaction to unanticipated disinflation along Phillips curve lines.

--Milton Friedman
Has Friedman forgotten that Reagan's policies were not premised on Keynesian principles? Moreover, Keynesian economics worked just fine for Kennedy and Carter when job and economic growth is clearly documented to have exceeded the same figures under Reagan, Bush and Bush. The truth is that any Democratic president since World War II has presided over greater growth of both GDP and jobs than has any Republican president! There must be a psychological explanation for the fact that millions will look at the documented statistics and refuse to believe them.

The rising unemployment rate throughout the 1980's is a good example. It is similarly documented at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is puzzling to me that an esteemed economist would cite this as evidence refuting the Keynesian model. That job creation fell and unemployment rose during the Reagan years does not indict Keynes--but Friedman.

Reagan's policies were not based upon the Keynesian model; they were based rather on Friedman himself and Arthur Laffer of "trickle down" fame. It was Laffer who, legend has it, drew a curve on a napkin and called it 'economics'. It was, rather, a convenient but plausible rationalization for the GOPs desire to enrich its base with tax cuts, a payoff for their support. It was not only the nation's tax revenues which paid them --it was the jobs and futures of everyone else not benefiting.

In fact, unemployment began to rise almost immediately upon Reagan's tax cut--not a "Keynesian" expenditure aimed at stimulating the economy but, rather, a "Laffer-curve tax-cut" premised upon the discredited notion that by cutting taxes for the upper classes, the wealth would "trickle down." It never has but GOP-types would feel good about it! It was intended to make GOP-types feel good about being greedy and dishonest with themselves. Friedman's passage glosses over the realities of that period:
  • First, Laffer's supply-side ideas are premised upon the idea that tax revenues at various tax rates may be graphed as a "curve." At some point on that curve, a lower tax rate may actually increase tax revenues. The problem with that is simply this: no one knows what that point is. The curve--on paper--is theoretical and depends on how you draw the curve. What, in fact, happened is that Reagan ran up huge deficits and tripled the national debt by budgeting monies that the theoretical curve had predicted but which never materialized. I hardly call this "conservative." The Bush budget has done the same thing.
  • Secondly, Laffer's tax curve was cited to justify supply-side economics--a goose that never laid the golden egg. It laid an 'egg' but only in the 'Vaudeville/Show biz' sense of the temr. It was Reagan and the supply-siders who laid an egg and it was not golden. As with the projected increased tax revenues, the new jobs that were to be the mechanism by which wealth would trickle down just did not happen. Rather --the reverse! Jobs declined and Reagan's administration is forever associated with a depression of some two years.
  • Finally, even if the tax base had increased, it does not follow from that wealth would in any way be redistributed downward; the public record clearly shows that it did not. One does not need an MBA or a PhD in economics in order to understand Census Bureau Statistics which clearly indicate that throughout the Reagan years, the upper 20 percent of income earners grew richer by a yearly average of some 20% while the lower 20 percent lost wealth at a similar rate. Friedman makes absolutely no mention of any of those facts in his paper on John Maynard Keynes. Several issues not addressed by Laffer's curve include how much wealth trickled, to whom, how, and when? The questions are moot, however. Nothing trickled down.
It is not merely that Friedman cites the 80's as an indictment of the wrong economists; it is his off-hand characterization as "temporary" the unemployment rate of some 11 percent that he calls a peak. Unemployment was high throughout the Reagan administration as was homelessness. In fact, half of the total number of jobs created under Reagan were in the public sector. Otherwise, his record--poor compared to any Democratic president and especially those who practiced Keynesian economics--would have been even worse. Finally, I submit to Mr. Friedman that a diminishing inflation rate is of similarly diminishing interest to someone who doesn't have a job.

How are we to account for the fact that Republicans still adhere to a policy that even a cursory reading of real world stats thoroughly discredits? Shermer posits that false beliefs are based on prejudice, but that just puts a label on it; it does not explain prejudice itself. More to the point, I think, is a common refrain heard among preppies throughout the Reagan years: He (Reagan) made us feel good about ourselves. The same could have been said of Hitler who is indicted by his own words: "Against the Jews I fought open-eyed and in view of the whole world...I made it plain that they, this parasitic vermin in Europe, will be finally exterminated."

Thanks to Herr Hitler, millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, psychopaths, i.e. Nazis and/or right wingers! Thanks to Ronald Reagan millions began to 'feel better' about being bigots, self-absorbed elites, and psychopaths! Under Hitler, millions felt felt better about themselves because they could blame Jews for their miserable, desperate lives in pre-war Germany. Under Reagan, millions felt better about living in suburbs that destroy the spirit of urban life, deplete the inner cities of revenues and consign all but the very, very rich to poor and declining schools and educational opportunities. Reagan made them feel good! He jerked off the right wing and screwed everyone else!

Bush and Perry have more recently jerked-off Texas. Millions of Texans clearly feel good enough about their state that they re-elected Bush Jr's successor --Rick Perry. Millions of Texans got hooked on the jerks who jerked them. As a result, Texas now trails the nation in high school graduations even as corporate owned prisons swell to over-flowing! But millions in Texas feel good about it! The corporate prisons are located where their presence is not obvious. The rich can pretend they don't exist. Likewise, the ultra-posh neighborhoods where the increasingly rich elite are housed are hidden away among pines, behind the moats, behind the security guards' little houses, behind the walls, the trees, and, symbolically, the 'bushes'. Under Bush/Perry, they could escape responsibility for the hell-hole Texas has become. They could escape a real world. They need never see it and Texas need never see them!

Hitler told the German people, in effect, you no longer have to be responsible for your own idiocy, your own prejudices! That message was repeated by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush and the entire GOP. In fact, there are no excuses for believing a lie and no reason to believe that good will come of it. It was Jacob Bronowski, a logical positivist, a scientist, a philosopher, who said: 'Behave in such a way that what is true may be verified to be so!” It was Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist, who said: "A man is nothing else but what he makes of himself!" It was Bertolt Brecht who said: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" And it was a fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, who said: "you cannot expect another man to carry your shit!" He was right and in my opinion all of us have carried the GOP/right wing shit for too long now! Enough is enough!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Terminator 'Soaks the Poor'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The terminator has terminated futures for some 1.3 million citizens with sweeping budget cuts that affect only the poor. The terminator's cuts eliminate CalWorks, the state's welfare program. Some 1.3 million --one million of which are children who will be left to fend for themselves with little choice but to turn to crime.

The rest will be unemployed, cut off, some left to starve or turn to crime. Is this what the GOP has mind? Is this an opportunistic move to fill up the corporate-owned prison, like those in Texas, in which every child that is left behind? Is this a deliberate move to provide 'corporate-persons' with slave labor because the 'state' has refused to support education?

This is slavery --pure and simple, a crime against humanity! Nothing in the old south was nearly so horrible.

The 'terminator' will have made California the only state not 'to offer a welfare-to-work program for low-income families with children.' The Neo-Nazi terminator will terminate a program which provided families with but an average $500 a month but which required that they find jobs. By terminating the program, the terminator has opted for the short-term profit and certain longer term disaster which the GOP always leaves to succeeding generations, a long term disaster from which only the GOP benefits now and in the future.
Proposing a budget that would eliminate the state's welfare-to-work program and most child care for the poor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday outlined a stark vision of a California that would sharply limit aid to some of its poorest and neediest citizens.
His $83.4-billion plan would also freeze funding for local schools, further cut state workers' pay and take away 60% of state money for local mental health programs. State parks and higher education are among the few areas the governor's proposal would spare.

The proposal, which would not raise taxes, also relies on $3.4 billion in help from Washington — roughly half of what the governor sought earlier this year — to help close a budget gap now estimated at $19.1 billion. Billions more would be saved through accounting moves and fund shifts.

"California no longer has low-hanging fruits," said Schwarzenegger at an afternoon news conference in Sacramento. "I now have no choice but to … call for elimination of some very important programs."

--May 15, 2010|By Shane Goldmacher, Los Angeles Times,Schwarzenegger's budget is a blow to the poor!
Even fascist Texas has a better record. Fact is --Karl Marx was absolutely correct: 1) labor creates wealth i.e. 'value'. Every major economist from A. Smith to Ricardo knows this. The GOP knows this as well but will lie to you about it; 2) there are but two main classes --the productive class which does the work and the leisure leeches --GOP --who put their money offshore resulting in a 'contraction' which, in fact, causes recessions and depressions. All U.S. depression/recessions have occurred during the GOP regimes --a tradition dating back to Herbert Hoover, who was preceded by a string of incompetent, big business shills to include Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

That is why the U.S. is at the very bottom of the CIA's own 'World Fact Book' with the world's largest Negative Current Account Balance'; CHINA, with whom the Sr Bush cut a deal, is on top with the world's largest positive 'Current Account Balance', previously referred to as the 'balance of trade' deficit. The GOP looted the U.S. on behalf of its clients: the U.S. ruling elite of just one percent of the total population and the People's Republic of China who dumps its cheap product on U.S. shores via Wal-Mart, their fascist, cheap labor representatives.

I've been yelling about 'trickle down' crap since 1980 But people (if you can call them 'people') will believe it because it '...makes us (GOP) good about ourselves!' That line was overhead on the floor of the GOP 'National Convention' in 1992. Some 90 percent of GOP propaganda is most surely designed to make these liars and psychopaths feel good about themselves. It's how the GOP recruits from among psychopaths who literally need to be told the lies about which an entire 'party' is built.

As Reagan's Budget Director --David Stockman --admitted 'supply side' theory is a 'trojan horse' which seems in retrospect deliberately designed to create an exploitable 'poor' class. The terminator will fill up the corporate owned prisons with millions which he must surely know will fall off the ladder and, thus, become vulnerable to the corporate/state machine! There is no 'invisible hand' which makes one class extremely wealthy and many more extremely poor and much more numerous. It's done by policy and design.

Those falling off the first rung will become the GOP's source of slave labor. This is a crime against humanity.

The terminator may have learned from the Texas 'model' of fascism. Texas has not occupied a position of prominence with regard to petroleum production since it was discovered that bombing Iraq and killing civilians was not only cheaper it was in itself profitable. Just ask Dick Cheney how profitable both Halliburton and Blackwater are! The GOP has learned that warehousing slaves in corporate-owned prisons is much cheaper than expensive secondary recovery methods by which the liars of 'big oil' squeezed a few more gallons out of abandoned oil fields in West Texas. Why spend millions exploring for oil when you can just bomb hell out of civilians in the Middle East, steal the oil from productive oil fields? The cost of bombing the crap out of the oil's rightful owners?? The corporations don't care. They have stuck the U.S. tax payer with the tab!

So-called 'free enterprise' robs millions of children of a decent education and as many poor of justice in a state ruled by the oil elites.
  • Texas --Bush style --provides the residents of Texas with some of the nation's very worst crime and incarceration rates;
  • Texas subjects the residents of Texas to deteriorating air quality and wanton ecosystem destruction;
  • Texas can boast of the the nation's very worst murder, crime and incarceration rates!
  • Texas --a state that now leads the nation in pollution, crime, and illiteracy --should be studied by any other state wishing to avoid a similar disastrous fate.
The rise of Texas' crime is concurrent with the rise of the Texas GOP. It is no accident that fascist policies now dominate the political and cultural life and environment of Texas and in turn spawns crime, creates the conditions in which it is nurtured and survives.
Still, most people are now ashamed to admit that punishment is based on vengeance and, for that reason, various excuses and apologies have been offered for the cruelty that goes with it. Some of the more humane, or “squeamish,” who still believe in punishment, contend that the object of this infliction is the reformation of the victim. This, of course, cannot be urged of the death penalty or even punishment for life, or for very long-term sentences. In these cases there is neither inducement to reform nor any object in the reformation. No matter how thorough the reform, the prisoner never goes back to society, or he returns after there is no longer a chance for him to be of use to the world or to enjoy life.

--Clarence Darrow, Crime: It's Cause and Treatment
By ensuring that millions will fall off the ladder, the terminator has guaranteed the corporate prisons a seemingly endless supply of slave labor. Down with the GOP! Down with slavery! Down with the 'Terminator'. Down with lies and 'supply side bullshit'.

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Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Is the GOP a Nazi Party?

dby Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It was James Whitcomb Riley, a Hoosier, not a Texan, who is credited with having said: "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." A thing or a party is what it does. This simple epistemological principles applies to everything from sub-atomic particles to mega-galaxies on the very edge of the universe and everything in between to include 'political parties'.

Merely putting a name on something does not explain it. Putting the label 'Nazi' on the US GOP does not explain either GOPPS or Nazis; it just helps us sort them out. I am sick of 'labels' and sick of the way labels have subverted American thought processes and debased the quality of debate and discourse. Labeling is passive. Meaningful sentences consist of subjects, ACTIVE verbs and, often, direct objects which are affected by some action that is taken. It is not enough for me to discount a politcian because they 'are' Republican. If I am to make my case, I must allege an 'action' --a GOP action --that has had, in fact, a harmful result. Indeed, it is the panoply of harmful actions that define this 'duck', this web-footed, forked tongued GOP!

The wake of WWII left many declaring that it must never happen again. If 'it' was to be prevented, however, it was clear that 'it' must be explained. The origins of WWII, however, could not be understood without first understanding a 'Nazi' mentality that provided it fertile soil and nurtured its growing roots. The Nazi weed grows and is cultivated in the US by bigots, authoritarians, and corporatists i.e, fascists.

At war's end, the victorious allies had in their custody the 'super-stars' of Hitler's Third Reich and imprisoned them at Nuremberg. Some believed that they should have been summarily executed. Others advocated trial for crimes against the peace and humanity. This is the legacy of Nuremberg: it left us what I hope is the lasting framework against which future crimes may be prosecuted. I have in mind the crimes perpetrated by the US against the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the peoples in those nations.

War criminals are where you find them. In the US, there were war hawks in both major parties, eager to avenge 911 and strike a blow against 'terrorism'. This is simplistic thinking. Terrorism is so vague as to be meaningless, certainly any act against US interests 'not liked' by the US or the specific interests affected. What if the 'interest' itself is illegal --the theft of Iraqi oil, for example. What about acts of terrorism perped by the US? Will the US govt root itself out and bring itself to justice? Don't hold your breath. The US govt has been, of late, fucked up!

'Revenge' is similarly problematic. 911 did not, does not and cannot justify the US invasion of either Afghanistan or Iraq for numerous reasons not the least of which is this: no one had been able to pin the 'rap' on Al Qaeda. Does al Qaeda exist? Could it possibly have pulled off 911? George W. Bush boasted of having killed alleged al Qaeda members though there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Afghanistan had anything whatsoever to do with crime of 911.

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

--George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2003
I believe that this statement speaks to George W. Bush's guilt of war crimes that were defined and prosecuted by the US and its allies at Nuremberg. I believe that Bush should be cross examined with regard to this statement. It should be put to Bush: what --specifically --was that fate? Are we saying that the US rounded up Afghanis en masse and subjected them to summary executions? Who ordered these summary executions? Were the executions sanctioned by the President?

If so --then the President and those carrying out the murders should be charged and, when found guilty, they should be hanged!

How to Know a Nazi When You Find One

Nazis are where you find them. In pre-war Germany, they were found in the party which gave them their name. In the US, latter day Nazis will be found in abundance in the GOP and even among the Democratic right wing. Nazis are what Nazis do!
Ritzler and his colleagues saw a socially distant, intellectually pretentious person lacking depth of character...this psychological profiled belonged to a simple man. They speculated that he attained his success by being a good organization man, doing what he was told to do and not making waves. ...no one suggested a person from academia, the clergy or the arts.

...

the experience of learning the subject's identity has been unforgettable. the psychological protocol belonged to Adolf Eichmann!

The Quest for the Nazi Personality
As he was tried, Eichmann was portrayed in the media as a 'depraved killer responsible for the deaths of millions'. And so he was but only because he was a bureaucrat, a 'Republican', an 'organization man', a man whose truth was the party line and modus operandi. The very face of 'evil' as it was glimpsed by Dr. Gilbert and, later, Hanah Arendt, turned out to be the banal face of a bureaucrat.

Nazis may not have issued membership cards and a subscription to a newsletter! They were defined, however, by a psychological characteristic perhaps first described by Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist who 'interviewed' Nazis imprisoned at Nuremberg. It was Gilbert who defined the Nazi mentality by its 'utter lack of empathy', a trait that has been identified in the contemporary US GOP. See John Dean's 'Conservatives Without Conscience'.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Brecht: Truth as Weapon

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy/Bertolt Brecht excerpts

Huge corporations and foreign nations take a proprietary interest in the government of the United States because they own it. They bought it at the on-going auction called 'K-street' where is sold to the highest bidders the services of Congress, the White House and even the US Supreme Court.

Our capital is a whore house.

Those intrepid bloggers, progressives, activists who oppose this new Leviathan are understandably frustrated by the impressive 'arsenal' that is summoned against us. Nevertheless, we have among our weapons, the most powerful and it is one that the PR flacks and spin-doctors will never have access to. It is --simply --the truth. Against a multitude of lies, spin, distractions and bullshit, the truth must always triumph. It may be our only weapon. But it is the most powerful.

Below the ruled line follows an except from Bertolt Brecht's essential essay on 'truth'. Readers of the Existentialist Cowboy have often read my quote of Brecht:
A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!
Following --Bertolt Brecht:
The truth must be spoken with a view to the results it will produce in the sphere of action. As a specimen of a truth from which no results, or the wrong ones, follow, we can cite the widespread view that bad conditions prevail in a number of countries as a result of barbarism. In this view, Fascism is a wave of barbarism which has descended upon some countries with the elemental force of a natural phenomenon. According to this view, Fascism is a new, third power beside (and above) capitalism and socialism; not only the socialist movement but capitalism as well might have survived without the intervention of Fascism. And so on. This is, of course, a Fascist claim; to accede to it is a capitulation to Fascism.

Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? What will be the practical results of such truth?

Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties

Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.

Outcries against barbarous measures may be effective as long as the listeners believe that such measures are out of the question in their own countries. Certain countries are still able to maintain their property relations by methods that appear less violent than those used in other countries.

Democracy still serves in these countries to achieve the results for which violence is needed in others, namely, to guarantee private ownership of the means of production. The private monopoly of factories, mines, and land creates barbarous conditions everywhere, but in some places these conditions do not so forcibly strike the eye. Barbarism strikes the eye only when it happens that monopoly can be protected only by open violence.

Some countries, which do not yet find it necessary to defend their barbarous monopolies by dispensing with the formal guarantees of a constitutional state, as well as with such amenities as art, philosophy, and literature, are particularly eager to listen to visitors who abuse their native lands because those amenities are denied there. They gladly listen because they hope to derive from what they hear advantages in future wars. Shall we say that they have recognized the truth who, for example, loudly demand an unrelenting struggle against Germany “because that country is now the true home of Evil in our day, the partner of hell, the abode of the Antichrist”? We should rather say that these are foolish and dangerous people. For the conclusion to be drawn from this nonsense is that since poison gas and bombs do not pick out the guilty, Germany must be exterminated—the whole country and all its people.

The man who does not know the truth expresses himself in lofty, general, and imprecise terms. He shouts about “the” German, he complains about Evil in general, and whoever hears him cannot make out what to do. Shall he decide not to be a German? Will hell vanish if he himself is good? The silly talk about the barbarism that comes out of barbarism is also of this kind. The source of barbarism is barbarism, and it is combated by culture, which comes from education. All this is put in general terms; it is not meant to be a guide to action and is in reality addressed to no one.

Such vague descriptions point to only a few links in the chain of causes. Their obscurantism conceals the real forces making for disaster. If light be thrown on the matter it promptly appears that disasters are caused by certain men. For we live in a time when the fate of man is determined by men.

Fascism is not a natural disaster which can be understood simply in terms of “human nature.” But even when we are dealing with natural catastrophes, there are ways to portray them which are worthy of human beings because they appeal to man’s fighting spirit. After a great earthquake that destroyed Yokohama, many American magazines published photographs showing a heap of ruins. The captions read: STEEL STOOD. And, to be sure, though one might see only ruins at first glance, the eye swiftly discerned, after noting the caption, that a few tall buildings had remained standing. Among the multitudinous descriptions that can be given of an earthquake, those drawn up by construction engineers concerning the shifts in the ground, the force of stresses, the best developed, etc., are of the greatest importance, for they lead to future construction which will withstand earthquakes.

If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth. He must show that these disasters are launched by the possessing classes to control the vast numbers of workers who do not own the means of production. If one wishes successfully to write the truth about evil conditions, one must write it so that its avertible causes can be identified. If the preventable causes can be identified, the evil conditions can be fought

--Bertolt Brecht, The Skill to Manipulate the Truth as a Weapon
It is easy enough to identify the lies told by Bush Jr, but cloaked by passing time and various revisions of history it is more difficult to learn the truth about previous regimes, primarily Ronald Reagan whose bankruptcy of the US was --literally --papered over with new debt and old propaganda. Paul Craig Roberts, who should know a thing or two about the Reagan years, must surely understand that the US economy has been a magician's illusion at least since the Reagan years.
Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.

The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.

As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.

The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.

When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy is a Lie, Too


Thursday, August 13, 2009

GOP STILL Plans to Steal Your Social Security

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The ascension (apotheosis?) of every GOP 'President' is inevitably accompanied by much GOP salivating over the prospects of getting their greedy, crooked mitts on your Social Security. Thus it was just over eight years ago when George W. Bush assumed (and I do mean 'assumed') the highest office in the land. Rest assured, despite the financial implosions of late, the GOP still plots to rob you blind, screw you silly and leave you a worthless slug on the night stand!

The GOP licked its greedy chops as the stupidest man, the grossest idiot since Warren Harding raised his hand and dared to swear on a holy book! The same gang of mendacious robber barons who made fortunes short-selling stocks on 911, profited from mass murder, and, later, plunged this nation into a new 'Great Depression' saw in the rise of George W. Bush another opportunity to steal your Social Security and buy Baltic Avenue with it!

Unlike GOP's 'trickle down' theory --pie in the sky but only if you are already very, very wealthy --Social Security did precisely what it was intended to do! It lived up to its billing, perhaps exceeded it! It is endangered not because it failed but because it succeeded! It is targeted now because the upper one percent of the population which owns more that about 95 percent of the rest of us combined is eager to seize control of ALL of the nation's wealth. Keep in mind --these are the arrogant bankers and snot nosed whiz kids who short sold stocks on 911!
Social Security is the bright spot. It has maybe some mild financial problems, several decades out, and here we are—he [Bush] wants a crisis there, partly to distract from the very real crises in other places, and there you go.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman, can you explain how Social Security works? Because it’s not just President Bush. If he was raising questions about it with a little megaphone on the steps of the White House, it would not have the kind of effect it was having without all of the media, it seems, amplifying the idea that Social Security is broken. It’s bankrupt.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. And of course, that’s really a question about the media, not about Social Security. Social Security is a program which has been traditionally run. It looks like a retirement fund, and it is not exactly. What it really is is a government program with a dedicated tax. We take the payroll tax and it’s used to pay benefits to retirees. And 20-plus years ago, the commission led by Alan Greenspan said, you know, we are going to have this problem as the baby boomers reach retirement age. We will have a higher ratio of retirees to workers, and we better get ready for it. Social Security, the payroll tax was increased. There were some other things, a small rise in the retirement age set in motion. So that Social Security would run a surplus, which would be used to accumulate a trust fund, and this would tithe us over, some ways into the aging of the population. And that on its own accounting is working just fine. I mean, one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses.

--Paul Krugman, Economist, Published Comments on Democxracy Now
It was not sufficient that GOP policies had enriched only the very, very rich. As a result, just one percent of the nation now owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined! But the greedy bastards wanted to own all of it! They wanted your retirement! They wanted the monies you paid into Social Security over the course of your lifetime! Joe the Plumber recently called Social Security a joke --not because he understands why it is coveted by the GOP. He is merely the recipient of the 'memo'. Stealing your Social Security is still very high on the GOPs list of great things it wants to fuck up permanently! We should take Joe and Palin seriously. The world is endangered by its idiots.

Joe the Plumber may be the GOP 'plug in' du jour! They act in consort like the Borg. They are set up in 'cells' like the 'terrorists' they would have us believe they hate so much. The GOP is not loyal to the principles of our founding; GOP attack dogs attack 'liberals', progressives, and the just plain ornery folk--like ME! And for all the wrong reasons! Because of this 'backward thinking', these misplaced values and priorities we keep losing unwinnable wars of naked aggression, wars that should never have begun in the first place. Because of it, we are now financially and morally bankrupt! Now --the GOP wants a bailout: YOUR Social Security!

Now --what if the GOP had succeeded already? Simply --the Social Security trust fund would be collapsed and millions of seniors would be lucky to find a place to set up a tent!

Let's put the GOP's fraudulent scheme to steal Social Security into perspective.

Social Security routinely runs a surplus, call it a profit if you will! It is this 'surplus' that is coveted by Wall Street! They want to plunder your monies as Bush plunder the taxes you pay every year as a good citizen! The GOP and Wall Street barons want to 'speculate' with the only retirement that millions will ever have! They want to enrich themselves on the interest and/or returns! Do you really think these greedy, latter-day Gordan Gecko's have your interests at heart? Not a frickin' chance!

During George W. Bush's first term I wrote and posted the following on NPR's infamous 'How's Bush Doing' board:
The crisis in 2015 -2018 won't be Social Security! It will be, rather, the utter bankruptcy of the United States and the profligate, incompetent policies of George Bush!
Now --if you are under 20 and still believe yourself immortal, my remarks will mean little to you. But here they are: knowing what we now now about the crookedness, the utter incompetence of an administration that I believe betrayed the people and their Constitution, aren't you glad we did NOT entrust those bastards with farming out the only retirement that millions might ever see to the greedy, shallow, mendacious liars that run Wall Street with their fascist buddies in DC?

You Give Me Real Money and I Will Give You a Worthless Piece of Paper!

It was said at the time that the Wall Street experts would actually turn a profit on YOUR money. Oh! I get it! I give you my money and you give me a worthless piece of paper! Uh Huh! I would have liked to write that time and events proved me correct but, in fact, the crash happened even sooner than I expected or predicted. Anyway --aren't you glad Bush did not steal your money?

It was said that the experts on Wall Street could 'invest' your monies. Sure! So can I Send me a check? I have lots of places I could put YOUR money! Fact is, you don't need no steenkin experts! Everyone can set up private accounts while you still have a job, that is before the GOP economy crashed and burned. My advice at the time was:
...you can still have Social Security to fall back on should GOP policies utterly destroy the stock market.

Keep in mind that I wrote that italicized sentence in 2003. I saw what the GOP had in mind and what has, in fact, come to pass. Given the global financial debacle, what logical rationale is there for incurring an additional debt of some 4.5 trillion dollars? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the truly elite (just one percent of the US population) are currently picking up the bargains and lickin' their greedy chops. They are as we write feasting upon the carcasses!

The Cure'll Kill Ya!

Right wing assaults on Social Security are of the 'stealth' kind, advertised as efforts to 'save' Social Security! As we would say in Texas: "Wah hale! The cure'll kill ya''! The assumption that the GOP wants to save Social Security or the retirement of this nation's elderly in ANY form is naive. As much was admitted by smarmy Dick Armey who admitted to Wall Street Week that he had been trying to abolish Social Security for the last thirty years.

There are several things wrong with "Privatization" in other words "corporatization":
  • Why 'corporatize Social Security when it is, in fact, working just fine as it is'? If I should want a 'provate account' what is preventing me from doing so? When millions have recently lost every penny in 'private accounts', what --please tell me --is the attraction they hold? What raison d'etre exists but to further enrich the cronies on Wall Street?
  • All government need do to fix Social Security is to rescind the profligate tax cuts since Ronald Reagan, tax cuts which failed to create a single new job, failed to increase tax revenues, failed to increase capital expenditures and expansions as promised by "supply side" bullshit!
  • "Privatization", in fact, 'corporatization', is just GOPSPEAK for you give me real money which will enrich ONLY Wall Street insiders and I will give you a worthless piece of paper!
  • Besides --Social Security may very well be the only government program that is currently turning a "profit"!
There is NO crisis!

Social Security was an easy target of conservative demagogues. (I know --that's redundant) Slimy ilk like Rush Limbaugh are not merely liars, they attack reason itself, the very processes by which fact and truth are determined. Latter day "conservatives" think differently and, therefore, arrive at false conclusions for the wrong reasons. Listening to Limbaugh, one is tempted to believe that "two" versions of the human brain have evolved. But take heart --when "God" passed out brains, "we" got the version that works. Limbaugh and his adoring ilk got the one that will be recalled, version 13.666!

Those who would make a bargain with Satan will have to live --and die --with a really, really bad deal!

During the so-called "Republican Revolution", when the GOP staged a budget stand-off with Clinton, it was clear that this new breed of so-called "conservatives", in truth, subversive radicals, viewed the long practiced art of compromise as synonymous with defeat. Their inflexibility backfired! Clinton won, leading to the eventual and much deserved disgrace and downfall of Newt Gringrich. Would that he had taken the GOP with him into hell!Someone forgot to place a convenient revolver on his nightstand! But Newt would not have done the right thing.

Rush and his ilk have popularized fallacy, celebrated anti-intellectualism, and sought to make it 'cool' to be stupid! Limbaugh wallows in sloppy thinking and appeals to our most ignoble motives. He personifies demagoguery, oozes duplicity! He is smarm itself. Hearing Limbaugh, one does one's best to suppress the urge to puke or walk on all-fours!
Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.

--Werner Herzog
Herzog has not yet looked into the eyes of a gopper, more terrifying than chickens! It may sound oxymoronic to speak of 'intelligent conservatives', neither intelligent nor truly conservative. Real conservatives would never have tolerated the astronomical deficits run up by Mssrs Reagan and Bush Jr. There must surely be some conservatives still smart enough to understand that the demagogic demonization of 'liberals, liberals' leads inexorably to a one-party, fascist, totalitarian state. Therefore, we must conclude that that is, in fact, the hidden agenda. They only pretend to be stupid and, admittedly, they do a good job of it.

Conservatives prefer a one party, fascist state in which the office of President is replaced with 'Der Fuhrer'! Will they be so enthusiastic 'when the last law [is] was down' and Der Fuhrer turns 'round on them? A fanatic GOP 'fuhrer' need only cite Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes who said "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify the round up, encampment and wholesale disposal of people they don't like!

Save the children

Throughout the conservative movement and the ranks of Limbaugh's mis-informed minions there is an appalling ignorance of history that betrays this nation's utter failure to educate its young. Texas is the best example and most notable. Under Bush Jr and his successor, Rick Perry, Texas now beats out Mississippi for DEAD LAST in 'high school graduations'.



Find the Cockroach

Failing to graduate high school is a guarantee that you will lead a life of poverty or crime or both! It is not coincidental that Texas --thanks to the GOP --is called the 'gulag state of Texas for the growth of its corporate run prison system, in truth a fascist gulag that is paid handsomely from the public trough to warehouse the millions of children who were --in fact --left behind to starve, fail and be warehoused by the fascists in Texas. To save these children, I urge that Texas be invaded and occupied until a responsible and competent government can lock up the current fascist regime and restore the 'rule of law' there.

There is an outrageous lack of outrage about this corporate take-over and occupation of Texas. What can be said of a population so addled, misinformed, uniformed and soporific that it doesn't even notice when it has been screwed without so much as a tip on the table? Does anyone in Texas care that their state has been stolen and is now run by Nazis? Clue for Texans: the corporate fat cats in skyscrapers in New York and Houston do not give a shit about you nor Hank Williams nor Larry Gatlin! You've been had! Wake the fuck up!

The American psychologist tasked with preventing Nazi war criminals from offing themselves before they could be duly hanged, said that "evil" was the utter lack of empathy! You find precisely that throughout the GOP rank and file --Rush Limbaugh's adoring throng. These 'people' defended torture and and state-sponsored murder at Abu Ghraib! They are short-sighted. They will not understand that if anyone can be victimized by unrestrained state power, so too, can they! No one is safe as long as a fascist holds so much as the office of dog catcher!

Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

People have an unrealistic idea of "evil"! Apparently, evil is a cartoon caricature --gleaming eyes, horns, pitchfork, snarls, drooling, and incantations to Satan, Bush Jr, or the Skull and Bones. No! Evil is Reinhard Heydrich conducting a gourmet luncheon meeting of Reich bureaucrats about how best to make legal the mass murder of European jews! Evil is Dick Cheney having a meeting with this 'Energy Task Force' and carving up the oil fields of Iraq before Bush's 911 would give them the pretext to invade! On both occasions, I believe, a quite civilized lunch and coffee were served amid veddy, veddy witty conversation! As Hannah Arendt said, evil is banal!

Had Heydrich and his Nazis succeeded, they would have gloated, patted each other on the back! What jolly good fellows they all were! They would have shared a few brews and toasted the 'Final Solution'. Heil Mein Fuhrer! They might have sang: Deutschland Uber Alles, The Nazi National Anthem or Tomorrow Belongs to Me! They were, after all, just good ol' boys ridding the world of 'vermin'. Or --they were all just good ol' boys hoping to get the terrorists from between them and 'all that oil!"

The GOP celebration of shortsighted, pyrrhic victories will in the longer term destroy America if it has not does so already. Certainly --the America that I knew is already destroyed. The Bill of Rights means very little even now with Obama's victory. I have yet to hear a resounding denunciation from this administration with regard to Bush's assault upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. America without the Bill of Rights is nothing! Without the Bill of Rights, the US is just another huge, unfeeling, corporate dominated bureaucracy!

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it!

--Georges Santayana, American Philosopher
We are, thus, condemned! Humankind has been at war since our evolution beyond the "hunter/gatherer" stage. Since someone decided that the land upon which he grew a crop was his, war has been incessant. Because "winners" procreate, the "war" gene is reinforced over generations. That explains why history repeats itself and 'facts' mean very little or nothing at all! DNA will trump reason and facts every time. Those most enthralled by inherited and irrational war mongering are of the same demographic segment who would discount evolution on religious or superstitious grounds.

The 'conservative' hostility towards intellectuals is blind to obvious parallels with other fascist states past and present.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

--H. L. Mencken
And Voltaire said:
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities!

--Voltaire

Voltaire's statement is not just a well-phrased aphorism chosen because it sounds 'literary'. It could be stated as a mathematical formula when 'atrocities' are actually counted and made a 'statistic', when popular myths and/or outright lies and falsehoods are identified and correlated demographically! Think of it! With such a formula, an enlightened state could identify those states and territories most likely to nurture a state-sponsored mass murder, a state sponsored torture, a state sponsored war of naked aggression as we have most recently witnessed by the United States of America. My country! May God help us all!

At last, I recommend one read Voltaire. When Voltaire learned of Catholic atrocities in Toulouse, he literally papered Europe with his polemics --so outraged was he! Voltaire was no effete 'scholoar'. Today, he would be a kick ass blogger, an activist, a gonzo, counter-culture journalist like Hunter Thompson, or, more likely, an acerbic latter-day H. L. Mencken pooh-poohing fundies down in Dayton! He would be a thorn in the GOP's sorry hide. He would skewer the liars on K-Street and Wall Street! He would laugh at the devil himself and wither him with a phrase!

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Assassinations, White House Child Prostitution, Cover-ups, and Terrorism

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Democrats might have been in a position to oppose Bush along a broad front. But 911 and targeted Anthrax attacks changed everything. Just as the FBI put a lid on Bush Sr's alleged involvement in a White House child prostitution ring circa 1990, the government itself most certainly denied the truth of 911 to the American people circa 2001. Suspicious deaths like these are far outside the normal distribution curves; suspicious deaths of establishment critics are statistically high. It is the picture of a world in which Democrats and liberals would be smart never to board a plane.

The Anthrax attacks had the desired result: it shut up the Democratic opposition, most notably, Nancy Pelosi who had once called Bush a 'dangerous man'. Impeachment was off the table. One wonders what improbable series of GOP coincidences are required before Americans will --at last --conclude that something very, very rotten, evil and corrupt has been loosed in America. A short essay cannot possibly document every suspicious detail, every suspension of physics, logic, or common sense. Nevertheless, a broad outline paints a vivid picture. And every picture tells a story. The story can be summed up thus: the cancerous growth of something rotten in America, a growth that paces the rise of the GOP.

911 divided the world up according the GOP ideology --patriots vs terrorists. 911 was so convenient as to be unbelievable! I still don't believe the official story and less now than when the event was fresh. The official version is even more unbelievable now as more is known about how Bush personally ordered evidence destroyed and inquiries quashed with veiled threats of GOP-sponsored terror. Were key Democrats afraid of being involved in a mysterious but highly coincidental plane crash, a plane crash that defies the normal distribution curve, the very laws of statistics and probability? It's the only hypothesis that explains what it otherwise inexplicable!

As many in government are overly eager now to put the Anthrax attacks behind them, it is clear that a genie may be out of the bottle. It's time to let it all hang out. It's time to conduct a real, open and accountable independent investigation into the suspicious, untimely deaths of Sen. Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, and numerous others who --we are expected to believe --just happened to get on board an ill-fated plane just before a key vote could be cast, an incriminating fact revealed, or an investigation (911 specifically) begun!

It is, of course, too late for this administration to retrieve any credibility. Because this administration is utterly without credibility on every issue from Iraq to Anthrax to 911, an investigation into the convenient death of Paul Wellstone must begin now!

The late Senator's death was no surprise. Indeed, on May 25, 2001 VoxFux predicted that 'a Senator' would die in a aircraft accident.
Within months, one of a selected group of democratic Senators, likely from a state with a Republican Governor, will meet an untimely death. The death will appear to be either a plane “accident” or by “natural causes,” - Whichever is most easily accomplished. The reality will in fact be that the Senator was one of a group of several Senators (Narrowed down into a group of “Selects”) targeted for assassination and was the one who was in the right place at the right time for the most convenient and clean "hit.”

You will see, within in the coming months, for absolutely certainty, the untimely death of at least one Democratic Senator, to "re balance the scale". The private covert intelligence groups behind George Bush Sr. are extraordinarily well funded with petrochemical billions. They are deadly, work completely autonomously, in a terrorist formation identical to a terrorist organization, and are absolutely religiously dedicated to accomplishing their objectives. They will not rest until the Senate is under the control once again of the darkest force ever to seize control of the American Empire - The clandestine industrial / military / intelligence triad who is currently represented by George Bush Jr.

--Democratic Senator to be Assassinated Soon, Assassination teams actively preparing hit
Wellstone opposed the Bush administration's 'War Resolution'. Is this motive for murder? That is best answered with another question: when it is clear that Saddam Hussein neither had WMD nor anything to do with 911, were the rich oil fields of Iraq motive for a war of aggression that has most certainly claimed over one million innocent lives?
If Wellstone's plane was sabotaged, it wouldn't be the first time that a political figure met his end in the friendly skies. A plane carrying Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung's hand-picked successor, Lin Biao, crashed under mysterious circumstances en route to Moscow during 1971. The Chinese later claimed that Lin was defecting to the Soviet Union after a botched coup attempt against Mao; guilty or not, most historians believe that his plane was probably sabotaged. On March 3, 2001, a phosphorus bomb blew up a Thai Airways Boeing 737-400 minutes before the country's new prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was set to board the jet.

Many American politicians--mostly Democrats and liberal Republicans--have died in aviation disasters. Senator John Tower (R-TX) Senator John Heinz (D-PA), Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX); Ron Brown and Mel Carnahan are among those who have been killed in airplanes since 1989. "Elected officials expose themselves every day to these kinds of risks as they travel across their states or districts," Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) commented, noting the perils of frequently using small aircraft.

Anyone who has traveled on what is euphemistically called "civil aviation" can tell horror stories about sudden drops, lurches and violent thunderstorms. But it's also true that security at the regional airports and small terminals at major airports used for such flights--Wellstone flew out of St. Paul--is more easily penetrable than that at JFK and LAX. It would hardly be impossible to sabotage a plane chartered for an inconvenient politician.

Wherefore the Black Box?

According to aviation consultant Robert Breiling, the plane that carried Senator Wellstone--the King Air A-100 "business turboprop," also known as a Beech King Air--is remarkably safe, with 25 percent fewer fatal accidents than other planes in its class. Warren Morningstar, spokesman for the Airline Owners and Pilots Association, says: "It's a great airplane."

So why did Wellstone's go down? Weather is the lead suspect. Freezing temperatures, which can be severe in Minnesota, came early this year. "This airplane would typically be equipped with de-ice equipment but there are icing conditions that are beyond the measure of any equipment to remove," Morningstar notes.

Local pilots, however, doubt that ice was a problem. "There was little ice. It was normal. We see it all the time," said Don Sipola, a flight instructor with 25 years experience.

"Black boxes"--a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder--are often crucial for discovering the cause of airplane crashes. According to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Paul Takemoto, the plane was required to be equipped with both. Contradicting the FAA, Carol Carmody, acting chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board which is investigating the site of the crash, says that the plane apparently carried neither. Were the black boxes lost or were they never aboard? Someone may know, but thus far no one's saying.

--Ted Rall, Assassination by Aviation
Paul Wellstone was the only progressive in the US Senate. Mother Jones magazine once described him as, "The first 1960s radical elected to the US senate." He was also the last. Since defeating incumbent Republican Rudy Boschowitz 12 years ago in a grassroots upset, Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration.

In a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party, who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year.

...

Wellstone now joins the ranks of other American politicians who died in small plane crashes. Another recent victim was Missouri's former Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft, despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush. Investigators determined that Carnahan's plane went down due to "poor visibility."

Carnahan was the second Missouri politician to die in a small plane crash. The first was Democratic Representative Jerry Litton, whose plane crashed the night he won the Democratic nomination for senate in 1976. His Republican opponent ultimately captured the seat from his successor in November.

While an article in the New York Times on Saturday pointed out the danger politicians face due to their heavy air travel schedules, the death of a senator or member of Congress is still relatively rare, with only one other sitting US Senator, liberal Republican John Heinz, dying in a plane crash since World War II. Heinz, who entered office as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, later emerged as a strong proponent of health care, social services, public transportation and the environment. He also urged reconciliation with Cuba. He died when the landing gear on his small plane failed to function, and a helicopter dispatched to survey the problem crashed into his plane.

One former senator, John Tower, also died in a small plane crash. Tower was best known as the chair of the Tower Commission, which investigated the Reagan/Bush era Iran/Contra scandal.

Another member of a prominent government commission who died in a small plane crash was former Democratic representative and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. Boggs was best known as one of the seven members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone when he killed the president. Boggs, it turns out, had "strong doubts" that Oswald acted alone, but went along with the commission findings. Later, in 1971 and 1972, he went public with his doubts. He was presumed dead after the small plane carrying him and Democratic Representative Nicholas Begich disappeared in 1972.

--Was Paul Wellstone Murdered, Alternet
Other prominent officials meeting untimely deaths in small plane crashes include Texas Democratic Representative Mickey Leland and Clinton administration Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown. Leland had been a six-term member of Congress, outspoken advocate of sanctions against the apartheid government in South Africa. He was traveling to Ethiopia when he was killed. Brown's plane went down in the Balkans.

Another suspicious case is that of Gen. Torrijos Herrera, the so-called dictator of Panama. The motive may have been his defiance of Ronald Reagan. Torrijos had 'thumbed his nose at the Reagan/Bush regime and threatened to close the Panama Canal. Like many another fatal flight, the Torrijos flight exploded in flight, disappearing from radar. In common with many another death, the flight took place in severe weather, the plane had dropped off radar.

The Torrijos death was most certainly politically motivated. In a pre-trial hearing in Miami, in 1991, Manuel Noriega's attorney, Frank Rubino, was quoted saying: "General Noriega has in his possession documents showing attempts to assassinate General Noriega and Mr. Torrijos by agencies of the United States."

Mel Carnahan was not the only politician from Missouri to meet an untimely end. Jerry Litton was running for the Senate when he and his family were 'plane crashed in August of 1976 enroute to a victory celebration in Kansas City.

In 1978, Dick Obershain had just won Virginia from John Warner. He was 'plane crashed'near Richmond, VA. Who benefited? John Warner who now heads the Senate Armed Service Committee.

In 1980, John Lennon, who had written poignantly of a world free of religious and political ideology, was shot to death by Mark David Chapman. Chapman was improbably connected with/to John Hinckley Sr, the father of the man, accused of shooting Ronald Reagan. Hinckley Sr was president of World Vision, a right wing evangelical association which had employed Lennon's killer --Mark David Chapman. Ominously Hinckley's organization is deeply connected to the CIA and has helped 'the company' in numerous 'projects'. Hinckley's largest contributor is none other than the US Department of State. I smell a rat, murder, and right wing subversion! [See: MarkWhite.com]

Among the numerous assassinations and strange deaths that have come to characterize American politics, the case of Gary Caradori --a retired state police investigator --is among the most weird and hints at the negative, evil, Satanic underbelly of American political culture. The Nebraska Senate had hired Caradori to investigate a "homosexual prostitution ring" that appeared to be operating right out of the White House. The Washington Times broke the story, reporting “...a homosexual prostitution ring is under investigation by federal and District authorities and includes among its clients key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, military officers, congressional aides and US and foreign businessmen with close ties to Washington’s political elite.”

Perhaps because Gary Caradori is no longer with us, the names of the Bush and Reagan officials involved in this queer ring, said to have also involved child pornography or even worse, will probably never be known. There were recent echoes of this scandal. Recall Jeff Gannon, Bush's gay boy who often posed as a reporter when he was not posing naked for folk like George W. Bush or other perverted, GOP fiends. His cover was blown when his nude photos were publicly circulated.

Before he was murdered, Caradori had been investigating Lawrence E. King Jr., an influential black Republican, a close friend of George H. W. Bush! A director of the Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha, King was suspected of embezzling $40 million. It was during this investigation that the subject of child prostitution came up. The Nebraska Senate found itself questioning child prostitutes who accused King of running a child prostitution ring. One of them reported seeing George H. W. Bush at one of King's 'parties'.

It was then that Schmidt was warned to drop his investigation amid fears that it would reach the highest levels of the GOP. Indeed, various international news organizations reported that the "scandal implicated not only Bush Sr but politicians 'close to the White House'. It was the kiss of death. Gary Caradori and his six year old son were killed as passengers in a small plane that exploded in mid-air. The cause was never discovered. Cardori had told friends that he was afraid that his plane would be sabotaged. It probably was.

Immediately after his death, the FBI seized and sealed all his papers. Watch the Discovery Channel video Conspiracy Of Silence

Additional resources:

Published Articles


Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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