FORGET LIMBAUGH! Work to Restore The Fairness Doctrine/Communications Act of 1934

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

FORGET LIMBAUGH Limbaugh is just a symptom. He's the ugly pimple that refuses 'off-the-shelf' remedies. It's time to drain the boil, pop the pimple. The REMEDY --the only remedy that will work and had worked until the election of Ronald Reagan. That is --RESTORE THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE.

The Fairness Doctrine dates to the Communications Act of 1934. The 'Act' limited the concentration of media into very few hands. Radio and TV station owners were required to provide equal time to opposing views. Individual broadcasters who operated electronic equipment or were required to monitor a 'transmitter' were required to have an engineer's licences. An expert in electronics could obtain a 'First Class' license which allowed those having the certification to repair and/or maintain radio or TV transmitters. The Communications Act also prohibited the concentration of outlets in very few hands.

To be sure, there were nut jobs exploiting the air waves but they were opposed while Limbaugh is all but unopposed but for his vigilant critics on the internet. Otherwise --he is un-accountable, irresponsible. He is obnoxious and contemptuous to any and all who oppose him. He is a megalomaniac to be sure but --worse --he is a product and symptom of GOP disease, a disease the symptoms of which include intolerance, bigotry and psychopathic behavior.

In other words, the GOP would repeal the First Amendment by decree if given opportunity and power. The Remedy: ORGANIZE block-by-block, house-by-house, precinct by precinct, district by district to RESTORE THE COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934 with amendments to include cable and satellite. Demand the rights that were DENIED to you by Ronald Reagan and the GOP.

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The GOP's 'Blame Game' Exposed

"There is a collective responsibility in an authoritarian regime."

--Albert Speer, testinony at Nuremberg War Crimes Trials

I am fed up with the right wing blame game! And you should be as well. The U.S. right wing has more scapegoats than A. Hitler's wet dreams! Jean-Paul Sartre said:

"A man is nothing else but what he makes of himself!"

And it was Bertolt Brecht who summed up right wing crookery:

"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!"

The GOP has made of themselves CROOKS and MORONS and MORON CROOKS. Conan Doyle provided some bullet-proof logic:

"When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however implausible, MUST be the truth!"

--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Doyle has never been more relevant. The GOP is defined by the utter BS that they espouse. That would be bad enough but, in fact, they expect you to buy into their ideology, propaganda, nonsense. The GOP is often threatening but that's typical of their psychopathic ilk. Don't buy it.

The only option is that people must think for themselves and demand proof of the lies and mythology that makes up the GOP's 'alternate reality'. The best and most obvious examples are the many ways in which the party favors the ruling elite and helps to enrich them even further. The most egregious example is 'supply-side' economics, often called 'trickle down theory'. It's all ---or worse! Wealth has never, ever 'trickled down' (at any speed or manner) as a result of GOP tax cuts which are designed to enrich those already filthy rich, those already amogn the RULING ONE PERCENT. This tiny (and shrinking) segment of the population owns more than the rest of us combined. GOP 'economics' creates a very, very steep curve.

Think for yourself. GOP ideology with respect to the economy is most easilly debunked with OFFICIAL STATS from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U. S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Commerce Dept -B.E.A. among many university and various 'think tank' studies. The GOP is dead wrong about almost EVERYTHING. Secondly, don't buy GOP platitudes that simply cannot be proven one way or the other. That's a Nazi tactic that was exposed by Hitler's confidant: Herr Albert Speer.

Food for though; wealth has never, ever trickled down nor has GOP policiy ever enriched or benefited any person who is NOT among the very wealthiest people in America if not the world. If you are not a billionaire, you are nuts to vote GOP.

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The Price We Paid for the GOP's Free Lunch with Ruling Elites

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I am in a cranky mood!

C'mon Obama! Take the gloves off! Obama did not mention several issues that may be found in his own ads. Why not hit Romney with the infamous '47 percent'? Obama could have beaten Romney with his own words. Obama could have held Romney to his his own failed 'standard'.

Obama might have, could have disproved the utter and often meaningless crap that passes for speech these days. Obama might have hit Romney on the issue of the many jobs Romney cut at Bain. Will Democrats never learn this lesson: put the GOP on the ropes or let them hang themselves with GOP absurdities, lies and significant omissions?

Whomever really 'won' the first debate no longer matters. The issue is about the effect it's had on Romney's billionaire buddies who are now prepared to BUY the office for a moron and co-conspirator.
Romney is reported to be collecting money from his millionaire donors "hand over fist". Unless Democrats reach down deep, the race could turn around and elect an UN-ABASHED SHILL for the ruling elites. Latest polls put Romney within one point in Florida (47-46) and just two in Virginia (48-46s).

It would not be this close but for the money factor. Until that issue is addressed, Americans must live under an oligarchy at best, a dictatorship of the 1 percent at the very worst.

While the GOP, kowtowing to the desires of the ruling 1 percent of its creation, poses a clear and present danger to the rule of law, the rights enumerated in our Bill of Rights, the rights of everyone who must, of necessity, work for a living, the rights of those would dissent and protest the right wing destruction of the values of our founding.

The rights of those who wish to work honestly for their living are likewise threatened by the documentable export of jobs during every GOP administration, the export of jobs that are, in fact, the RESULT of GOP policies. And --no --assertions that there are no differences between the parties is (politely) uninformed; and less politely, it's stupid. Democrats who stay at home believing Obama is at fault might as well wait in vain for a Messiah to come again or a Klaato to beam down out of a space craft. Rather than waiting for a 'bailout', I urge Democrats and/or progressives to assume some responsibility and, at the very least, show some initiative.

This is, in a nutshell, the core problem facing liberals. Those who wish to become activists need to direct their energies to dismantling the corporate special interest system and restoring greater equality of income.

--Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass

If the GOP did not invent the sellout, this ongoing auction of the U.S. to the ruling elites, they might as well have. This 'sellout' has enslaved U.S. citizens and, at the same time expects them to pick up the tab for their military adventures on behalf of the obscenely wealthy.

In the meantime, the American people are brainwashed by big media. That's by design. Why do you suppose the Reagan administration worked tirelessly to abolish, perhaps erase the memory of the FAIRNESS DOCTRINE?

Why do you suppose that the ownership of media is concentrated in the hands of some five or six huge conglomerates? Was this decreed by God? Is this the result of 'natural selection', good genes, or is it a product of the Big Bang. No --it was the planned result of the Reagan attack on the Fairness Doctrine specifically and, in general, every provision of the Communications Act of 1934.
The internet has proven NOT to have been effective in countering the well-oiled, well-heeled right wing money and propaganda MACHINES.

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Tell Rick Perry that there was NO 'Texas Miracle'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

As a fourth generation Texan, a descendant of Texas pioneers, I deny a favorite myth among the GOP inclined. There was no 'Texas Miracle' --a term cooked up in a GOP focus group, fly-by-night political consultants (perhaps from Chicago). Fact is --not only has education dropped off the radar, Texas has run out of oil that can be pumped profitably; real jobs are as scarce as hen's teeth.

Frankly, I am surprised to learn that --as economist Paul Krugman points out -- in June 2011 the Texas unemployment rate was ONLY 8.2 percent. I had expected that it would have been higher. About that, economist Paul Krugman asks: "...what does population growth have to do with job growth?" Krugman is right to ask! The point is made as only Krugman can make it! Indeed, if the 'Texas Miracle' had been real, Texas should not be boasting of unemployment rates as high as 8.2 percent.

But I am disappointed that Krugman has not mentioned the BUSH-PERRY scam about which I have screamed bloody murder! I believe that unemployment figures for TX would be much, much higher if those millions left behind by Bush-Perry neglect/subversion of public education were showing up in the stats. But --they are not! They are not showing up because those "left behind" are finding the only long-term employment that is available to them in the corporate-owned prisons, what I call the Bush-Perry Gulag!

This is not the result of GOP incompetence. It is, rather, the result of deliberate GOP crookery at the party-leadership level. This is the result of the GOP's deliberate neglect of education. It is one of several reasons the GOP is not a poltiical party; it is a crime syndicate, a kooky cult!

The only pockets lined by GOP largesse (pork) are the pockets of an increasingly tiny ruling elite now just 1 percent of the total US population. Official stats prove my assertions; those numbers can be found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Commerce Dept-B.E.A. Be prepared to see proof that the GOP, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry et al are lying, distorting the effects of every GOP tax cut in U.S. history.

In each case, the cuts --enriching only the upper, upper classes and the corporate owners of prisons --are followed by recessions, depressions. ERGO: GOP tax cuts do not and have never stimulated the economy, have never created a single job! In fact, job growth has either declined or gone negative (net job loss) after every GOP tax cut. In fact, every recession/depression since 1900 has been the result of either GOP incompetence or crookedness or both.

It is for this reason primarily that BUSH-PERRY neglected education. A state that will not educate new generations deserves to pay for the privilege of neglect with much higher crime rates. But even that is not the point ---the point is that the GOP and the CORPORATE OWNED PRISONS benefit from the whole package: 1) LOWER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATIONS 2) HIGHER CRIME RATES 3) HIGHER PROFITS FOR CORPORATE-OWNED PRISONS. It's the GOP formula.

Given what we know about the GOP record in Texas, we should not be surprised to learn that a failed governor from a 'gulag' state, a failed governor with more hair than brains, an inarticulate governor challenged to spell 'ed-joo-ka-shun' should wish to occupy the White House, a 'perch' from which he might prey upon the future of an entire nation and the futures of all the people who live in it.

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.

--Paul Krugman, The Texas Unmiracle

There was NO 'Texas Miracle'!

Unless you consider the rise of the prison system to be a 'miracle'! I don't! Nor am I impressed with pimples on the much larger curve. I grew up with the boom and bust 'oil industry' and consider it an utterly failed strategy akin to playing Blackjack or Roulette in the expection of, one day, hitting a jackpot! I cannot count the number of 'busts' that I witnessed growing up. And from each 'bust' only the very, very rich benefited. In any case, when it is deemed more profitable to attack and invade another Middle Eastern country, temporary 'bubbles' will always burst. But crime --as a result of the GOP/right wing sabotage of education --will ensure that the corporate run prisons are full. What a racket!!

GOP policy is anti-education! It was the evil axis of Bush-Perry that made of Texas the GULAG STATE!

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It's Time for Rush Limbaugh to Go!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Free speech is not free! It is paid for with responsibility! Rush Limbaugh, however, has made a career of "...yelling fire in a crowded theater" when, in fact, there is NO fire! Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s decision re: Eugene Debs means that Rush has routinely exceeded the limits of free speech. But the Holmes decision was fallaciously applied to Debs; Rush, by contrast, is defined by shrill cries of 'fire' when --in fact --there is no fire!

We might tolerate Rush if the Fairness Doctrine were restored. His opponents would at least be heard. They are sure to be more intelligent, articulate and even entertaining; the nation would be better for it!

How long would Rush last if he had to compete in truly free market, if he were compelled by law to be responsible as I was compelled as a working broadcast journalist in major U.S. markets? I was expected to be responsible and professional; but Rush lives down to lower expectations, lower standards. He is expected, even encouraged to be irresponsible, outrageous, dishonest and boorish!

We might tolerate Rush had he ever made a good faith effort to inform his audiences with respect to real issues as opposed to his constant demoguoguery, his fussilade of lies and ad hominem attacks, propaganda, strawmen, distortions, outright lies and --most egregiously --bigotry and/or racial slurs most notably those about black athletes and, specifically, the great quarterback Warren Moon et al.

If an intelligent man like Eugene Debs --whose only crime was that of exercising his conscience i.e, opposing the U.S. entry into WWI --could be imprisoned, then Rush, who has exhorted treason and bigotry in response to phony threats and strawmen, should be held responsible for having abused 'privileges' that the rest of us had --at one time --enjoyed responsibly as 'rights'. Why is Rush given 'license' when, in fct, the rest of us are DENIED the benefits of 'free speech' by having been denied access to what had publically owned airwaves. Rush is prescisely what the GOP had in minded when, under Ronald Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine and the Communications Act of 1934 were rescinded, media 'de-regulated', a GOP code-word for consoidating the ownership of media into very few and very corporate hands.

Debs was courageous and smart --a man of integrity! Rush is slimy and stupid --a charlatan! Debs spoke truth to power! Rush misleads the poor and gullible for profit! He is a corporate kiss-up, a coward, a stooge who peddles propaganda for profit! Debs accepted responsibility for what he had made of himself and was prepared to accept the consequences. Rush is a coward who blames all on 'niggers', poor people and 'liberals, LIBERALS, LIBERALS!!!

“When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. we will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.”

--Eugene Debs, American Activist

It is time for Rush Limbaugh to GO!

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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:

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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

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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.

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--Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy is a Lie, Too

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Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It was not so long ago that GOP Senators Chuck Hegal and Richard Lugar described the Bush administration as "incompetent"! And they were being polite. CONSERVATIVE commentator George Will referred to the Bush administration as "...the gang that couldn't shoot straight!" In Iraq, Bush's "puppet" Allawi said of WMD: "...they must be somewhere!"

WMD are where you find them! But that's not to say that WMD were ever in Iraq! It does not follow that because something is not 'here', it must be 'there'! It does not follow that because something is 'not' then something else 'is'.

The Bush regime was as utterly incompetent as it was evil. Otherwise, Dick Cheney, who supervised 911, would have just ordered his minions to 'plant' WMD in the areas his 'task force' had already targeted for theft! In retrospect, the Bush regime turns out to have been half-assed crooks, half-assed murderers, half-assed liars, a ludicrous gang that couldn't shoot straight.

It might have been Kant who said that there is a moral imperative to be intelligent. By that standard, the GOP grows more evil as it grows more stupid!

The cure that kills!

The GOP under Bush was determined to stay the course if it killed us. It killed many of us --those 'left behind' by Texas' 'dead last' educational system and millions more for whom murdering Iraqis and stealing oil was, perhaps, their career path of last resort!

It was Ronald Reagan who put a smiley face on "psychosis", i.e. the indulgence of delusion as long as it makes you feel good or, at least, better about yourself. Reagan did this for millions who returned his utterly failed administration to office. Thus, the GOP perfected the 'big lie' with research and focus groups. There was simply no way to get a GOPPER elected on fact or reason. Insanity became and remains the campaign strategy of choice for a party that could not, cannot think straight, a party that is either delusional or is dishonest and just pretends to be insane as a cover!

Wealth would trickle down, Dr Feelgood (Ronald Reagan) assured us, if we would but help him make the privileged elite even richer. Wealth didn't trickle down and never has ...but millions swooned as the aging actor made them feel better about themselves [GOP Convention, 1992, Houston]. The effect was as short-lived as are many 'feel good' remedies and sex toys. Come to think of it --every GOP administration is a circle jerk of old cronies, limited intelligences and the morally bankrupt.

'Let them eat cake and live in houses'

Ronald Reagan told us that those made homeless and forced to live in tent cities were "mentally ill". It was the middle class that had been made homeless during those Reagan nightmare years and while Carter occupied the White House, they had lived in houses. I suppose that as long as they were in a house, they were considered by the GOP to be sane. If you don't have a house, the GOP thinks you are nuts!

Official government statistics [Bureau of Labor Statistics, BEA, Census Bureau] prove that job creation and GDP were higher during the Carter years than in any GOP regime since WWII. As they would say in Texas: the GOP 'cain't carry Carter's shit!' Carter is --therefore --a GOP whipping boy not because he failed but because he succeeded.

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents8

Johnson   3.8%
Carter    3.1
Clinton   2.4
Kennedy   2.3
Nixon     2.3
Reagan    2.1
Bush      0.6

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics Survey

It must be pointed out that under Clinton, the recently insane went sane again and moved back into houses! The GOP never figured it out! I was surprised when the GOP failed to lambast the Democrats for the dramatic drop in tent sales during the Clinton years.

GOP thought processes are scrambled. GOP logic works backward from conclusions to premises. The late Barbara Olson said that Gary Condit was guilty of murder not because there was evidence against him but because there was none.

Similarly, it was during the 2000 election debacle that Robert Novak said Democrats were 'trying to steal this election by counting votes!' Antonin Scalia would not be outdone. He said that continuing the recount would be harmful to Bush! Indeed! Bush would have lost!

Scalia did not know when to shut the flock up, adding:

Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.

--Antonin Scalia, U. S. Supreme Court Justice

'Scuse me!

Anyone getting the fewer number of votes is supposed to lose. Scalia was just puking up something that sounded 'scholarly' but, in fact, meant: stop the count while Bush is still ahead!!

Bush v Gore majority opinions are pure bunkum, lousy law, worse legal scholarship. The BEST critique of Bush v Gore is found in the dissenting opinions, primarily Ruth Bader Ginsberg who laid bare Scalia's idiocy and hypocrisy.

I might join THE CHIEF JUSTICE were it my commission to interpret Florida law. But disagreement with the Florida court's interpretation of its own State' s law does not warrant the conclusion that the justices of that court have legislated. There is no cause here to believe that the dissenting members of Florida' s high court have done less than ''their mortal best to discharge their oath of office,'' Sumner v. Mata, 449 U. S. 539, 549 (1981), and no cause to upset their reasoned interpretation of Florida law.

JUSTICE GINSBURG, with whom JUSTICE STEVENS joins, and with whom JUSTICE SOUTER and JUSTICE BREYER join as to Part I, dissenting. [emphasis mine, EC]

GOP brains should be dissected, studied, diagnosed and then quarantined! Scalia's condition should be written up by someone like Carl Jung who estimated that as much as thirty percent of any population is certifiably psychopathic and/or delusional. The GOP, meanwhile, consulted swamis or anyone who could justify ex post facto the conclusions already drawn, the results desired but not really ever achieved.

Scalia displays psychopathic symptoms which Dr. Gustav Gilbert identified among the Nazi war criminals he studied at Nuremberg.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently claimed that the Constitution does not prohibit the execution of an innocent man provided that he has had a fair trial. While this is astonishing enough coming from a man who holds himself out as a Catholic -- even more astonishing is how Justice Scalia substitutes his personal religious beliefs for the law and the Constitution.

This extraordinary tale of what we might call substitutionalism, begins with the case of Troy Davis who was sentenced to death by the State of Georgia in 1991 for the murder of a police officer. Davis has always maintained his innocence and sought a new new trial. "Seven key witnesses have since recanted," according to an editorial in The New York Times, "and several people have charged that the main prosecution witness was the shooter. Rather than arguing that there were procedural flaws in his trial, Mr. Davis is making the more basic claim that he is innocent and that new evidence proves it."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens declared "the substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification." The majority of his colleagues agreed and ordered a federal judge in Georgia to review the new evidence and rule whether it "clearly establishes" Davis' innocence.

But Scalia and fellow traditionalist Catholic, Clarence Thomas, didn't see it that way. "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial," Scalia opined, " but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

--How Do You Solve a Problem Like Scalia?

Again --Scalia, typical of his ilk, thinks 'backward'. Certainly, a 'fair trial', however desirable, is not an ideal but, like 'justice' itself, a means by which the taking of an innocent life by the state is made less likely. The state murder of a provable innocent because all the 't's' are crossed and all the 'i's' dotted is not just Kafakaesque, it typifies the endemic evil of the state itself.

A paper will be written about the many lies that the GOP has told about Social Security. Unless they are stopped, the GOP will one day raid Social Security not because it's broke but because it's not! If SS were broke, the GOP would have nothing to covet, no booty to be divided up among their base of Wall St insiders! When they have seized SS, the GOP will argue that they had to kill it to save it! Social Security 'reform' will consist of transferring more wealth to the wealthy, putting those monies into the hands of the Wall St geniuses who brought you every recession/depression since the Great Depression of 1929 and its more recent reprise under Bushco.

Against Kerry, Bush and the GOP resorted to almost every lie and every GOP fallacy. Millions apparently believed Bush when he told them that because HE failed in Iraq, we should NOT elect Kerry! Perhaps the GOP believed that because the GOP left us record budget shortfalls, deficits, and the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance, we should never elect Democrats who left instead the more nearly balanced budgets and, often, surpluses! Big Brother must be pleased to learn that all of his 'big lies' have been put to work by the US GOP.

Are we safe yet?

Millions believed Bush when he said that we were certain to get hit by terrorists again and, seemingly in the same paragraph, we were safer! It never occurred to the media to ask: which is it? Are we safer or not?

Obviously --the GOP strategists never figured this one out: did the GOP get more votes by saying we were safer or were more votes gained by saying we were less safe? The GOP consultants and focus group gurus let them down. They never resolved the issue! With any luck, the GOP's central processor will overheat and melt down before the party destroys the US as we knew it!

Elizabeth!

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

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Edward R. Murrow: Why the Fairness Doctrine Must be Restored

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The Communications Act of 1934 had affirmed the principle that the 'airwaves' belonged the people. Thanks to GOP/right wing policies, the airwaves have been stolen. 'Public ownership' of the airwaves is under attack by GOP regimes primarily and the large corporations benefiting from so-called 'de-regulation' during the Reagan years. More recent legislation also took its toll. Clear Channel Communications, for example, grew to include some 1200 radio stations as a result of the GOP assault upon fairness.

Formally adopted in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine had required broadcasters to devote air time to the discussion of 'controversial matters of public interest'. To maintain a 'license' broadcasters were required to 'air' opposing and contrasting opinions and viewpoints. Given wide latitude, TV and radio outlets really had little to complain about. Nevertheless, the doctrine was all but repealed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan’s pro-big business FCC.

The doctrine can be traced back to the early days of broadcast regulation. It was the 'teeth' in the federal law that affirmed the public ownership of the 'airwaves'.

Your right to challenge the licenses of abusive outlets is now severely restrained or non-existent. Because there is no real competition, 'big media' can lie to you, slant the news, fill up air time with Billo and bullshit. Big media can jack up the rates on air time and other advertising.

'Fair and balanced'?? I don't think so! What you really get are corporate, focus group approved 'talking points' --not facts! You get Wolf Blitzer cliches and banalities passed off as 'analysis'. You don't get the news; you get right wing propaganda. Millions have been 'brainwashed' and don't even know it.

The Fairness Doctrine had required broadcasters to devote air time to the discussion of 'controversial matters of public interest'. To maintain a 'license' broadcasters were required to 'air' opposing and contrasting opinions and viewpoints. Given wide latitude, TV and radio outlets really had little to complain about.

There is precedent for a 'people's revolution' that will take back our media.

Edward R. Murrow "Wires and Lights In a Box" Remembered

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a...frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

--U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

Certainly, broadcasting has become subservient to the ruling oligopoly of less than one percent of the population, an oligopoly which spawned it and expects it to serve them --not you, not the public! Public access had been guaranteed by law. It is now restricted or non-existent.

What happened to the American Media? After Nixon's demise, the right wing of the Republican party decided that they could no longer afford to allow the free dissemination of information to the US public. The simple solution? Have their friends buy up the major networks, newspaper chains and magazines, so they could be controlled from the top on the corporate level. The Left's Media Miscalculation was to stand by and watch them do it.

"The American Fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

-- Henry A. Wallace, Vice President to FDR, 1944, The Danger of American Fascism

Having wrested control over the channels of public information, they went on to remove any impediment to their injecting their poisons into the public dialogue. The first step was to get rid of the fairness doctrine.

--Sadbuttrue, What Happened to the American Media?

Certainly the relationship between the American media and the increasingly tiny elite, a 'ruling oligopoly' is entirely too convenient to have come about by chance.

The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"

Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.

By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included:

• Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity.
• Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call.
• Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA.
• Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.

...

Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.

The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. (8)

MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda.

At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

• Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)
• William Paley (President, CBS)
• Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
• Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)
• Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)
  
• Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
  
• Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)
  
• James Copley (Copley News Services)
  
• Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
  
• C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
  
• Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
  
• ABC
  
• NBC
  
• Associated Press
  
• United Press International
  
• Reuters
  
• Hearst Newspapers
  
• Scripps-Howard
  
• Newsweek magazine
  
• Mutual Broadcasting System
  
• Miami Herald
  
• Old Saturday Evening Post
  
• New York Herald-Tribune
  

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation’s capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

--Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass

One wonders how many of the more obvious shills have been recruited for their abilities to 'serve' the ruling oligopoly. These 'super-wealthy' have, over the years, consolidated many ways by which they may acquire more wealth and power. By 1912, a year in which the Los Angeles Times building was bombed, the Scripps-Howard organization had already become a media powerhouse with newspapers in many American cities.

By the mid-1970s these methods became a well-oiled, efficient propaganda machine, a Ministry of Bullshit! By 1975 it had became a slick noise machine for advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms. Who benefited? Just one percent of the US population, the 'ruling elite' that profited by the dumbing down of America.

Local markets are served by a limited number of stations, because radio stations are local in reach and licensed to utilize a specific frequency that is assigned by the Federal Communications Commission. A similar system exists for television, cable systems, et al. The communications industries are thus characterized by the Concentration of 'large scale ownership', in other words, 'media consolidation. Most recently, it is reported that only seven major corporations own 99 percent of all media outlets in the United States.

The biggest owners include: Disney, National Amusements, Viacom, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann AG, Sony, General Electric, Vivendi SA, Hearst Corporation, Organizações Globo and Lagardère Group. None of them are 'liberal'. The consequences are measurable.

• Fewer jobs for media workers
• More homogenization of music on radio
• Less community-oriented programming
• Loss of local control over programming decisions Less independently-produced programming
• Increased censorship of divergent views
• Less political discussion
• Inadequate emergency weather/disaster warnings
• Fewer minority-owned broadcast stations.
• The 'brain-washing' of the American public by FOX
• The media has become the propaganda arm of the GOP

At last --the idea that media is 'liberal' is, therefore, a myth. The handful of large corporations owning the media are 'conservative' --not liberal. In fact, the 'liberal voice' is essentially non-existent in today's monopolistic BIG MEDIA.

The following video featuring Bill Moyer exposes a clear and present danger to dissent and to the very lives of those who dare dissent in the United States. When you watch this video, keep in mind that the ugly hatred, bigotry and venom that is revealed is the result of right wing attacks upon the Fairness Doctrine. Clearly --there is only one reason anyone would oppose 'fairness' and that is that they wish to be 'unfair'; they wish to shout, scream and accuse while muzzling you. They wish to lie while shutting you up. They wish to deny you the right of free speech that had been guaranteed to us in the US Constitution.

Michael Savage, Hannity and Beck Urge the MURDER of Liberals

Addendum:

Republicans own Fox News: Admission by Bush Apologist Robert G. Kaufman

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Thinking Clearly About Bush Atrocities, War Crimes and Torture

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It seems like only yesterday that the Brookings Institution was wringing its hands and whining about how disastrous it would be if the issue of Guantanamo detainees made it to SCOTUS. Brookings declared: 'the Courts Can't Fix Guantanamo'. Brookings not only got it wrong but often shot themselves in the foot.

As the case heads towards the Supremes, you'll no doubt hear a lot about suspension of the Great Writ of habeas corpus--the ancient device by which courts evaluate the legality of detentions. And you'll also hear a lot about Guantanamo as a legal "black hole." It's all a lot of rot, really, albeit rot a majority of the justices might well adopt. Cut through it, and Guantanamo poses a set of difficult policy problems, not legal ones. And, while judges have a role in the solution to those problems, that role isn't the one most liberals seem to want them to play.

Brookings, which apparently pulled its own paper --Total Acts of Terrorism in the US 1980-98, America's Response to Terrorism --works backward from conclusions, not a recipe for getting to the truth. In the meantime, I challenge them to re-post their above mentioned article obviously pulled because it supports a proposition that Brookings was and remains politically uncomfortable with: terrorism is worse under GOP regimes.

Brookings, like everyone who supported George W. Bush's so-called 'war on terrorism', tried to have it both ways. Brookings shills called Bush's acts of terrorism against the people of Iraq 'war' whenever doing so allowed the Bush regime to accrue the arbitrary or illegal powers of war. With respect to other issues --GITMO prisoners, for example --it was not a 'war' and GITMO prisoners were, therefore, to be denied the protections afforded to prisoners of war by law and by treaty. My question to Brookings remains: was it war or was it not war? Brookings would have it both ways depending which way the winds were blowing.

... nobody seriously believed that the federal courts would entertain challenges by aliens who had never set foot in this country to overseas military detentions--or, at least, nobody thought so who had read the Supreme Court's emphatic pronouncement on the subject. "We are cited to no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued it on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction," the Court wrote in 1950. "Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes."

--Brookings Institution,

Brookings had swallowed the 'Kool-aid', the idea that somehow Bush's so-called 'war on terror' was a different animal, completely unforseen by the founders, never thought of by distinguished jurists, never envisioned by great philosophers, jurists, or ordinary lawyers.

Bollocks!

The only problems with adjudicating the often unfairly labeled 'terrorists' at GITMO were those associated with acts of buying into Bush's false dichotomy, his phony paradigm.

If the courts try to dictate how the executive branch should handle these detentions, they will be wading into some very deep water without a life vest. Overseas military action, after all, is an area about which judges know little and which is peculiarly resistant to principled legal decision-making. While any reasonable approach to this problem would likely make use of judges, who are highly skilled at reviewing evidence and holding it up against legal standards, it's a big leap from there to letting judges define those legal standards and set the rules for handling the relevant evidence.

The justices can pretend that the Constitution, international humanitarian law, or the laws of war answer the questions posed by the detentions. But it's the wrong way to fix this system; it probably won't work well, and its unintended consequences will, in any event, overwhelm whatever good it does.Ironically, the outlines of a good system are already in place. Right now, military tribunals determine whether the administration has rightly classified a detainee as an enemy combatant, and the detainee can then appeal the tribunal's judgment to a federal appeals court. The real problem here isn't the lack of habeas jurisdiction.

It is that these tribunals are too cursory. The detainee has no right to assistance from a lawyer and often doesn't see the evidence against him. The consequence is that the tribunal that consigns him to indefinite detention has no clear picture of the evidence, and any reviewing court has only the most limited record to evaluate.Yet in this flawed system lies the nucleus of a procedure better than either the current one or any attempt to supplant executive power with judicial power. The compromise would beef up the combatant-status tribunals, making them fairer and more robust--and clarifying the form of judicial review that would follow them.

--Brookings Institution, The Courts Can't Fix Guantanamo

It is the role of the courts to keep the executive 'honest' with respect to human rights, civil rights and matters of Constitutionality in general. If the courts don't or won't do this, who will? Who must? Who can? Brookings --not surprisingly --misses the point time and again!

Brookings went on to say that "human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees would have to drop their insistence on habeas corpus litigation as the essential mechanism of judicial review in this conflict". A 'Sacred Cow' it is called. One wonders how many other 'sacred cows' Brooking would have us give up?? Due Process of Law, perhaps! The right to trial by jury, perhaps! The right to legal counsel?

It is clear to me that it was and remains the intention of the founders, the intention of those drafting US Codes criminalizing violations of our international commitments that government may not exercise arbitrary and unrestrained powers to decide what is an inviolate 'right' and what is but a 'sacred cow'!

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Brookings position means that US obligations to the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg are moot, that there is no mechanism by which the US government may be held --under law --to its commitments. If Brookings had been or were correct, then no nation is wise to enter into agreements or treaties of any type with the US which may simply abrogate upon a whim and less than a moments notice. I believe this to be a recipe for mayhem and anarchy.

Clearly --Brookings is dead wrong and indefensible. It is a fact that the illegal practice of torture was carried out at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and various US gulags and hell-holes throughout Eastern Europe. By any Orwellian name given it by Bush or his minions, it is torture.

Recent ACLU-compelled disclosures of previously concealed DOJ documents reveal many of the details of what has been long known: that the highest levels of the Bush administration secretly implemented an illegal torture regime. But while those torture programs began in secret, we have gradually learned more and more about them. The more time that goes by and the more we learn — particularly if we do nothing meaningful to stop it — the more the responsibility for these policies shifts from the administration to all of us collectively.

--Glenn Greenwald: Growing Responsibility for the Bush Torture Regime

Torture is a crime which if it results in death, the penalty is death. That law applies to the architects and defenders of the policy of torture. It applies to Bush --its chief architect, defender and practitioner.

The disclosure that the Justice Department advised the White House in 2002 that the torture of al Qaeda terrorist suspects might be legally defensible has focused new attention on the role President Bush played in setting the rules for interrogations in the war on terrorism.

...

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, addressed to Gonzales, said that torturing suspected al Qaeda members abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation" conducted against suspected terrorists.

The document provided legal guidance for the CIA, which crafted new, more aggressive techniques for its operatives in the field. McClellan called the memo a historic or scholarly review of laws and conventions concerning torture. "The memo was not prepared to provide advice on specific methods or techniques," he said. "It was analytical."

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday refused senators' requests to make public the memo, which is not classified, and would not discuss any possible involvement of the president.

In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last "months or even years."

A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush's aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach.

--Memo on Torture Draws Focus to Bush

Just as Brookings wrote doggerel about wars that were not wars and non-wars that were, Bush himself took center stage to defend practices which he had denied took place --the best clue yet to his guilt of capital crimes.

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

--US CODES, TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441

Brookings contends that the US must 'stop pretending that, legally speaking, this is a war like any other and requires no additional legislative imagination.' Brookings does not go far enough. In fact, not only was the 'war on terrorism' not a 'war like any other', it was not a war at all. It was and remains the act of a mass murderer ordering acts of mass murder by proxy.

Acts of aggression, mass murder, and torture are not war! They are simply acts of mass murder, torture and aggression. Stop calling it war. A corrolary: Bush was never a 'war time President'. He was simply a perverted sadist criminal who hijacked the apparatus of state for his evil purposes.

On the one hand, Brookings claims that the issues were not a matter for the courts, not a matter for the legislative branch. How convenient! Had the legislative declared war, it might have been a matter for the 'legislative' --but as the Constitution itself was violated when Bush ordered the war without a declaration, the matter is, indeed, a matter for the courts: the International Court at the Hague.

Given that Bush's war was from the outset illegal --a war crime --none of the GITMO detentions were legal. Each detention is a war crime! If SCOTUS was not up to the task of ordering an immediate release, then who was, who could, who would? As the US is signatory to treaties prohibiting Bush's actions, what has Brookings to say about the undeniable fact that George W. Bush committed war crimes violating both US Codes and US treaty commitments, crimes for which the penalty is death?

Brookings is cowardly silent!

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On the Brink of Collapse, Palin-McCain Indulge Smear Jobs and Distractions

McCain-Palin refuse to talk about the fact that the US and the world face the biggest economic collapse since the GOP brought you the Great Depression. McCain Palin want to talk about someone Obama might have met when he was eight years old!

Palin-McCain want the US to repeat the GOP/ideological strategies that brought us to this point: 1) enriching the tiny elite which alone have benfited from GOP tax cuts, bailouts, and preferential treatments; 2) raising the tax burden on everyone else who must take up the slack. In other words, McCain-Palin want to keep on raping the nation and blaming the victim. It's the GOP way. Rather than rewarding this gang of crooks with an election win, I want to round up the Bush administration and put it on trial at the Hague, charge it with war crimes, crimes against the peace, torture and other violations of Geneva and Nuremberg.

To distract you, McCain-Palin resort to tired old GOP tactics --smear jobs and distractions.

McCain’s course correction reflects a growing case of nerves within his high command as the electoral map has shifted significantly in Obama’s favor in the past two weeks.

“It’s a dangerous road, but we have no choice,” a top McCain strategist told the Daily News. “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”

--New York Daily News:

McCain's attitudes about the corporate takeover of the us government dates to the role his played in the Savings and Loan Scandal of the 80s and 90s when McCain was accused of 'improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating' who was chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association at the time. An investigation by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee resulted in McCain getting reprimanded for his role. McCain is, in fact, the only major party Presidential nominee in US history to have been "...rebuked, censured or otherwise admonished after a Congressional investigation." [See: Keating Economics: John McCain and hte Making of a Financial Crisis]

Two bailouts in a period of some two weeks or less hasn't worked. Panicked investors withdrew 52 billion from US managed stock and bond funds in a period of a week or less. Investors had already withdrawn $72.3 billion in September --the biggest withdrawal ever in a single month.

Years ago, I wrote in 'The Opinion' that GOP strategy was best summed up: just keep on doing whatever makes you sick! Even then, the numbers were unmistakable: every Democratic president since FDR had outperformed every GOP President in every key economic index, notably, job growth and overall GDP. Moreover, Bill Clinton had reversed a trend begun with Reagan's tax cut for the rich. It was Reagan's tax cut that not only triggered a depression of some two years --the worst since the Great Depression --it triggered a trend that is always worse under GOP regimes: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This trend abated in Clinton's second term only to resume with Bush and yet another round of GOP largesse to those who don't need it.

That was not the only trend reversed by Bill Clinton. The ratio of gross national debt to to GDP was at its lowest level since 1931 when Ronald Reagan took office. Under Reagan, it did not last long. Ronald Reagan ran up historically high debt and deficit --a trend that 'skyrocketed' through twelve years of Reagan/Bush. The official charts from every agency prove conclusively that Bill Ciinton had reversed those pernicious trends as well. Another myth is that Reagan was one of the best Presidents for job creation. In reality, he's among the worst:

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents⁸

Johnson   3.8%
Carter    3.1
Clinton   2.4
Kennedy   2.3
Nixon     2.3
Reagan    2.1
Bush      0.6
--U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But this week, Larry King let a GOP spinmesiter and paid shill get away with characterizing 'unemployment' under Jimmy Carter as 'immense'. Briefly --that is a BALD FACED LIE and to be expected from the GOP. Check the official numbers above. One should expect a morally bankrupt party like the GOP to attack Carter's record. Carter's record on every issue is far, far superior to the miserable performances turned in by EVERY GOP President since 1900.

The GOP is a party of liars. They will lie to you because they lie to themselves daily. It's the only way they can get through the day. If GOPPERS had ever faced the truth about themselves, they would have shot themselves a long time ago.

It took a return to GOP mismanagement, greed and incompetence to undo the good that had been done in Clinton's eight years in the Oval Office. Now the national debt is the highest it's been since 1955 (53 years ago).

Bush did three things to skyrocket the debt from $5.7 trillion to $10 trillion:

• He lowered taxes on the rich (by far the biggest item)
• He invaded Iraq instead of winning in Afghan-Pakistan (another $600 B).
• He loosened controls on Wall Street.

McCain backed all three policies:

• He backed Bush's tax cuts for the rich and now wants to give them bigger tax cuts.
• He was gung-ho for the Iraq war from the start.
• When Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin to name one time McCain suggested regulating Wall Street, she couldn't—because he never did. He crowed in the Wall Street Journal how he was always against regulation.
Bush did three things to skyrocket the debt from $5.7 trillion to $10 trillion:
• 1. He lowered taxes on the rich (by far the biggest item).
• He invaded Iraq instead of winning in Afghan-Pakistan (another $600 B).
• He loosened controls on Wall Street.
As it happens, McCain backed all three policies:
• He backed Bush's tax cuts for the rich and now wants to give them bigger tax cuts.
• He was gung-ho for the Iraq war from the start.
• When Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin to name one time McCain suggested regulating Wall Street, she couldn't—because he never did. He crowed in the Wall Street Journal how he was always against regulation.

--Z facts.com

What if you went to a doctor who told you: 'just keep on eating the greasy foods, lazing around the house, hitting the bottle! Don't take any responsibility for your own health; blame it all on your neighbors!

Bill Clinton's was the ONLY successful presidency since Jimmy Carter left the White House. The GOP would like you to just keep on doing whatever it is that's making the nation sick, bankrupt, deteriorating, collapsing. The GOP has nothing new to offer. At the cost of the republic itself, we have learned the hard way that everything the GOP has ever said has been a lie. Nothing has worked! It's all bullshit!

Addendum: it's not bad enough that the GOP has deliberately bankrupted the nation, Bush worked assiduously to assume dictatorial powers as he put into place a huge federal bureacracy whose only raison d'etre is to spy on you, intimidate you and deny you due process of law. There is a word for this: TYRANNY!

Naomi Wolfe on Tyranny and the US Police State

Published Articles

• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part I, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part II, A Climate of Fear is Maintained
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part III, In Fascist Dictatorships Telling the truth becomes a crime
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part IV, the state forces an 'existential' choice
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part V, Public Opinion Becomes Irrelevant
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VI, The government places itself above the law
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VII, The Government Denies 'Due Process of Law'
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State Part VIII: Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

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Exposing GOP Lies, Myths and Propaganda About Ronald Reagan

Three myths about the cold war"

• 'We won the cold war'! But in fact, the end was negotiated.
  
• 'The Soviet Union collapsed because the US brought pressure to bear or because Unca Ronnie 'outspent' them.' In fact, the opposite is true as you will learn.
• 'Ronald Reagan defeated communism'. In fact, Ronald Reagan defeated America!!

Let's set the record straight. Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of communism. A great statesman-- Mikhail Gorbachev --deserves the credit for withdrawing nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe which he did upon his own initiative. Gorbachev was the architect of Perestroika and, later, Glasnost. Reagan merely followed the leader.

As I have pointed out: Ronald Reagan Blew the World's Last Chance for Peace! It was Gorbachev --a real leader --who had put total nuclear disarmament on the table. It was an offer Reagan could not accept! Reagan had bosses who had already made him an offer he didn't refuse: the sale of his soul!

The real power base back home would have had Reagan's head. Reagan was a typical Republican, that is, he said many things and did the opposite. Every Republican has two stories to tell: one that he/she tells the base via "code words" like "family values" the other, he/she tells to the world. This second category is most often just lies and bullshit. In this case, Reagan had talked the talked --world peace, nuclear disarmament, etc. When Gorbachev put total nuclear disarmament on the table, Reagan blinked because he was not free to negotiate in 'good faith'. He was but the figure-head for an entire class that had been enriched by 'cold war' military spending. The same folk have a vested interest in a destabilized middle east.

Here is what Reagan himself said about the threat of nuclear war.

The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radarscope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn't be won by either side. It must never be fought. Advocates of the MAD policy believed it had served a purpose: The balance of terror it created had prevented nuclear war for decades. But as far as I was concerned, the MAD policy was madness.

--Ronald Reagan, The Official Site

So, if that's how Ronald Reagan really felt about nuclear madness, why did he blow what is perhaps our last chance at peace? The answer is simple. Reagan was not his own man.

Jack Matlock: Current US Policy and Cold War

Rank and file goppers will find reasons not to believe anything unflattering about Reagan but that's not the same thing as refuting anything that I have ever written in my admittedly Quixotic quest to set the record straight.

Reagan-heads have often tried to shout me down on these issues. But facts are facts and the fact is it was Ronald Reagan, indebted to GOP money interests back home, a tiny elite of just one percent of the total population, who blinked at Reykjavik and thus blew --perhaps forever --what might have been the world's last chance for a non-nuclear peace.

If, that is, the ensuing “Great Society,” to borrow a term from JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, were laid low by a nuclear attack on an American city (or seven, if al Qaeda had its way).

This is the territory into which Gorbachev launched his most daring raids. First, in 1985, he announced that the Soviet Union would no longer deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs in Eastern Europe. Later that year, he proposed that both his country and the US slice their nuclear arsenals in half.)

The next year, at the memorable Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev got Ronald Reagan to agree in principle to his plan for removal of all INFs from Europe, as well as to draw them down worldwide. Caught up in Gorbachev’s enthusiasm, Reagan expressed a willingness to join Russia in eliminating all nuclear weapons in 10 years.

In the end, though, Reagan clung to his blankie, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars.

Gorbachev feared SDI would lead to nukes in space, not to mention leave the Soviet defense establishment with the impression he’d been played. Their dreams of saving the world came crashing back down to earth.

--It’s not a new JFK we need in Obama, but the next Gorbachev

Recently, Mitt Romney built his failed campaign around two words: 'Ronald' and 'Reagan' just as Giuliani built his around 'nine' and 'eleven', as McCain has now built his platform around three words: 'stay', 'Iraq', 'surge'!

Morally bankrupt and out of ideas, stuck with McCain who has trouble walking while chewing gum, the GOP has tried to make of Ronald Reagan a "savior". Failing live leadership, the GOP would settle for myths and desperate hope for the "second-coming" of Ronald Reagan! It won't work. Reagan is still dead!

At another level, rank and file GOP understand that should a deified Reagan fall out of the Pantheon, the party itself is finished. Reagan was all they had left. In the blogosphere, Reagan defenders themselves are resurrected, more vehement and less rational than ever. To wit:

The lies of the left about Ronald Reagan stink up the blogosphere worse than a rest room at a Greyhound bus depot.

I leave it to Larry Craig to assess the stalls at Greyhound --a topic about which he may have considerable expertise and foot-tapping experience. Craig is but a specimen of GOP hypocrisy, lack of imagination, it's endemic inability to come up with anything other than stupid slogans on the one hand and lies, smears, propaganda, assassination on the other. It's their one-two punch! Various sexual perversions to include sado-masochism and homosexuality are just contrapuntal to the sellouts made to the Military/Industrial complex.

The presidency of Ronald Reagan confirms the assertion: the GOP is not a political party, its a criminal conspiracy, a kooky cult built up around Reagan types who encourage addled followers to 'feel good about being liars, psychopaths, and elite militarists.

In my book, Without Conscience, I argued that we live in a "camouflage society," a society in which some psychopathic traits- egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, style over substance, being "cool," manipulativeness, and so forth- increasingly are tolerated and even valued. With respect to the topic of this article, it is easy to see how both psychopaths and those with ASPD could blend in readily with groups holding antisocial or criminal values. It is more difficult to envisage how those with ASPD could hide out among more pro social segments of society. Yet psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures. It is the egocentric, cold-blooded and remorseless psychopaths who blend into all aspects of society and have such devastating impacts on people around them who send chills down the spines of law enforcement officers.

--[Hare, Robert D., PhD., Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Case of Diagnostic Confusion, Psychiatric Times, February 1996: Vol. XIII Issue 2] The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil

Reagan was precisely what the GOP needed at the time. A former movie star, he was a practiced Spellbinder.

To the spellbinder, everything becomes subordinated to their conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology can emerge from such individuals that is certainly partly true, and the value of which is claimed to be superior to all other ideologies. They believe they will find many converts to their ideology and when they discover that this is not the case, they are shocked and fume with “paramoral indignation.” The attitude of most normal people to such spellbinders is generally critical, pained and disturbed.The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who succumbs to his influence, and he will shower such people with attention and property and perks of all kinds. Critics are met with “moral” outrage and it will be claimed by the spellbinder that the compliant minority is actually a majority.Such activity is always characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view, because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically.In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively on common sense and social order - such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers manifesting pathological traits - spellbinders activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy.Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally become a ponerogenic union.

-- The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil

There is enough probable cause in the public record alone to indict the leadership of the GOP for violations of various US Criminal Codes having to do with "criminal conspiracy". Now we know why the GOP is eager to keep Reagan alive and disprove the existence of conspiracies. If conspiracies did not exist, Ronald Reagan himself need not have worried about the opinion of Iran/Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh who believed Reagan guilty of conspiring to arm an avowed enemy of the US while funneling money to a right-wing terrorist organization.

The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President's willful activities.

What protection do the people of the United States have against such a concerted action by such powerful officers? The Constitution provides for congressional oversight and congressional control of appropriations, but if false information is given to Congress, these checks and balances are of lessened value.

--Lawrence Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matter

Reagan apologists often attack Jimmy Carter because, like the predators they are, they smell weakness. It is a mistake. Carter, is in fact among the best Presidents in job creation and he is the only US President to have brokered a Middle East peace --the Camp David Accords. In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Carter acted quickly. He replaced Kissinger's incremental, shuttle diplomacy with a comprehensive, multilateral approach that included reconvening the 1973 Geneva Conference to include a Palestinian delegation. The GOP feared to duplicate that approach because it might have succeeded.

Reagan’s election in November 1980 also was welcomed in other quarters. His victory set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anti-communist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anti-communist action justified, no matter how brutal.

From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the over-arching Cold War rationalization, emanating from Ronald Reagan's White House.

--Robert Parry, Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan

Hoping to deflect attention from the new Äugustus, Reagan worshipers claim that Carter was responsible for "horrible inflation" and 20% interest rates. So what? Interest rates would be expected to decline under Reagan's depression as interest rates, in fact, decline in every recession or depression. During Reagan's depression, the GDP declined at a rate of 2.2 percent, quite possibly the biggest such decline since the Great Depression, most certainly it was the biggest decline in the more than twenty years between 1973 to the assumption of the White House by Bush. Millions lost jobs and homes. In any case, it was the Federal Reserve Board that slashed interest rates and expanded the money supply, thus reducing prices. Ronald Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with it! It was the Fed --not Reagan --who was responsible for the following but short-lived recovery.

Under Carter, people were at work and productive. They were buying homes --not leaving them under the threat of imminent foreclosure as many, perhaps, millions are doing now. That was not the case under Reagan who destroyed the trade unions, exported jobs and technology, and plunged the nation into a depression of two years ---the very worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression!

Ronald Reagan justified disastrous economic policies with ideological nonsense called 'supply-side economics or, derisively, 'Trickle Down' theory might have worked in a completely "closed economy". But the US imports goods from abroad. 'Tax cuts' to non-productive, American elites who outsource [read: export] jobs abroad will only squirrel away a 'tax cuts' in a safe haven beyond the reach of the tax man. It is money that will never trickle down. It is monies lost forever to investment inside the United States. It is the mechanism by which the GOP has made of America a third world nation. It is the mechanism by which the axis of Reagan/Bush destroyed a once great nation!

The US, a net debtor nation, imports most of its automobiles, appliances, and electronic goods from abroad. No wealth trickles down. Items that had been the staple of the US economic engine had, at one time, provided jobs at home. That has not been the case since Ronald Reagan and the GOP feasted upon the rotting carcass that had been the source of US industrial might. Compounding the tragedy, Ronald Reagan slashed taxes for millionaires and billionaires and everyone else got poor.

"Globalization" amid Ronald Reagan's orgy of union-busting, offshore tax havens and outsourcing, must be blamed for the decline of US exports, the collapse of major US industries, the fact that the US is now a third world nation behind a mask of Hollywood and glitz. The US now pulls up the rear, behind China, Japan, Europe and much of the world. Everything from jeans to binoculars now come from China, IT is outsourced to India, and I see few Americans driving anything but Japanese cars.

Given this hole dug over more than twenty years, I am as outraged as I am unimpressed with the crumbs now thrown the rest of us by this profligate administration, this profligate, arrogant party.

Meanwhile, the nation’s official poverty rate declined for the first time this decade, from 12.6 percent in 2005 to 12.3 percent in 2006. There were 36.5 million people in poverty in 2006, not statistically different from 2005. The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 44.8 million (15.3 percent) in 2005 to 47 million (15.8 percent) in 2006.

--US Census Bureau Release, AUG. 28, 2007

Capital "trickling up" to Bush's base is money lost to productive investment, lost to small business, lost to consumers who might have spent it in ways that would have created jobs here in the US.

Before Reagan, America had a steel industry. After Reagan, it didn't. Before Reagan, America had a viable automotive industry. After Reagan, the US was buying its cars from Japan. Before Reagan, small retailers still existed. After Reagan, small stores had all but disappeared, giving way to huge corporate chains, and, in time, WalMart --the economic Kudzu that ate America.

Typically, Reagan would take credit for reforms begun under Carter. It was Carter who gave the rich a capital gains tax cut, even as he deregulated key industries like trucking and airlines. Carter also increased defense spending. I happen to think Carter ought not have done that! But, to his credit, he didn't muck it up nearly as much as did Reagan who sold his soul for the elite GOP base of robber barons, war lords and buyers of crooked GOP politicians!

The era was largely characterized by the undue influence of corporate PACs which forced Congress to pass pro-business/anti-individual, anti-family legislation. Supply-siders believed it would trickle down. Like Bush's war on Iraq, it didn't work out as planned. The nation was plunged into the worst and longest (two years) depression since WWII.

The GOP would love to fight another cold war. The "commies" were shooting back like the misnamed "insurgents", "terrorists" or whatever they are called this week.

Much is made of the demoralized military under Carter. What had they to be demoralized about? They were no longer slogging through the swamps in Viet Nam and they had to yet been sent to Lebanon by Ronald Reagan. The Pentagon brass should have just gotten over it! These guys are not 'war heroes'. They don't put their lives on the front lines. They don't get shot it! They are glorified pencil pushers and bureaucrats. If they were disgruntled, it is no fault of the electorate. Screw 'em. If they don't like their jobs, let them try to get into another line of work while a gopper is President. Lotsa luck, general!

All in all, the enlisted person, under Carter, had it a helluva lot better than do soldiers under either Ronald Reagan who dispatched them to Lebanon to be blown up in a Marine Barracks or under Bush who has them mired and dehumanized in Iraq. Has anyone bothered to check out the suicide rates of returning servicemen?

(CBS) Some of America's 25 million veterans face their biggest fight when they return home from the battlefield -- when they take on mental illness.

And, a CBS News analysis reveals they lose that battle, and take their own lives, at a clip described by various experts as "stunning" and "alarming," according to Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian. One called it a "hidden epidemic."

He says no one had ever counted just how many suicides there are nationwide among those who had served in the military -- until now.

The five-month CBS News probe, based upon a detailed analysis of data obtained from death records from 2004 and 2005, found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets.

A recent Veteran Affairs Department estimate says some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year, largely as a result of mental health issues, and Keteyian says, "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

--CBS News: Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning"

Goppers have been known to opine: ...cleaning up after Carter's utter incompetence was messy. In fact, there was nothing to clean up. There was, in fact, nothing for Reagan to do but screw up and screw up he did! The nation would have been better off if Reagan has done absolutely nothing! See my article: Reagan was no hero but he played one in a movie.

That's because, under Reagan, the GOP became not merely a crime syndicate, it became a kooky cult.

The methods that cults use can be used by anyone in any group setting and can be thought of as a "Management system" or a technique of motivation. Thus there is a benefit to applying this knowledge in other areas.

ISOLATION

An obvious way a cult does this is through isolation from other social networks. The extreme of a cult does not have to be applied. If this is applied to a work setting then the stated rule is "This is work. Leave the other parts of life at the door." Likewise the person can go home and leave work at work. The result is a "work personality" and a "home personality".

ENLIST THEM IN A CAUSE

Nothing is quite so motivating than to be involved in a glorious cause. To do this make the success of the group linked to the individuals success. Make the cause lofty and ideal and progressive always on the wave of the future.

DESCRIBE FOR THEM THE QUALITIES OF A "GOOD SOLDIER"

Once you've enlisted them in a cause you can now tell them how best to serve the cause. By describing the qualities of "good soldier" you create an ideal of behavior. On the one hand it's important to point out qualities that they already have to affirm their part in the cause. But it's also important to describe qualities that they will have to work to develop. These qualities can be actual behaviors or they can values that you wish to impose on them. Either way you are holding them to an ideal and letting them know that they play a vital role in the cause.

DRILL THE "GOOD SOLDIER" INTO EXISTENCE (the Nazi/Gop way?)

A cult may do this process with intense drills and exercises that emphasize the qualities and values of a good soldier. They will create scenarios and situations where these qualities can be tested and followed up with feedback and correction when needed. You can do this in a management setting much the same way. The goal is to make them WANT to bring on this new personality and do it without prompting. This is done mostly by creating a high standard and through a subtle application of rewards and punishment.

CREATE A GROUP MYTH

Nothing will solidify the new personality than getting a group of "good soldiers" together and having them work with some great purpose in mind. By getting your employee, staff, cult member involved in a group and putting them into action as a group you help create an "esprit de corp" that unifies them and helps solidify the newly created personality. Thus, find tasks that your group can do together. It could be a project, a field trip or anything where they have to work together as a group.

Every one of these tactics can be used and applied in your business and social settings.

If your response to this is to recoil at the idea of using cult strategies then stop it. These strategies are used all the time in many different setting and situations. A good manager is a person who would make a good cult leader if they choose to do it.

The benefits of this strategy include highly motivated people who support the team and, when needed, can put work on hold to develop a personal life.

--How cults create an artificial personality in their followers

If the policies worked, Reagan could take credit for them. If they didn't work, Reagan and the GOP noise machine always had Carter to blame! The GOP still bad-mouths Carter though there is not a Republican who can carry Carter's ...uh...water.

When I talk of tax cuts, I am reminded that every major tax cut in this century has strengthened the economy, generated renewed productivity and ended up yielding new revenues for the government by creating new investment, new jobs and more commerce among our people.

--Ronald Reagan, Acceptance Speech at the 1980 Republican Convention

That's a famous Reagan half-truth. Keynesian, Democratic tax cuts, indeed, stimulate economies but only under Democratic regimes --not under GOP regimes. The reason: Democratic tax cuts are egalitarian, benefiting all income groups and classes. GOP tax cuts, by contrast, are deliberately inequitable, benefiting only rich cronies, the corporate establishment, the Military/Industrial complex and other corporate supporters of the GOP establishment. GOP tax cuts are a payoff, just as were the no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Blackwater et al! I've got the stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and the BEA to prove it.

Despite his over-blown, high sounding rhetoric, Reagan's "trickle down" tax cut of 1982 was quickly followed by a depression lasting some two years --the longest and deepest depression since Herbert Hoover's "Great Depression".

At the end of two years of hardship, Americans were no better off. The GDP growth rate of some three percent was no better at the end of two years of hardship than it had been before the Reagan crash. Nothing had been gained.

The Reagan years can be summed up briefly. He doubled the size of the Federal Bureaucracy and tripled the national deficit. The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of decline in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseam utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work? Reagan's Budget Director, David Stockman called Reaganomics a 'Trojan Horse'. He understood that tax cuts were not intended to trickle down. Rather, the tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! They are 'laundered' pay offs. Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them. It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief - restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists - thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things - local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left - and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering.Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama's remarks have done.

It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission. It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era.

It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

--Found on the Democratic Underground

Let's take a look at the history before it gets re-written:

• Any Democratic President has presided over greater economic growth and job creation than any Republican President since World War II.
• When Bush Jr took office, job creation was worst under a Republican, Bush Sr, at 0.6% per year and best under a Democrat, Johnson, at 3.8% per year.
• Economic growth under President Carter was far greater than under Reagan or Bush Sr. In fact, economic growth in general was greater under Johnson, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton than under Reagan or Bush. Democrats always outperform a failed party: the GOP!
  
• The job creation rate under Clinton was 2.4% significantly higher than Ronald Reagan's 2.1% per year.
• The "top performing Presidents" by this standard, in order from best down, were Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Kennedy. The "worst" (in descending order) were Nixon, Reagan, Bush.
• Half of jobs created under Reagan were in the public sector--some 2 million jobs added to the Federal Bureaucracy. Hadn't he promised to reduce that bureaucracy?
• Reagan, though promising to reduce government and spending, tripled the national debt and left huge deficits to his successor. Bush Jr's record will be even worse.
  
• By contrast, most of the jobs created on Clinton's watch were in the private sector.
• Put another way: any Democratic President beats any Republican President since World War II.

Everything posted above is based upon official, government stats from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CBO, and BEA among others. They are 'official' and irrefutable unless someone wants to make the outlandish case that the Federal Bureaucracy, the numerous agencies which keep these stats, is somehow biased. That argument is absurd in light of the fact that of those 20 years from the election of Ronald Reagan to the stolen election of 2000, Democrats had the Presidency in only eight of them.

Along the way, Reagan made up a whopper --his story about a Cadillac driving welfare gra'ma. The story reveals the real Reagan --Reagan the bald-faced liar! This bald-faced lie became his rationalization for cutting back social programs. Unca Ronnie most certainly knew it to be a bald-faced lie.

Then there was the attack and invasion of tiny Grenada. Does anyone remember how Grenada became an imminent threat to US security such that a war of aggression against it was necessitated or justified under international law?

Reagan must be remembered for:

1. having blown a chance for nuclear disarmament at Reykjavik
2. beginning a trend still underway but for a brief respite in Clinton's second term, that is, the rich get filthy rich exponentially while everyone else loses ground
3. making those who benefit from this rapacious policy 'feel good about themselves'
4. institutionalizing government corruption with Iran/Contra, the Savings and Loan Scandal, and a child prostitution ring that was literally run out of the White House
5. lying about a 'welfare grannie' whom Reagan claimed drove a Caddy! Bullshit
6. anemic job growth which --contrary to popular myth --trails that of Jimmy Carter
[Check BEA, Bureau of Labor Stats, and CB]
7. making terrorism worse, in fact, terrorism incidents were THREE TIMES more numerous under Reagan than any Demo president since WWII. [Source: FBI Stats, published, compiled and charted by the Brookings Inst.; See:Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes]
8. almost starting a nuclear war when he shot off his stupid mouth on an open microphone about radar detecting Russian ICBMs enroute to the US
The whole world heard him and, as I recall, the Soviets actually went on alert 9
9. conquering Grenada (to his credit Reagan did NOT wear an enhancing cod-piece and an ill-fitting jumpsuit)
10. Ronald Reagan ordered a US invasion of Lebanon in 1982 premised upon a "deceitful pretext", in other words, a bald-faced lie! The "pretext" was that the PLO, called a terrorist organization, had shot the Israeli ambassador to London. In fact, the shooter may never have been a PLO member. See: [Fading Illusions: D-Day and Reagan]
11. finishing off the last vestige of the labor movement depriving the voiceless of 'voice'
12. elevating style over substance and stupidity over intellect, an area he pioneered for the Bushmen to come
13. cutting funding for AIDS research in the hope that all 'immoral' AIDS sufferers would die off and thus 'cure' the disease
14. waging a war on 'porn' and losing to the un-reported glee of the jerkoffs and child prostitution rackets headquartered inside his White House, his administration
15. waging war on education by calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students, demanding 20% across-the-board cuts in higher education funding,repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses, engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the popular President of the University of California, declaring that the state "should not subsidize intellectual curiosity [the rationale: the GOP is safe when all of us are kept stupid, uneducated, or in the dark!]
16. waging war on the environment and winning!
17. waging the GOPs obligatory 'war on drugs'! Yawn!
18. selling out to the big corporations
19. presiding over the demise of the US Steel industry, car industry, electronics industry and almost every industry in which the US, at one time, led the world
20. last --but not least --presiding over the end of American empire by making of the US a net debtor nation which it has been ever since.

Only the GOP could have destroyed a nation so efficiently and have the nerve to tout it on TV ads! Bush Jr has finished the job begun by Reagan. See ya' in hell!

The government's own numbers prove conclusively that Reagan's tax cuts enrich his base and began a pernicious trend which continues to this day. The nation plunged into a depression of some two years, the longest and worst depression since Hoover's big one of the 1930s. Though he had promised to reduce the size of government, Reagan doubled the federal bureaucracy, ran yearly deficits, and tripled the national debt. He blazed a trail for Bush, the lesser and idiot!

Nations which tax the rich progressively are more egalitarian, more efficient, more productive and --it is proven in numerous studies --the people themselves are happier, more productive, and better educated. The opposite is true of America. More people are getting poorer; fewer are getting richer; an increasingly tiny percentage (one percent and shrinking) are getting exponentially richer. It is the end of the United States as a world power, indeed, as a viable nation!

GOP thinking is circular and symptomatic of psychosis. They disdain 'poor people' while deliberately creating conditions guaranteed to create more of them.

How an 'honest' general summed it all up:

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives...

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows...

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill...

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations...

...a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends...

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it...

Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed.

--Gen. Smedly Butler, War is a Racket!

An essential resource: This War was About So Much More

An addendum: 20 things you have to believe to be a Republican today

1. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

2. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.

3. Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

4. "Standing Tall for America" means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all humankind without regulation.

6. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

7. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

8. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

9. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

10. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

11. HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.

12. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

13. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

14. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

15. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war crime in which thousands were killed or murdered is a solid defense policy.

16. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

17. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's AWOL record, cocaine abuse, and queer exploits is none of our business.

18. You support states' rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

19. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the 1980s is irrelevant.

20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist; but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.--

20 things you have to believe to be a Republican today

Published Articles

• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part I, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part II, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part III, In Fascist Dictatorships Telling the truth becomes a crime
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part IV, the state forces an 'existential' choice
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part V, Public Opinion Becomes Irrelevant
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VI, The government places itself above the law
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VII, The Government Denies 'Due Process of Law'
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State Part VIII: Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

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