Why do 'Tea Baggers' and Republicans make such good l'il Nazis?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Research repeatedly confirms that Republicans are naturally inclined to exhibit authoritarian personality traits. The research leading to this conclusion is extensive. It was Carl Jung, in his 'The Undiscovered Self' who said that about thirty percent of every population was certifiably psychopathic.

The survival of civilization, he maintains, depends on individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche. The exploration of the unconscious, in particular, leads to self-knowledge and with it recognition of the duality of human nature --its potential for evil as well as for good. Jung believed that it is this self-knowledge that enables the individual to resist the collective power of mass society and the state and to cope with their possible threats.

--Princeton University Press, Review:The Undiscovered Self, C.G. Jung

Dr. Gustav Gilbert, who had been tasked with keeping Nazi war criminals alive until they could be hanged, concluded that his 'clients' had a defining characteristic in common: all, he said, 'lacked empathy'. Later, Hannah Arendt, founder of the New School for Sociological Studies in New York, coined a phrase to describe what she had observed of "Adolph Eichmann at this trial: 'the banality of evil'.

Jung believed that it was important for the individual to resist the "collective power of mass society". Some of the more recent research is surveyed by John Dean in his "Conservatives Without Consciences". Essentially, conservatives are 'authoritarian' types and tend to sort themselves into strong leaders (fuhrers) and eager, non-questioning followers (good l'il Nazis). I suspect that it is this personality and the various 'props' required of it that results in Republicans having more night mares and 'night terrors' than do normal people.

Liberals and progressives, by contrast, are often independent, creative, original. An 'ENTP' type is one of several types identified by the Jung Personality Test, similar to the Myers/Brigg test. ENTP, specifically, is described thus: "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative."

This kind of personality will not produce good, unquestioning follower-conspirators! This kind of person does not make a good li'l Nazi. The GOP, by contrast, is over run by good li'l Nazis, eager to click their heels and carry out orders from on high, specifically, the GOP national headquarters and the 'johns' who purchase the GOP on K-street in DC.

The 'tea bagger' movement is the 'enemy within', the anti-democratic, pro-fascist brownshirts who may have already destroyed the US ideal of a free and democratic republic --something that we have most certainly NOT seen since the rise of Ronald Reagan.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, however, came to Carter’s defense on Wednesday. “Jimmy Carter tells the truth about some, not all, but some of the rabid rage against President Obama,” Olbermann stated, “and is thus the recipient of the automatic blowback from those whose livelihoods depend on enabling the ragers to tell themselves it is not racism that they feel.”

In introducing the segment, Olbermann claimed that he could offer “at least 37? cases that he believes “prove President Carter to be correct.” He also noted that Rush Limbaugh had attacked Carter’s statements by saying “Jimmy Carter is the nation‘s hemorrhoid” — and retorted, “”Well, I got to defer to him here, the nation‘s asshole would know about the nation‘s hemorrhoid.”

Some of Olbermann’s examples seem fairly indisputable, like a poster used at tea party demonstrations that depicts Obama as an Africa witch doctor, or Limbaugh’s claim that Obama has made it okay for black kids to beat up a white kid on a school bus.

--Olbermann: 37 racist incidents prove Carter is right

Download video via RawReplay.com

Already losers, a now desperate GOP has made a Faustian bargain with bigots. It is significant that the so-called GOP 'leadership' has yet to issue a tepid reproach, let alone a strongly worded condemnation of a movement that is 1) un-American 2) bigoted 3) made of liars to a person!

Until the GOP leadership steps forward and condemns the 'tea bagger movement', I remain confirmed that the 'tea bagger' movement is encouraged by the highest ranking members of the GOP embittered by the legion of failures chalked up by their party since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

We have a right NOT to be intimidated!'

If we are attacked, we will fight back and have a right to do so! Violence must be met by an organized, effective and appropriate response. Tea baggers, having shown the world the face of bigotry, should just crawl back under their slimy rocks. They have very nearly undone the gains we thought we made in the sixties. They have rolled back the clock.

Encouraged by the GOP, bigoted liars like Rush Limbaugh, and, even worse, the hypocrites daring to spew this venom from the pulpit, the GOP resorts to form --encouraging ugly mobs to disrupt legal democratic town hall meetings. I urge that legal town hall meetings be defended by arms and armor. Enough is enough. The Democrats have a right to meet and they have a right to defend themselves against felony violence. They have a right to oppose and defend against a gang of would-be felons!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• Edward R. Murruow: Why the Fairness Doctrine Must be Restored
• It's the Hypocrisy, the Financial Collapse, the War Crimes
  
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

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Truth and Consequences: 'A Conspiracy of Rich Men'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Every criminal thinks he will get away with it. Every criminal hides the truth. Every criminal has a cover story. 911 is Bush's 'cover story'. Inexplicably, Bush critics are called 'conspiracy theorists' when, in fact, it was Bush who put forward an absurd theory for which the FBI has said there is no no hard evidence.

Now --let's get this straight: the media allows Bush to indulge a stupid theory and even promotes it. But if you should try it, even liberals and progressives who should know better will call you a 'conspiracy theorist'.

The 'official' conspiracy theory of 911 is an absurd and ridiculous fabrication believed only by idiots, a bullshit cover story designed to shock, awe and confuse.

It did this with its sheer audacity and vainglorious hubris. We should not be surprised, nor shocked, nor awed! Every criminal lies about his crime. We should have expected no less, nor more from Bush --a common liar, a common criminal.

There is historical precedent for Dick Cheney's meeting with Bush's financial supporters. A good description of that precedent is found in the work of St. Thomas More who wrote of what he called a 'conspiracy of rich men'. More's description of a 'conspiracy of rich men' presages Hitler's infamous meeting in which he 'closed' a deal with I.G. Farben, Thyssen, Krupp et al. Hitler would wage wars from which his sponsors would benefit if they would 'pony up', if they would finance and support his rise to dictatorship.

For the first time—in the last relatively free election Germany was to have—the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal.

We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. [note: this is clearly a reference to a 'planned' Reichstag Fire, Hitlers' 911!]

And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality ... All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3)

--William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

Hitler began his war on the cheap, clearly hoping to make it all up with war booty. Bush hoped to and did seize the oil fields of Iraq. It was a priority. Nazis are said to have paid 'subsistence wages' for big projects --the autobahn, new public buildings, the grand visions of Albert Speer, most which were never realized. Much is made of the money borrowed from Swiss banking houses. Many historians claim the Wehrmacht was but a shell despite its reputation. Panzer divisions were mechanized, the infantry walked. But, if we are to believe the memoirs of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's money problems had been solved by his industrial and American financiers.

It was Krupp who told the meeting: "Pony up!", pledging himself a million marks to prime the pump. American industrialists --led by Henry Ford --did their part for the Nazi cause. [See: Henry Ford and the Nazis; Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler; Hitler and the rise of the Nazis] By July 1942 'incriminating information' had filtered back to Washington from Ford of France; it was all about Ford's active and financial support for Herr Hitler's war of aggression against the nations of Europe. Not surprisingly, the information was buried, as Fox et al bury anti-Bush information today.

Those who benefit most from 'conspiracies' are motivated to convince you that 'conspiracies do not exist'. But --the fact is no one acting alone is capable of achieving much. Certainly, one person cannot wage 'aggressive war'. One person could not have pulled off 911. It's even difficult for one person to hold up a 7-11. While he discounts 'outrageous conspiracy theories', Bush would have you believe one: the official conspiracy theory of 911!

If 'conspiracies' did not exist, then why has the US Supreme Court handed down so many cases defining them and applying to them the laws of these United States? And why are there so many US laws having to do with 'conspiracies' if 'conspiracies' did not exist?

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

The fascist domination of American life and debate is possible because people have 'bought into' the pernicious notion of 'corporate personhood'. This notion facilitates More's 'conspiracy of rich men'. Mere legal abstractions are absurdly accorded rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people. Corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality, literally, a 'conspiracy of rich men: the Tea Baggers and idiots who have bought into it; and the GOP consultants, firms, and focus groups who dreamed it all up.

It's all top down, dishonest, disingenuous --symptoms of a failed but criminal organization: the GOP which represents and seeks to enrich the a ruling one percent. They are he beneficiaries of GOP tax cuts since Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982. Initially, the top 20 percent benefited as charts dating to the beginning of the Clinton administration indicate. Though Clinton succeeded in reversing the trend, much of the groundwork was still in place by the time Bush Jr assumed the White House. Today, as a result, just one percent of all Americans were enriched. The official stats are available from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The story is there for anyone desiring to get at the truth about the criminality of the GOP.

We cannot rely upon the likes of FOX, indeed, any network or media conglomerate to expose this hoax. Fox actively promotes it. And if the other so-called MSM are not overtly supporting, they give it free air time worth billions of dollars.

The NWO means different things to different people. As a result, very little written about it is meaningful or significant. Hitler had in mind a world dominated by the Third Reich. But recent use of the term does not necessarily mean Nazism. In some cases, it may be worse. Muddying the waters are the "Illuminati Conspiracy' theorists which get mixed with with other theories about Jesuits, international bankers and Jews. Who can sort all this stuff out?

There was, in fact, an Illuminati in Europe at the time of the 'Enlightenment'. How the term came to be associated with an obvious and criminal conspiracy like the Skull and Bones, I will never know. I do know this: SCOTUS, Federal Law, numerous lesser courts, a saint (St. Thomas More) and numerous state laws, ordinances and regulations all recognize the fact that crimes not involving conspiracies tend to be petty --simple theft, robbery, mugging etc. Real crimes --like those perped by Enron upon the state of California --are simply impossible for one person working alone. The sheer scale of such crimes require a conspiracy. The genocide of Jews by Hitler's Third Reich 'required' the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. The minutes of Heydrich's meeting at Wannsee are a testament to the coordinated planning required to pull off the murder of millions of people. One person --a lone gunman in a depository window --cannot contemplate or 'pull off' such a crime.

The Director Stanly Kubrick must surely have believed in the Illuminati. 'Eyes Wide Shut' with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman was Kubrick's take on the effect that an evil and kooky cult might have on individuals. Religious folk would say of 'members' that they had 'sold their souls'. Is that not what church people themselves have done? In psychological terms, such persons will have compromised their integrity, fracturing the 'personality'. Are there such groups, in fact? Probably! But the thing to be remembered is this: they have NO POWER but the power that is given them by their victims.

With regard to politics, the Skull and Bones is such a group and that they exist is a fact. They have no power but the monies that have been bequeathed them by wealthy Yale alumni and the oaths required of their pledges. This combination is most powerful when the initiate is a believer.

Now --I took an oath once! I pledged an honorary fraternity at University. But the oath I took was to 'integrity', 'scholarship' and the 'pursuit of truth'. I am very, very comfortable with that oath as I believe it to be the basis for a better and more egalitarian world in which individual rights are respected within the framework of a more egalitarian state which respects all peoples and all races. That oath is enough to make me an outlaw among the cultist GOP inclined.

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Recovering a Lost America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Europe is a life changing experience for many Americans, an important part of the 'American Experience'. The most obvious examples are famous writers from Thomas Wolfe to Ernest Hemingway'. They enriched American literature with their often personal experiences of Europe. Artists like James Whistler and John Singer Sargent were at once fresh eyes in Europe and glimpses of rich European culture for Americans. America's greatest cultural achievements may have been born of or inspired by the need to escape America.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

--Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel quoted in The Creative Process

I recall reading the 'Story of a Novel' by Thomas Wolfe at about age 15. I was deeply impressed by the 'homesickness' for America that Wolfe felt as he sat near the Champs-Elysees. Something about it --I think it was smell of mowed grass --reminded him of watermelons on the Fourth of July. An iron railing flashed him back to the board walk in Atlantic City. At the end of this journey of self-discovery in Europe, Wolfe had written 'Of Time and the River'.

It is an American tradition to leave America. In the 1995 remake of Sabrina with Harrison Ford and with Julia Ormand as Sabrina, there is a scene in which Sabrina's letter to home is heard in an off screen voice. Of Paris, she said: "...I found myself in Paris." Appropriately, La Vie en Rose was playing in the background. Fiction, perhaps! Nevertheless many Americans have found and continue to find "themselves" abroad. This is a Jungian journey of self-discovery as is life itself.

The only way to truly know your own country is to travel to some other country. The only way to understand or find yourself is to abandon your "self" and realize that the "self" is an invention and an illusion.
--Robert Dente - 10:14pm Jun 15, 2002 EDT (#15047 of 38607)

It is often described as a feeling of having recovered something lost. But that is what Americans have always done in Europe. The French relate to America in that respect. This 'American' story or archetype is an existentialist journey and thus the very core of French philosophy. It has been so since Descartes wrote: "I think, therefore, I am". From this 'cogito', Sartre would extrapolate: "A man is nothing more than what he makes of himself". British philosophy, by contrast, is objective.

I had been to Europe five times now; each time I had come with delight, with maddening eagerness to return, and each time how, where, and in what way I did not know, I had felt the bitter ache of homelessness, a desperate longing for America, an overwhelming desire to return.
During this summer in Paris, I think I felt this great homesickness more than ever before, and I really believe that from this emotion, this constant and almost intolerable effort of memory and desire, the material and the structure of the books I now began to write were derived.
--Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel quoted in The Creative Process

I am not alone but among many influenced by 'The Creative Process' , an anthology of original thinkers of many nationalities.

I'm very touched to find this book again as i browsed through the net, 25 years after i first bought it in a flee market in New York. The essay by Henry Miller, literally blew my young artist mind back then. It inspired me to follow on his crazy steps. I quit my civil service job(without official leave) and went to Paris ,where I lived for ten years. I read and re-read that essay on creativity and it just kept giving me the courage to step further into the unknown, thus changing my life completely.

--Reader Review, The Creative Process, Amazon.com

The great American exodus may have begun with the "expulsion" of Tories during the Revolutionary war. Most went to the Canadian provinces, but between seven thousand and eight thousand went to England --notably Thomas Danforth who had practiced law in the colonies.
Later, Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of War and Secretary of State, fled to England and became a successful lawyer. Other "confederates" fled to Canada, Japan, Australia, Egypt, Mexico, and Central and South America.
The most famous expatriates were the "lost generation": Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, Harry Crosby, Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Robert Hillyer, and Dashiell Hammett. They shared with the Dadists and the Surrealists an almost universal disillusionment following the "Great War".

Most of the expatriates congregated in Paris, France where they lived for several weeks, months, years, or even for the rest of their lives. During the 1920s, Paris was a bustling cosmopolitan hub where a rich history converged with a blossoming artistic community.
It was considered to be the cultural capital of the early twentieth century. Attracted by this atmosphere, the expatriates settled in Paris hoping to establish their literary identities and find a market for their work. Nevertheless, each author found a varying degree of success while living and writing in Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald, as compared to his friend and fellow author Ernest Hemingway, was much less productive in the mid-1920s.

--American Expatriates in Europe: The Lost Generation

John Singer Sargent was of another type, born of American parents in Florence. He grew up speaking several languages, most certainly English, French and Italian.

His 1884 portrait of New Orleans born Virginie Avegno Gautreau --better known as Madame X --became his most famous portrait. It's hard to imagine how one succeeds in scandalizing a society in which men were expected to have mistresses. Nevertheless, a single strap off the bare shoulder was too much for polite society. The hubbub persuaded the artist to quit Paris for London. He would not see America until 1887.

Many expatriates returned to US but --in the early 1920s --many returned to Europe. Their complaints about postwar American culture --standardized and vulgar --reverberate today in contemporary criticisms of FOX, football, and Limbaugh. For them --as well as contemporary American critics --Europe represented ancient wisdom, a sense of history lost amid post-modern Americana and suburban sprawl, mass media, Walmarts, and super-sized fries.
Though not an expatriate, William Wordsworth wrote of London:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

My first such impressions of London were not from Westminster Bridge looking east but Blackfriars looking west in the damp gray cold --London weather at its worst. That the Thames looked like gray slate did not deter the intrepid racers rowing quickly upstream. Later, of course, I would find Wordsworth's "London" from Westminster, just below the statue of Boudicca, a symbol of every people's revolt against tyranny and empire.

Indeed, what American, longing to find what had been lost in him/herself, could pass the piazzas of Florence, the cafés of Paris, the coffeehouses of Vienna, the cabarets of Berlin, the pubs of London and not be inspired to rediscover those parts not nurtured back home in Indiana or perhaps deliberately scorned in Texas? The tradition is not passive flight; it is the active embrace of life itself.

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The Imperial Origins of Feudal America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Any politician can cook up a run o' the mill recession, but it requires the GOP to revert an entire people to feudalism. Our status as vassal of China is the evidence and result of our feudal status. GOP policies from which a ruling elite of just one percent benefit are responsible; the results may be seen at the CIA's 'World Fact Book' which lists China at the very top with the World's largest positive Current Account Balance and the U.S. on bottom with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. Related to this is China's support for the U.S. dollar, a situation that China tolerates so that American consumers can buy Chinese product at Wal-Mart. If China should find this arrangement inconvenient, as many have said it is becoming, then China may 'pull the plug' and the dollar will collapse.

The economic decline of America is behind and the result of U.S. imperialism, a path about which we were well warned by a man that I have called the 'last honest Republican' ---Dwight David Eisenhower.

The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only ineffective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

--Ike's Cross of Iron speech

My facebook friend, calling himself Abbie Hoffman, points an accusing finger at 'military Keynesianism', also called 'barracks socialism':

"One could argue that the US got addicted to it after WWII, that we haven't resolved the issues and problems of the postwar era. Maybe that's obvious?"

That said, we have a long history of war-profiteering stretching back to the American Civil War, and a war about ever generation of our history.

--"Abbie Hoffman"(FB id),

The recovery from the Great Depression was slow. World War II created a fully employed economy seemingly overnight. New industries sprang up, new products invented, most memorably the Higgins Boat, the landing craft, manufactured in Louisiana remembred primarily for the drop down front that allowed US troops to disembark on the heavily fortified beaches of Normandy.

The lesson learned was the wrong one. A war time economy like that created in response to Pearl Harbor cannot last. Perpetual prosperity via Orwellian perpetual war is not possible.

It [military Keynesianism] unfolded primarily during George W. Bush's administration with legislation signed in to law by William Jefferson Clinton and the bills to continue this trend are still on the books! Scary, hey? This is why we have to break from spending our energy fighting the left vs. the right fight because it's just an illusion of smoke and mirrors and is taking our focus off of the real culprit; the super class, those who posses over 80% of the world's money supply and ehat needs to be done to reverse the ugly economic trends we now suffer.

--Nancy My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Oligarchy ~ Purchased By ‘The MIC’

Many colonial businesses, including Shipbuilders, made a good living off the 'Revolutionary' war. Rome, arguably, had been bankrupt long before the Praetorian Guard auctioned it all off to Didius Julianus for Greek currency --not worthless Roman sesterces. Much earlier, Rome invaded Dacia for its gold. Rome makes for thrilling movies and gripping TV series. But actually living in it was not nearly so glamorous. Like the U.S. today a tiny and shrinking aristocracy alone benefited from Roman conquest. The currency was all but worthless. Poverty was rampant and growing as 'aristocrats' seized small farms!

Empire is surely the last step toward feudalism --at least in the 'empire' scenario. A 'feudal' Europe filled the vacuum resulting from the fall of decadent Rome. A 'feudal America' may arise amid the ruins of the huge, flashy skyscraper-filled corporate empire of America. In his 'Decline and Fall of the American Empire', Gore Vidal puts a date upon the fall of the American Republic --1950. The 'imperial system', the 'security state' resulting, became the self-reinforcing mechanism by which the US would justify intervention against its 'interests' in far flung reaches --Korea, Viet Nam, the Middle East. The last President to eschew American interventions in various crises was JFK who refused US air cover for a CIA operation called the Bay of Pigs.

Many believe that one motive of several for his assassination, his cold blooded murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963. And Mr. Bugliosi, please don't try to tell me that Mr. Zapruder's camera movements 'explain' the apparent motion of JFK's head backward. I have practiced high-level, exacting photography with still cameras of all formats from 8mm motions picture to 4x5 large format product photography for commercial clients in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. Put me on the stand as an expert and I will testify, based upon my own frame by frame analysis of high rez Zapruder images that there is simply no way that camera movement will account, i.e, explain the movement of JFKs head backward upon being hit on Z -313. More on that in a future article.

Vidal points out that the USA has intervened aggressively, waging at least 300 wars in every part of the world despite the fact that the US Constitution requires a Declaration of War by Congress. The last time an American president sought and obtained congressional approval for a war was in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Today --US Presidents don't bother. My first recollection of the word 'intervention' was the use of US troops in Lebanon by Dwight David Eisenhower. It was not a war, we were told. It was just an 'intervention'.

Later, the US would intervene in Viet Nam, a failed and lost war, a perpetual war by Orwellian standards, a tragic loss of thousands of American lives for no good purpose whatsoever. When the US eventually withdrew, the 'two Viet Nams' united, predictably and what had been a killing field is now a prosperous and peaceful nation. We, America, lost that war but from the ashes a prosperous nation flourished. But --it must be pointed out --that result is an effect of our leaving Viet Nam --not our staying. Based on the facts of history, I will wager that when the U.S. leaves the middle east and the CIA is, likewise, muzzzled or, better, smashed 'into a thousand pieces, that part of the world, too, will rebound and prosper.

It is time that someone speak the unspeakable and painful truth: American citizens, some of them my classmates, were sacrificed for nothing in Viet Nam! American citizens, primarily those who could not afford to stay in school and thus 'earn' a deferment, were sacrificed for vainglorious, imperial ambitions. I deny that 'right' of nations and/or empires to to sacrifice its youth, its talent, its wealth for the benefit of the very, very few, an 'elite' few.

Viet Nam was the crime of murder committed by arrogant, vainglorious empire upon its people. It was a crime upon the people by the privileged which makes up just one percent of the US population. Shame! It is time that a real revolution --not a focus group approved, cooked up, top down bullshit propaganda stunt called 'tea baggers' --to put an end to his Leviathan called 'empire'!

'Tea Baggers' will not solve the problems of America

They are, rather a part of the problem.Tea baggers embrace a panoply of lies and various forms of bigotry to include racism at home and the demonization of 'Islam' abroad. Tea baggers are wrong, wrong-headed, mis-informed, perhaps, just plain stupid. They are not the solution; they ARE the problem, a cancer, a sore, an open wound, a scab that was picked.

Keynes himself would not have approved of 'Military Keynesianism' which follows from misconceptions about Keynes, often thought of by 'conservatives' as being just short of communist if not communist outright. It must be pointed out however, that it was a Republican --Richard NIxon --who opined "We are all Keynesians now!"

NOT!

Militarists, by way of the lobbies who benefit most from military spending, 'hijacked' Keynes and drag out his corpse to justify increases in the huge US military budget. Keynes, himself, would have known better. Keynes would have supported expansions of the economy but, as Gore Vidal pointed out, military spending actually represents a contraction --not an expansion, certainly not an expansion that benefits anyone but the rich ruling elite of just one percent of the total US population.

A 'tank', Gore says, is an economic black hole. And so it is returning nothing but 'booty' benefiting only the ever shrinking elite. During the Reagan years, an elite of just 20 percent benefited from the highly touted but unfair and unjust tax cuts. Everyone else lost ground as wealth trickled UP --not down! Things are worse now! Last time I checked, just one percent of the total US population owned more than about 95 percent or more of the rest of us combined. That is called an 'L - curve' in contrast to the normal distribution curve commonly referred to as a 'Bell Curve'. This outcome is the opposite of Keynesianism --an effective contraction of moneys spent, a contraction of the economy as a whole. The L - curve is the result.

The MIC will always create isolated pools here and there. For example, every half-assed town in TX used to compete, lobby and scramble for a 'military base'. Local businesses love it until the base closes down at which time the localized bubble bursts. It is a phony prosperity based upon a bubble that, of late, is created by war crimes. I always hated base towns where merchants always raised prices upon news of military pay raises and cut back jobs upon news of troop reductions.

As odious as are the 'military economies' found in base towns, congressmen exploit local fears of base closings, 'baracks' economics at its worst. Almost every congressman I knew in Texas would campaign on promises of new bases and/or expansion of current bases. Clearly --the modern Praetorians were not, are not content with a one-time sell-out; rather, they conduct an an on-going auction of empire. It's called Congress. Are we beyond reform? We will have to begin and/or restore some of the industries we've lost to China and Japan from scratch. Who will invest in us? Can we trust the liars and clowns who created all this mess to reform themselves? I doubt it.

My friend Abbie wrote: "The rich are going to be holding monopoly money". Indeed, and that is yet another way in which the rich will have screwed us over. The rich will sellout short and thus get even richer. That will, of course, result in a monetary collapse that will swamp everyone. Right now, we are all playing chicken. Millions --who bought into this while thinking themselves rich --will learn otherwise and quickly. As Billie Holiday sang: God bless the child that's got his own!

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

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How China Partnered with the GOP to Screw America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Chinese rulers and the US elites partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US became a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up the buck so that it can sell us junk via Wal-Mart.

These deals were all worked out with China by Bush Sr et al in the years following Nixon's infamous visit to the forbidden city. In these talks, US leaders, primarily the right wing/GOP, the US consumer and laborer was sold out. The US would become a vassal state, a slave state, a consumer society whose raison d'etre was to buy Chinese junk. The big losers are US workers and consumers.

I work at Wal-Mart (I'm involved in the UFCW's effort to organize W-M). One day, right after I was hired, I went around on my lunch break and just sort of randomly looked at where a whole bunch of products were made.

I think I found a blender that had been made in Malaysia. EVERYTHING else had been made in China.

I wonder how the typical US consumer would feel about Wal-Mart if it were named, say, US Corporate Capital & Chinese Slave Labor Coooperative?
--John Carter, on Facebook

The US used to make some of the products --appliances, electronic gear et al --that are now dumped on the US via an economic blight called Wal-Mart! The US ruling elite resented the high wages paid to unionized workers in affluent America. Nixon, Reagan et al solved the US labor 'problem'!

The solution: EXPORT US JOBS TO CHINA!

China pays slave wages and dumps the resulting cheap product on a US which produces very little these days. Concurrently, there are fewer futures, fewer opportunities, declining hope, rising despair --all the result of some thirty or forty years of right wing bullshit, lies, crookery and outright fraud. The GOP, for example, is not a political party. It is a crime syndicate and a kooky cult to boot!

The tragic truth can be found in black and white at the CIA's World Fact Book which lists the US at the bottom of the list with the world's largest negative current account balance, formerly called the balance of trade deficit.

While the US was spending time, resources and personnel in running 'elections' for its corrupt clients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and participating in pointless mediations between its intransigent Israeli partner and its impotent Palestinian client, the South Korean government backed a consortium headed by the Korea Electric Power Corporation in its successful bid on the $20.4 billion dollar nuclear power deal, opening the way for other billion-dollar contracts in the region (FT - page 13).
...
In contrast, the US is a declining world power with a deteriorating society resulting from its military-driven empire building and its financial-speculative centered economy:

1. Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners - Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars. China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.
2. The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; China invests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.
3. China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country's interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.
4. The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.
5. China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe (to threaten Venezuela), backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran.
6. China increases economic relations with dynamic Latin American economies, incorporating over 80% of the continent's population; the US partners with the failed state of Mexico, which has the worst economic performance in the hemisphere and where powerful drug cartels control wide regions and penetrate deep into the state apparatus. --Information Clearing House, The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning, James Petras

The US right wing robbed the US population with "trickle down theory" and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence:

In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].

• The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].
• One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].
• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent....
• Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
• Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined...Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We've gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn't seen since the teens and 1920s.’" [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].

The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].
Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest. 

--US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one's worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.

BBC: Al Qaeda NEVER Existed!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The BBC had revealed that Al Qaeda is a creation of US propaganda, in fact, a term never used by Bin Laden until after 911. The implications of the BBC documentary are enormous. It means that the US government of George W. Bush is guilty of the crimes of mass murder, high treason with respect to 911 and war crimes with respect to the mass murder of Iraqi civilians who had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. The specific crimes are violations of U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 which prescribes the penalty of death for violations thereof!

Bush --you and your administration are in deep shit! An ever angrier American population will --one day --bring you and your CIA co-conspirators to justice. In the meantime, I suggest that all members of the Bush administration look up the relevent federal laws, some of which prescribe death. Start with US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.

Al Qaeda NEVER Existed!

(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.

--U.S.C. § 2441 : US Code - Section 2441: War crimes

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

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