Republican Dirty Tricks

Archive for the ‘American Nightmares’ Category

Those who forget history are doomed to vote Republican.

In 1944 as World War II raged, Henry Wallace (FDR’s Vice President from 1941 to 1945) penned an article in the New York Times about the dangers of American Fascism. Wallace warned of the American Fascist’s deliberate perversion of truth and fact, monopolistic extortion, appeal to prejudice and fear while paying lip service to democracy, intolerance towards the “other,” evasion of laws designed to protect the public good, elevation of money and power before the welfare of human beings to feed insatiable greed. With the exception of right wing isolationism, the piece could have been written today.   Give it a read and draw your own conclusions.

The Danger of American Fascism
By Henry A. Wallace
The New York Times
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

Sunday 09 April 1944

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. 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.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
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Validating MYTH Won’t Revive the Dying Middle Class

Just about every single time I write something critical of the President (which is pretty regularly, given his bent towards capitulation) I get emails saying, “what’s he gonna do?  He can’t get tough with the Banksters!  What about Citizens United!?,” “Let’s not start a circular firing squad here!  We must support our President! ” and would you rather have President Palin?

Well no, I wouldn’t want a “President Palin,” but I not too sure that supporting someone simply because “they’re not Palin” is necessarily doing what needs to be done to pull the middle class out of this slide into Serfdom.

Some say that we have to support The President as he crawls over to the Chamber of Commerce and begs them to let some crumbs fall off their tables in America rather than continue to create jobs in places with underpaid labor pools… they say he can’t “go all ‘FDR’” on them because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizen’s United ruling which ignored precedent and opened the stops on corruption, allowing (for the first time) vast reservoirs of corporate funds to flood federal elections.

Despite the fact that the US chamber opposed “buy American” provisions of the 2010 jobs bill opposed bill to crack down on outsourcing and bring jobs to U.S., defended outsourcing of U.S. Jobs (arguing that Americans are “short of skills”) and vowed to fight any attempts to reduce outsourcing. (Read more Chamber offenses at U.S. Chamber Watch)

The President desperately tried to appeal to a sense of patriotism these actions clearly illustrate the Chamber does not possess.

The President said, “For all the disagreements, Tom (Donohue, the chamber’s president), that we may have sometimes on issues, I know you love this country.  I know you want America to succeed just as badly as I do.

Really?

Never mind the truth that the Chamber of Commerce is nothing but a right-wing lobbying group with no loyalty to country or community, recently exposed for working with private security companies to dig up dirt on the families and children of the Chamber’s political opponents and develop sabotage campaigns against progressive groups and labor unions. The Chamber is worse than an international organized crime family because, at least the mob follows ethical rules about targeting families.

The Washington Post reported in an article titled, “Obama’s speech to U.S. Chamber of Commerce disappoints progressive groups”

“A progressive New York group called the Agenda Project released a video slamming the president for meeting with the chamber, which over the past two years had been the equivalent of the White House’s arch-enemy. The chamber clashed with the administration over foreign money in elections, the health-care law, the financial regulation overhaul and numerous other issues.

‘Two weeks ago the president promised that he would work to rebuild people’s faith in government — meeting with the biggest lobbyists in the country is hardly a step in the right direction,’ said Erica Payne, the Agenda Project’s founder.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, was just as harsh:

‘It’s unclear what is more mortifying: President Barack Obama choosing the club of America’s notorious job-offshorers to talk about the importance of creating American jobs, or his rallying of his fiercest political opponents to help him overcome the majority of Americans who oppose more-of-the-same job-killing trade agreements and pass a NAFTA-style deal with Korea that the government’s own analysis shows will increase our trade deficit.”

Many of the President’s supporters resigned that capitulation is the best he can do given the circumstances, call him a pragmatist walking a fine line during the New Gilded Age on Steroids in the midst of Faux News propaganda, and unbridled financial corruption of elections.

But FDR had Father Coughlin who drew 40 million listeners frightened by economic hard times in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon radio program.   That’s double the 20 million Rush Limbaugh claims for his audience.   The same Big-Moneyed interests that Father Caughlin rallied the dupes of his day to protect, are also the same interests who actually plotted a fascist coup against FDR which was secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires, and only thwarted when General Smedley Butler, having been approached by the richest families in America to lead the military against Roosevelt, went to Congress and blew the whistle.

Today, we are still up against the SAME “Privileged Princes” of  “new economic dynasties, thirsting for power,” who “reached out for control over government itself,” but rather than take the argument to the People, President Obama naively tries to woo the “Economic Royalists” (and their Republican operatives in government) by appealing to their sense of patriotism and mercy for the middle class they have already systematically destroyed.
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It’s not surprising that a CBS poll found an overwhelming majority of Americans approved of President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday considering the speech seemed less of a report on the actual “state of the Union” than an exercise in something President Obama seems to value above all else… namely, trying to be all things to all people.

He called for investment projects and spending cuts, patted himself on the back for the tax cuts he passed, while insisting we simply can’t afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans that he extended. But more than just “compromises” to the same Republican ideas that have collapsed the economy for a second time in a century and pining for Republican approval like a battered spouse pining for an abuser, the President propagated an incomplete narrative that the American worker is on the ropes, not because of the 30 year assault on the New Deal policies that made the middle class possible, but due to changing “innovation” with “education” the remedy.

The President said,

” Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company.

That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear — proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.

They’re right. The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there’s an Internet connection.”

It’s true the “rules have been changed in the middle of the game”, but not solely because “revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business.” What changed was not just a matter of education – what changed was government policy.

This notion that the American worker suddenly found himself or herself in a losing competition against the rest of the world neglects the historical reality that “booming factories” and “busy Main Streets” did not materialize simply because we didn’t have to compete in a worldwide marketplace.

American workers have ALWAYS competed in a worldwide marketplace and operated in times of broad technological change – doing extremely well and coming out ahead.   To say, “competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors” is patently false. If we are reminiscing about the time when “finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown”,let’s remember accurately that was when the United States was the largest WORLDWIDE exporter of finished goods and “Made in America” was everywhere. Around the world, the American product defined “quality,” whereas “Made in China” was shorthand for “crap.”

The reasons American workers enjoyed a high standard of living was because our government protected homegrown industries from having to compete with countries with desperately underpaid labor pools, creating this environment through trade, tariff and domestic regulations that protected American industries from rapacious monopolistic competition and American Labor from having to compete with slave wage laborers throughout the world.
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With the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the right-wing apologists are out en masse, attempting to excuse the violent-rhetoric that always seems to flood our public discourse whenever America has a Democratic President.

As they are apt to do when Republican foot-in-mouth disease bites them in the ass, Republicans are positioning themselves as victims of the “lame stream media” rather that using this moment as an opportunity to take a long, hard, look at themselves and the consequences of their behavior.

It’s sad that “the Party of Personal Responsibility” only sticks to that motto when trying to deny children a school lunch program.  When it comes to taking “Personal Responsibility” for stoking fear and inciting unbalanced people to commit acts of violence…. FORGET IT!

How are we ever going to face and rectify this problem, which is a threat to our system of government itself, if we put trying not to offend Sarah Palin and her ilk over confronting the toxic environment their violent discourse fosters by excusing their incessant use of militaristic metaphors that act as a dog-whistle call to action for unhinged elements already teetering on the edge.

The truth is what happened to Gabrielle Giffords is the consequence of the inflammatory hate-speech against Democrats conveniently seems to happen when we have a Democratic President.
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Ahhhh!   Freedom….. to be groin-groped by blue-gloved Transportation Security Administration agents, or photographed “naked” in a full-body X-ray device?   These are the choices Ben Franklin couldn’t have imagined when he wrote in his notes to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1775, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Some will cry that Franklin didn’t live in a post-9/11 world as they try to convince us that violations of our 4^th Amendment rights are for our own good…  as was every other whittling-away of the rights meant to protect the people from the power of the state – currently laying comfortably in bed with the power of big moneyed-interests with profit as the highest virtue.

With our elected politicians acting as representatives to the companies that pay them, it’s no surprise that the 2 companies that make the majority of airport security scanners have doubled their lobbying efforts over the past 9 months to convince Congress that “Security Theater” now playing at an airport near you is an absolute necessity.

Once again…  just follow the money… and this time the trail leads right to the bank account of Michael Chertoff.

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These are terrible times for the struggling working people of America.  Not only has the 30-year Republican Reaganomics class war given us the widest gap between the rich and poor in decades, but has also turned America into the LEAST upwardly mobile of all industrialized nations as Republican propaganda outlets have many fellow citizens convinced that they aren’t “free” unless transnational corporations can ride them to the bank unfettered by “big government.”

It’s amazing.  The American People are either so exhausted from either working their 3 “uniquely American” jobs to notice, or too bogged down by their own Fox “News” activated filters of racism, homophobia, misogyny, religious fanaticism and/or fear to realize they are being played by the billionaires who have mercilessly destroying the American Dream.

It’s pretty distressing when you think about the fact that the rest of the civilized world shakes their heads in disbelief when they ponder the many layers of American stupidly – and how it mixes curiously with incredible awesomeness.

George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian, UK, “The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.”

The assault on intellectualism, an integral ingredient in economically unbalanced, Corporatist societies, is a prime characteristic for Teabag candidates and followers – lest their intellectual curiosity force them to connect the dots and reveal the actual culprit for their demise – the well-heeled funders of their anti-government “grassroots” movements.

With all the corporate media coverage of this midterm election, the tragedy is not a SINGLE mainstream network media outlet, save MSNBC, fulfilled their duties as the guardians of liberty to report the truth about the unprecedented amount of money ($300 million dollars – $123 Million from anonymous donors – the going cost to buy House Republican Representatives) the US Chamber of Commerce and its big business associates rained down into the Midterms to fund hit pieces aimed at knocking off Democrats around the country.

Of course, the stupid-enough-to-vote-Republican Teabaggers, funded by billionaire Oligarchs like the trust-fund-endowed Koch brothers and Karl Rove’s billionaire-boys-club American Crossroads PAC, are the useful idiots in this class war against the working people.
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The midterm elections are upon us, and America is about to get a real lesson in “be careful what you wish for.”

“Fiscal conservatives” who want to add massively to the Federal debt…  Cons who chant the mantra of “small government” who want Uncle Sam to intervene and force a woman to bear her rapist’s child…  billionaires using their own personal fortunes to turn the election of our so-called representatives into an auction for the highest bidder.

These are the flying monkeys swarming the American body politic to roll back the social progress of the last century and turn the government of the United States into an appendage of the affairs of billionaires.

I understand that most Americans are too overworked, disillusioned or disinterested to follow politics the way some of us do, but before some of you pull the lever for a Republican … please take a little trip down memory lane and recall that since the time they sold themselves out to the Railroads in the Gilded Age (another time of “Republican Ideas”) the GOP have not gotten out of bed in the morning unless they can make sure some bankster can ride the people to the bank unfettered by “pesky” government.

So that stench you smell as you enter the voting booth is the rotting corpse of the late, great, America Middle Class who Republicans who have systematically turned into Serfs.

The government stinks. Republicans have handed it over without apology to transnational corporations who operate solely in the name of profit – not country or community. But then again… they tell us that operating in the name of country or community would be some dirty Commie plot… so country and community be damned! See how that works?

I have some Republican friends who have had their “Road to Damascus” conversion after THEY lose their jobs and realize they can’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and marry a beer heiress or have daddy buy them a baseball team. Now they cry about the Republican obstruction to their unemployment benefits and are grateful for the lifelines keeping them off the street.   If Republicans get their boney fingers around the neck of government, they will squeeze the life out of her.

Keith Olbermann put together a “Special Comment” exposing the Teabagging Repugs attempting to destroy our government from the inside… describing them as a “group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the ’30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the Trusts and the Robber Barons.”

In 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention and warned, “Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.”

The speech is worth reading today in its entirety as it is tragically just as applicable now as it was then.
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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is trying to label the Democratic Party “The Party of Food Stamps,” so that must mean that Republicans are proudly the Party of Starvation –literally, figuratively and morally.  The Republicans are so morally bankrupt, in fact, they actually celebrate the fact that firefighters stood idle while Gene Cranick’s home burned to the ground and 4 family pets burned to death for forgetting to pay a $75 fee.  Welcome to the Teabag vision for America, where contempt is a virtue, compassion is reserved only for the rich and those in crisis are attacked as “sponges” and “freeloaders.”

Glenn Beck and the rest of the filthy cons leapt to the defense of this indefensible, morally bankrupt, act of contempt for a fellow American, but now Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association has weighed in, insisting that Jesus himself was a vindictive, greed-centered, free-market sociopath (curiously, like Fischer himself) who was not a feminized “love thy neighbor” type, but a “real man” who only gave a shit about himself.
Read more about it at Mediaite.

Click here for information on how to help the Cranick family.

Since the late 1860′s, when the Republican Party hired themselves out to the Railroad Tycoons in order to turn our government into a mere appendage of corporate affairs, Republicans have engaged in a class war against the working people of this nation.

Having nothing legitimate to offer working people, Republicans understand quite plainly that their leverage during election season goes down as the voting populace goes up.  This is common knowledge in the Republican establishment.  In fact,  Paul Weyrich, father of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups is on video telling his Republican co-conspirators,

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Republicans also know that whether the topic is Universal Health care or more tax giveaways for the rich, contrary to the incessant insistence on Fox News that America is a “center-right” nation, when asked plainly about specific issues, the American People clearly support a progressive agenda.

This being the case, the Republican establishment speak to the worst aspects of the human condition in order to make the people divided enough to consider their conquerors their allies.
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On the 9th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin – two of our more notable modern snake oil salespeople – did not miss the opportunity to politicize and commodify our greatest national tragedy.

Not one to let those Benjamins get away, Palin the quitter announced one of her Facebook pages:
“Glenn’s coming to the Last Frontier! I hope my fellow Alaskans (and anyone visiting from Outside) will join me this Saturday, September 11, 2010, at Anchorage’s Dena’ina Center at 8:00 p.m. Glenn Beck will be there – you won’t want to miss it. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster.com.”

Leave it to the quitter to put the words “9/11″ and “tickets available” together and charge “patriots” $225 to listen to her inane Jingoistic and Xenophobic musings about the “freedom” to be ridden mercilessly to the bank unfettered by pesky government.

It’s amazing to think that Beck – a person who proudly proclaimed to Fortune Magazine that he was purely an entertainer out for a fat payday and could “give a flying crap” about politics and Palin – a barely-literate, overly-arrogant and self-serving Governor who quit her elected office to chase the unholy dollar can command such an obedient following despite such transparent hypocrisy.

Yet there they are attempting to redefine the conversation as if the interests of billionaires as akin to the downtrodden huddled masses and we small people who dare attempt to make a society that works for all are the likes of those who.. say… prevented African-American children from attending an integrated school.

To normal people (non-Republicans), the shear arrogance of attempting to co-opt the mantle of civil rights is stunning. It makes sense that the barely literate followers of Beck and Palin would bite the hook, line and sinker and all.

It would be unimaginable to envision Martin Luther King Jr. turning the Civil Rights movement into a vehicle to incite paranoia against the government and peddle dodgy gold coins.

But for Teabaggers… these obvious conflicts of interest are given a “pass” – ironically by those who liken themselves such keen truth seekers that they can smell the nefarious communist plots embedded in every policy not meant to prop up the interests of their corporate masters.
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