Republican Dirty Tricks

Warren Buffett, one of the two richest men in the world knows that workers are losing the class war in spite of the repetitious drum beat of “free market” and “personal responsibility/pull yourself up by your bootstrap” metaphors heard incessantly on the right wing media. In 2006 he stated to the New York Times,

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Yes, the upper classes are winning since the time of Ronald Reagan and the outright assault on New Deal policies that CREATED the American Middle Class. This assault is no accident. Just read the Powell Memo and the plots are clearly mapped out in front of our own lying eyes.

Glenn Beck recently aired his so-called “documentary” titled “The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free Or Die” which propagated Jonah Goldberg’s pseudo-academic sham Liberal Fascism and its underlying thesis, that fascism is “properly understood” as “a phenomenon of the left.”

Crooks and Liars put together some essays from historians and political scientists in an effort to finally produce a serious response from academics to Goldberg’s and Becks’s traduced version of history.

Today, at History News Network, you can read the initial essays.

In addition to David Neiwert’s introduction, there are four essays:

– Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, leads off the essays with “The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism.”

– Roger Griffin, professor of political science at Oxford Brookes and the author of The Nature of Fascism, has a piece titled “An Academic Book – Not!”

– Matthew Feldman, professor of history at University of Northampton, and a co-editor of several academic texts on fascism, offers his assessment on why refuting Goldberg still matters: “Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions”.

– Chip Berlet, senior researcher at Political Research Associates and the co-author (with Matthew Lyons) of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, has penned a history of Goldberg’s arguments, “The Roots of Liberal Fascism: The Book.”

Normal people (non-Republicans) know that Fox News exists solely to confuse the willfully ignorant that progressive policies are tantamount to a Nazi invasion because these liberal policies usurp the Economic Royalists from their thrones. In this time of yet another Republican Recession teetering on the verge of Depression, the People are suffering under the weight of the very Republican policies that CREATED THEIR ECONOMIC TROUBLES. It is the MISSION of Glenn Beck, Fox News and the like to dupe their historically ignorant viewers into believing that the very policies that will SAVE them from the boot of Fascism are in themselves Fascist!

Pretty ingenuous, I must admit, and working. Case in point, I attended a gathering this weekend where a working class woman, who’s life is no doubt better due to the very liberal policies she rails against, actually defended the “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations the rights of natural persons and allows unfettered corporate monies to infest our so-called “one-person, one-vote, free and fair” election system because Glenn Beck assured her it was OK. Of course he did. He exists solely to turn the People against the very policies that get in the way of corporations riding their complicit asses to the bank – as if their compliance will somehow lessen the load.

The fact is, liberal policies CREATED the American Middle class – before the New Deal, we had a country that was reflective of “Oliver Twist” – an upper class that ran everything and had all the wealth (Remember robber-barons?) a small mercantile class and an EXTREMELY LARGE pool of poor, cheap labor to exploit.  Read Thom Hartman’s article “Scrooge & Marley, Inc. – The True Conservative Agenda.”

But the “Scrooge and Marley” world is the Republican Worldview - and their policies reflect it. They simply can’t thrive if an empowered, educated, financially stable middle class exists because they stand up for themselves and fight for THEIR OWN AGENDA – not the agenda of their wealthy overlords. They say, “Hell NO, we won’t go!” to their stinking corporate wars, they DEMAND fair wages, benefits and working conditions! Of course, when they do stand up, part of the backlash is always to be labeled with the moniker, “Communist, Socialist and now “Fascist” – knowing that their viewers have little grasp of those concepts but know they may or may not have something to do with Hitler. But the truth is, their correlation of “Liberalism” and “Fascism” is an outright lie debunked by legitimate historians and academics but part of the successful propaganda campaign propagated by Fox has been their ability to instill mistrust into any piece of information that doesn’t come from the lying mouths of right wing pundits.

All one had to do is look at the reality of our daily lives. The truth is that every time Republicans get their boney fingers around the neck of power, the country breaks out in recession, depression, war, division and economic insecurity – as the gap between the rich and poor gets wider and big CEO salaries increase.

Here’s some more truth: If you think that a 40 hour workweek, weekends, 8 hour days, not competing with CHILDREN for jobs, and every other benefit that MADE the middle class came because the wealthy were feeling generous one day, then you have been listening to Limbaugh too long.

There is also no “free market.” We The People decide that certain standards should apply so greed doesn’t trump all other considerations such as health, safety and security. To put it simply, I kinda appreciate the fact that my ass doesn’t explode with diarrhea every time I drink out a tap because some liberal believed in, and fought for, regulations and standards!

THANK YOU FDR, TRUMAN and all the other PROUD LIBERALS who stood up to the well-heeled, powerful Bankster interests and worked on the side of We The People! Then again, they called them Communist and Socialist and Anti-American… as they do every time the PEOPLE stand together against corporate power,

FDR himself said it best in his speech to 1936 Democratic National Convention:

“For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair.  If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.“   Read and here the whole speech here.

Democrats need only to reach back to their own history for inspiration – not some Republican Myth about Reagan that in reality made a nightmare of the “American Dream” – and not let the Economic Royalists and their bought and paid for Republican Party redefine history, reality and most of all, our future.