Republican Dirty Tricks

It’s become common to call the Freshman Teabagger Reps in the House “hostage takers” for their willingness to squeeze the life out of vital programs which aim to improve the lot of those on the wrong side of Reaganomics, but these Teabaggers should more accurately be labeled what they are – Terrorists – willing to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve political goals – even if it means the nation’s and the world’s economy crashes into Depression.

Unfortunately, rather than a leader with a backbone and stomach to fight these terrorists, we have Obama… someone who has confused bipartisan “compromise” with “surrender” and whose willingness to offer Social Security and Medicare to those who want them destroyed has done more damage to what was left of the Democratic Party’s core principles of giving voice to the working class in the halls of power than any Teabag terrorist could ever have dreamed during a Republican administration.

On Saturday, Obama negotiated a debt deal in private with Mitch McConnell, the man who said his greatest political objective was not to create jobs for the unemployed, but to make Obama a one-term President.  Given that Obama pines for Republican love like a battered spouse pining for an abuser, it’s not surprising Obama met with his turtle-looking closet-case nemesis without any of his supposed Democratic allies – who just can’t understand their star-crossed love.
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Among the many confirmations of government’s corrupt collusion with powerful interests, the News Corp hacking scandal and Murdoch denial reminds us that the Republican Party is not only a nest of scientifically-proven inherent cowards who lack the desire, much less the ability, to govern an evolving society populated with citizens who strive to live a decent life, rather than toil thanklessly for a handful of aristocratic overlords, it is a collection of greed-centered ghouls, ultimately motivated by a desire to save their own ass – all while deflecting blame so their privilege can continue.

As Canadian/American Keynesian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, famously explained,

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

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For all their flag waving, Republicans hate America.  Don’t get me wrong… They like the LAND that comprises America for whatever natural resources can wrested from the ground, profited from, and discarded without care. The unfortunate rubes born on that land are merely tolerated – for the time being. Due to the system of government our Founding Fathers entrusted to us, Republicans have no choice but pretend they are working for these useful idiots – until they can actually permanently eliminate the “problem” altogether by somehow denying them the right to vote – and they’re working on it.

It doesn’t matter that in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,”  in over 40 states, Republicans are trying to make it much more difficult for poor people, the elderly, students and minorities to vote – because those are people who typically vote Democratic.

Under the guise of tamping down on the mythical “voter fraud,” Republicans are purposefully attacking consistently Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Watch Rachel Maddow lay out the Republican Voter Suppression Strategy for 2012 in her must-see report:

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In the waning days of the Bush administration, 8 years after the Supreme Court interjected itself into a state vote count to usurp the will of the people and install the losing candidate into the Presidency, many could never have imagined that Barack Obama – the person we knocked on doors for, donated parts of our dwindling paychecks to, and voted for with the hopeful assurance that he would work to restore the balance of power between working people and their well-heeled “betters” – would be offering Social Security and Medicaid to the people who have wanted to destroy it for generations.

We rested assuredly that the election of Barack Obama would prove that our system of government worked and the crimes and abuses that inevitably accompany power, greed and financial influence could be rectified through our electoral process for the sake of the General Welfare – without the pain of bloody revolution.

But we were warned. Ralph Nader, who famously called Obama an “Uncle Tom” for corporate interests, and Cynthia McKinney were widely chastised for throwing cold water on the “hope” that the system of government passed down would be enough to remedy the tyrannies our founders knew all too well – one tyranny being the subjugation of the working class by the rich who use their wealth to corrupt government into an appendage to their own affairs.

After Obama’s win, Cynthia McKinney wondered what was the “change we could believe in,”

“What kind of change are we really going to have? I wish we could assume a break from the special-interest orthodoxy that seems to have a grip on Washington, D.C. It is this special-interest orthodoxy that has led to war and occupation, civil liberties attacks, social injustice, unemployment, poor yet very costly education and healthcare.”

The tragedy and shame is that America’s inequality between rich and poor is worse than Cameroon, Ivory Coast and revolutionary Egypt and hopes for Obama to champion actual “change” don’t seem to be coming to fruition.
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The Reich-Wing corporate media protection racket is outraged, I tell you, outraged that President Obama challenged Congress to eliminate tax breaks on corporate jets in order to help stave off a default crisis – accusing Obama of waging “class warfare.”

Any half-awake person with a brain knows that Republicans always accuse the other side of engaging in the very dirty tricks that they, themselves, have honed to an art. Their tactic of projection and deflection goes like this – reproach the other side for doing what you are flagrantly guilty of before the other side can accuse you of it. The preemptive accusation disarms the opposition, leaving them looking petty, unoriginal and unable to bring it up in their own defense.

Despite the fact that progressive taxation is essential to maintaining a free society, the accusation of “class warfare” is an old standby that Republicans charge whenever anyone dare suggest that the rich should actually pay their fair share to maintain the civilization that has benefited and profited them.

Tax The Rich – For The Sake of a Free Society

Class Warfare is as old as recorded history. Our Founding Fathers – students of the Liberal Age of Enlightenment – were aware of the corrosive influence of money in government.

Thomas Jefferson said, “another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometric progression as they rise.”

Teddy Roosevelt observed that American democracy could easily be destroyed by the rich through subversion of our political institutions from within. After the bank panic of 1907, he said the “malefactors of great wealth” were “responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned Americans about the great dangers of “the military-industrial complex.”

Franklin Roosevelt warned, “the liberty of democracy is not safe if people tolerate growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger that their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism” and Abraham Lincoln warned, “I have the Confederacy in front of me, I have the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers more.”

Still, Republicans champion policies that serve to destroy the economic security of the working class.

Philip Slater wrote in the Huffington Post,

“Republicans, who have always hated democracy, wanted to create the caste system that exists in the most wretched Third World nations — a system in which a tiny minority of wealthy individuals live off the labor of the deeply impoverished 98%, and maintain their stranglehold through a corrupt military dictatorship. This pattern, which prevailed in most of Latin America throughout the 20th Century, with strong support from corporate America, is one for which Republicans have always secretly yearned. Hence Republican policies have consistently pushed us toward it — bolstering the military, concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands, shifting taxes from the rich onto the poor, and seeking, with considerable success, to make education a privilege of the wealthy rather than a right for all Americans.”

Despite the fact that Republican policies turned the surplus they were handed into a deficit, the US into the LEAST upwardly mobile with the widest income disparity of all industrialized nations, and crashed the economy 2x in a century, they are promising MORE OF THE SAME. While working people suffer, the RICH have never had it so good. Why promote these policies? Because a desperate workforce is an obedient workforce – and the Republican ideology can be broken down to 2 words – CHEAP LABOR.

Lately, Republicans have their class war cards plainly on the table. Republicans blatantly promise to end every policy that made the American middle class possible in the first place. This means they promise to end the minimum wage, end child labor laws, destroy unions, end Medicare, turn Social Security over to their Wall Street benefactors AND permanently slash taxes for the wealthy while upping them for the rest of us.

All the while, their transnational corporate media protection rackets blare on about the poor, put upon, rich… and the selfish working people who dare attempt to retire in dignity after a lifetime of work.
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As the great recession continues, failed “trickle down” theories are being recycled under a different name – “kick start.”

When politicians – Republicans and DINO Consevatdems alike  - promise to enact policies that will “kick start” the economy, they are not referring to proactive, job-creating, initiatives reminiscent of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corp, but the same, tried and failed class warfare “trickle down” policies that collapsed the American Working Class to begin with.

Economist and Professor Richard Wolff was interviewed for the public affairs program called “Making Contact.”  He said, “Capitalism has a built in tendency to collapse,” and “we are in the middle… or to be more honest… in the early stages of a really big one.”

He explained, “In a Capitalist system, the economic crisis we are in today was entirely predictable.”

In other words, one does not have to be a “Psychic Friend” to predict that rampant deregulation and low marginal tax rates similar to the atmosphere that plunged us into the FIRST Republican Great Depression in the 1930’s, would have a similar result when implemented a second time.

On the back of the most recent Conservative-policy-induced collapse, Republicans are pushing for even more tax cuts for the wealthy, despite the fact that today’s tax rates are low by historical standards-and even lower for the rich.   In fact, the economy we are in today is STILL the Bush economy…  you remember… the economy that Republicans held unemployed Americans hostage to continue.

The budget shortfalls are allowing Republicans in local governments to cry “we’re broke” as they make up the gap by enacting heavy cuts to state worker pay, community colleges, state health care programs, childcare programs and other programs vital to the populace they economically hobbled.

Listen to Richard Wolff explain how we got into this economic mess, who’s to blame, and how, if we get organized, the flow of resources might be reversed, here:

It doesn’t matter that the Congressional Budget Office confirmed that tax cuts have the LEAST simulative effect on the economy.  It doesn’t matter that even their own Bill Kristol admitted that corporations have plenty of money and corporate tax rates aren’t hurting anyone. Businesses invest when there is an unmet demand. As the Billings Gazette reported, “The Clinton era slogan of “it’s the economy, stupid” should now be “it’s demand, stupid.” To stimulate the economy and create jobs, good policy gets the money to the folks with the highest propensity to spend. That’s not the wealthy, who will spend very little if any of their tax savings.”
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We live in a world where Rupert Murdoch’s Terrorist Network, Faux News, runs a 24/7 protection racket for transnational corporations, and willfully ignorant “average Joes” sit silently glued waiting for their cue to rally for their own demise.

Still, the word is getting out. Republicans are wholly-owned subsidiaries of said transnational corporations, and, with no loyalty to country or community, have never done a single thing to benefit the working people of this nation.

Republicans are inept by design, offering the same old failed policies again and again and again.

Bob Hertbert of the New York Times noted,

“What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?”

…The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.”

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Republican­s have no solutions because they created the problem.

The latest Republican failure is the Paul Ryan budget plan, which kills Medicare and gives American seniors a coupon to purchase health insurance on the private market.

In addition, Ryan’s budget is a concoction of fantasy and outright fiction. As Slate reported, “…economists from across the spectrum gave the accounting the smell test and called it spoiled.” Read the breakdown of Ryan’s fuzzy math here.

Of course, normal people (non-Republicans) were not surprised that the Ryan plot to usher in Republican neo-Feudalism was merely just ANOTHER ideologically-based Republican failure waiting to get its claws around the neck of a nation made weary by 30 years of other] ideologically-based Republican failures.

Watch Anthony Weiner speak to the fact that Republicans have ALWAYS opposed the social safety net that Democrats created:

In the lead up to the 2010 midterms, Chris Matthews pressed Republican strategist Todd Harris to answer the question, “what has the Republican Party done for America?”

Matthews repeatedly asked for examples, as he cited negative examples like Bush-era spending bills, Katrina, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Harris had one attempt, “The Bush administration kept the country safe,” which Matthews shot back, “Except the one big day.”

“YouTube is watching,” he told Harris. “You’re the Republican consultant. One of the best in the country. Tell me what the Republican party has done for this country in the last ten to 20 years.”

Harris was silent.

Still, the poor, dumb, people of America sent Republicans to the House – like a chicken giving Colonel Sanders the key to the Chicken Coop.

Watch the exchange here:

The Republicans have us purposefully on a race to the bottom, promising to implement more of the same policies that turned the surplus they were handed into a deficit, the US into the LEAST upwardly mobile with the widest income disparity of all industrialized nations, and crashed the economy 2x in a century.
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We all know that the truth has a well-documented liberal bias that Conservative, so-called “free market” ideology – with its long history of failure – simply cannot abide.

With that in mind, the Reich Wing of America is doing all they can to graft their dead-end ideas onto the minds of the young in the hopes of enlisting more zombie acolytes to cheer their own demise.

Case in point: for the past three years, American children all over the country have been subjected to a curriculum originating in a book titled “The United States of Energy,” published by Scholastic with the (undoubtedly) unbiased sponsorship from the good people at the American Coal Foundation.  The book regaled the students with a litany of completely positive coal facts – sans any of the nasty down sides.

A recent NY Times article stated,

“What they do not mention are the negative effects of mining and burning coal: the removal of Appalachian mountaintops; the release of sulfur dioxide, mercury and arsenic; the toxic wastes; the mining accidents; the lung disease.”

Unfortunately, the pesky public found this sponsorship a bit egregious and suspected the people at the American Coal Foundation were merely trying to indoctrinate our impressionable youth with pro-corporate propaganda. So, after some outcry, the American Coal Foundation announced it would no longer offer our budding consumers this particular title. Read more about that incident here.

But this example isn’t the only assault Conservatives are waging against the minds of American youth.

The Koch Brother menace is now using their trust fund to corrupt institutes of higher learning in order to mold America to their liking – a nation where the rich run and own everything and everyone else knows their “place.”

The AmericaBlog has put together a detailed accounting of this latest disturbing development in the Oligarch’s assault on the American People.
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Since President Obama did something that Bush said he was “truly not that concerned about… “   – namely, bring Osama Bin Laden to justice –  Republicans have been trying to spin the event to try and keep those who authorized torture out of jail by claiming that it was these “enhanced interrogation techniques” that led to the terrorist’s whereabouts.

Never mind the fact that these claims have been denied by the war criminal Donald Rumsefeld, as well as others in the Intelligence communities… normal people (non-Republicans) know that the truth rarely, if ever, gets in the way of a CONservative’s mission to serve their dead-end, ideological agenda.

The Christian Science Monitor reported,

“Several former military interrogators refute assertions that waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ methods provided intelligence that led the US to bin Laden. Some lament lost opportunity to grill Al Qaeda’s leader.”

In fact, it has been reported that the torture of detainees may have actually hindered and slowed the hunt for Bin Laden, not hastened it.

From The Huffington Post.:

“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.

Disgracefully, the inherently cowardly Reich Wingers hold the view that waterboarding is something to crow about.
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The last refuge of failure is myth… and myth is the only thing Republicans have to hold on to if they have any hope of not being relegated to where they belong – permanent minority status.

Since the Sunday our legally-elected President relegated Osama Bin Laden to the bottom of the sea, Republicans have had their propaganda machines running overtime to try and give credit to Bush – the man who not only let Osama Bin Laden go when cornered in Tora Bora, but… in late 2005… actually DISBANDED the CIA group (Alec Station) who’s sole focus was to catch the world’s most notorious Islamist extremist terrorist

As pathetic as it is for Reich Wingers to attempt to give Bush credit for something he doesn’t deserve is, it also speaks volumes to the fact that Republicans have absolutely nothing of their own to boast about, and are FORCED to attempt to co-opt the successes of their rivals.
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