Republican Dirty Tricks

The term “plutocracy” is defined “a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.” It also applies to a form of government where a wealthy class controls government from behind the scenes, dominating the political arena, directly or indirectly.

Economist David Korten writes,

“Our curent economy is accurately described by investment advisors and marketing consultants as a “plutonomy,” a combination of the terms “plutocracy” and “economy.” It refers to an economy in which income growth is confined to those at the top of the wealth pyramid. They use the concept as a guide to framing profitable investment and marketing strategies.

The is the mirror opposite of economic democracy, which is an essential foundation of political democracy, both foundational to the Living Democracy of Earth Community.

Bringing democracy to these United States, begins with a new story that acknowledges we have never had it. In the words of Frances Moore Lappe, “To save the democracy we thought we had, we must take democracy to where it’s never been.”

In other words, in order to truly realize the dreams of our Founders and create a government of, by and for the People, we must ensure economic egalitarianism through policies that promote it. We came close with the New Deal, so vehemently opposed by the “privileged princes” of the ruling class that they actually plotted a fascist coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Watch this chilling BBC documentary on the “Business Plot.” Pay special attention to the similarities of what we are up against today… including FDR’s own “Teabaggers” – “The Liberty League.”
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

President Barack Obama was asked at the Facebook town hall about Paul Ryan’s “bold” and courageous” plan to further empower the powerful and responded, “The Republican budget that was put forward I would say is fairly radical. I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous,” explaining that the Republican budget plot would (par for the GOP course) reduce taxes for corporations and the wealthy by, among other ideologically-based initiatives, cutting funds to clean energy programs and transportation.

“I guess you could call that bold. I would call it shortsighted,” and later added, “Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor or people who don’t have lobbyists or people who don’t have clout.”

The good news for normal people (non-Republicans) about Paul Ryan’s budget is that we can finally all stop pretending the GOP has the same goal as Democrats to create a strong, economically vibrant, working class, but simply holds different ideas how to get there. If those days ever existed, they ended in the late 1890s when they sold out to the Railroads and never looked back.  Since that time, the Republican Party does not get out of bed in the morning unless they can turn the government into a mere appendage to the affairs of banksters and corporations and continue to be so wedded to the same policies that have tanked the economy twice in a century that economists like Nouriel Roubini (as well as anyone with a brain) are forced to speculate that Republicans are actively trying to tank the economy for political gain.

The GOP agenda can be boiled down to 2 words: CHEAP LABOR… and Paul Ryan’s budget plan is about ensuring the Plutocrats finally eliminate the last vestige of middle class “uppityness” – our Social Safety net. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ Liberty requires opportunity to make a living – a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” Paul Ryan is an ideologue who admitted that his budget was not just a budget, but a “cause.” That “cause” is the subjugation of the working class to plutocratic masters.

Obama buys the Republican myth of CUTTING our way to prosperity.

A last-minute budget deal cutting billions in spending postponed the Republican threat of a government shut down until next Thursday… thus giving Obama more time to capitulate to GOP terrorist demands.

Clearly, rather than fight for Democratic ideals – say… like the ones that lifted us out of the disaster of the FIRST Republican Great Depression… The so-called leader of the Democratic Party has bought into to Republican meme that we can “CUT” our way to prosperity.  We cannot.

Look at history.  Economists attributed the economic recovery out of the first Republican Great Depression from heavy government deficit spending. From the time he was inaugurated, Franklin D. Roosevelt increased spending with programs directly geared to putting people to work and the economy recovered partially from 1933 until 1936 until he caved to a Republican Congress bloviating about an unbalanced budget, cut spending, and the nation plunged into another recession.

Watch Thom Hartmann explain how Republican polices created and prolonged the Great Depression:

Republicans believe that tax cuts for the rich and just plain CUTS for everyone else is the “remedy” for the economic disasters Republican policies create, not because it creates a vibrant economy and strong middle class, but simply because it is Republican dogma. 

The Republican answer to the problems caused by their love of deregulation will always be “more deregulation” just like their answer to the problems caused by unfunded tax-cuts for the wealthy will always be “more unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy.”

It doesn’t matter a whit to Republicans that David Stockman, the father of Republican “trickle-down” economics recently made the media rounds to tell the late, great American Middle Class something they already know – that Reaganomics was a abysmal failure.

Yet, Barack Obama capitulates to the same class war policies that got us into the mess to being with, promising nothing but more of the same widening of the gap between rich and poor.

It makes no difference that Repug policies are the lynchpin on which all the destruction is hung–their true goal is to maintain the Plutonomy. Period.

In their own private Republican apocalypse, a world where the rich run and own everything is not a problem because everyone else, as their hero Ayn Rand says, is a “parasite.”
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The alarm is ringing and many Americans once too exhausted to face the fact that they were been hoodwinked by 30 years of misinformation and myth into believing the American Dream was within their grasp, have stopped hitting the snooze button.  They’re living in the dreams of yesteryear but the reality of today.

It’s all their fault, they’ve been told.  If only they work harder, longer hours without ever taking a vacation or day off… they’ll be able to eventually grasp the prosperity those on the upper end of the income ladder have been holding in front of them like a carrot on a stick.

But let’s face it, my fellow Americans.  We’ve been are under attack…  sometimes stealthily, sometimes overtly…  In fact, we are at war.  Class War.

Being the aggressors, Republicans know this, so they have tried desperately through their corporate protection racket propaganda outlets to redefine “Class War” to mean that horrible thing that occurs when society dare request that the rich pay their fair share of taxes.

The common retort is that the rich already pay most of the taxes, but Republicans neglect to complete the second half of that statement… which is… that the rich pay more taxes because they control the vast majority of the wealth.   Simply put, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay- a fact of modern American life that began to come to fruition with the inauguration of Reagan.

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FDR once said, “Yes, we are on the way back — not by mere chance, not by a turn of the cycle. We are coming back more soundly than ever before because we planned it that way, and don’t let anybody tell you differently.”

Republicans (and DINOS) would have us believe that all our economic woes are simply a result of the “natural” ebb and flow of the market, but they are not. They PLANNED IT THAT WAY.

It’s the age-old struggle. The dream of America was that “We The People” ruled ourselves, rather than an inter-generational aristocracy akin to the one we fought a revolution to escape. Republicans (& DINOS) have been putting that oppressive system back together piece by piece since America swallowed the Reaganomics Voodoo we are now dying from.

The objective of Right – which cares about America as much as it does for Mother Earth as a whole – is to return us to the economic order last seen in the Gilded Age. This was an America with incredible wealth disparities, nonexistent labor standards and a government indifferent to the plight of the average citizen. FDR reflected on that society when he said, “Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent. “

The one ironic tragedy of FDR’s New Deal was that it created economically stable middle classes who, with the aid of incessant Right Wing misinformation campaigns, were convinced their interests and the interests of billionaires were one in the same.

As memory of pre-New Deal life faded with the passing of our grandparents, many “Average Joe” Americans were thoroughly propagandized into voting Republican – and therefore voting for their own demise.
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WASHINGTON — Liberal radio talk show host, Mike Malloy, along with the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, and more than 100 other anti-war protesters were arrested outside the White House on Saturday, March 19, 2011 in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.- led illegal war and occupation in Iraq.   Ironically, the demonstrations came on the same day that the U.S., French and British suddenly discovered there were human rights concerns in oil-rich Libya and started a bombing assault to establish a no-fly zone over the country where the awakened brutal dictator Gaddafi reigned unmolested for 40 years.   The attack was the largest international military action since the Iraq war began on March 19, 2003.

Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, March Forward!, Code Pink and ANSWER Coalition sponsored the rally.  Along with Mike Malloy, other speakers included Daniel Ellsberg (who was also arrested the following day protesting outside Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia), Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges.

After the rally, the protesters conducted a silent march which culminated in taking to the White House fence shouting anti-war slogans such as, “Stop the War! Expose the Lies! Free Bradley Manning!”

“Charged with 34 counts, including ‘aiding the enemy,’ Bradley Manning faces life in prison and maybe execution. He is accused of illegally downloading hundreds of thousands of secret military and State Department documents and giving it to WikiLeaks.

To many Americans, Manning is a traitor. To many Americans, Manning is a hero.

To Daniel Ellsberg, Manning is something else.

‘I was that young man; I was Bradley Manning,’ he says.”  CNN Reported (although, if you notice in the article, they couldn’t bother to get a picture from Saturday’s event, but instead chose to run one from the rally in December.)

The protesters on Saturday were arrested after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House.

Click the video on top of the page for Mike Malloy’s speech at the rally, subsequent arrest, release and final commentary regarding his experience.


Daniel Ellsberg’s comments:

Ralph Nader’s comments:

Chris Hedges’ moving comments:

Poor Michele Bachmann… it’s not that she is appallingly stupid to the history she purports to be an expert of, it’s the damn liberal media that reports her appalling stupidity who deserve chastising. Much like her sister in stupidity, Sarah Palin, Bachmann has the CON victim act down pat.

The Boston Herald Reported, “Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann yesterday made her Granite State debut with historical and geographic missteps.

“You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord,” she said at an event organized by the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, according to Politico.com. “And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors.”

Too bad for Bachmann, the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired in Massachusetts.”

TPM continued, “Somewhat ironically, Scott Conroy of RealClearPolitics reports that Bachmann also talked a bit about the importance of teaching children the facts and letting them draw their own conclusions. “I don’t think that our public schools are necessarily the place where one fixed set of political beliefs should be imposed on students,” she said. “I think that knowledge, facts, and information should be on the table, and let students decide what their beliefs should be.”

Bachmann’s gotten her American history wrong before. Back in January, she lauded the United States for its early commitment to diversity. “It didn’t matter the color of their skin, it didn’t matter their language, it didn’t matter their economic status,” Bachmann said of the first settlers. She also praised the founders who she said “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Late Update: Bachmann responded in two posts on her Facebook page:

“So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!

And by the way… That will be the last time I borrow President Obama’s tele-promoter!”

But, as the Minnesota Post points out, she made the same mistake the night before on the sea coast of New Hampshire: “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world, you are the state of Lexington and Concord (sic), you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.”

Bachmann has gotten into the habit of making ignorant statements about American history.    She claimed the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery and that John Quincy Adams was a founding father who lived to see slavery’s end..  Not surprisingly, Bachmann is the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus-  who took it’s name from the astroturf front group funded by billionaires, dedicated to manipulating “Average Joe” dupes into rallying for the agenda of said billionaires while the billionaires ride said dupes to the bank unfettered by the only institution large enough to stop them – our government of “We The People” our Founders fought and died for.

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It must be tough for anti-American Repugs having to try & pretend to operate in a constitutionally-limited democratic republic, when in their chests beat the hearts of filthy, cowardly, authoritarian dictators.

That being the case, and well aware that they were losing in the court of public opinion, Republicans rammed through legislation actively targeting the working class by inventing a new “nuclear option” to pass their union-killing bill with no quorum, no discussion and no debate.

Despite the ruse that Republicans insisted that stripping collective bargaining was a “fiscal” issue, Repugs violate the Wisconsin “Open Meetings” law and voted to destroy unions as a stand alone, non-”fiscal” bill.

Clearly, Republicans have been attacking Unions on an ideological, not “fiscal” basis. The “fiscal” excuse being trotted out all over the nation in places stupid enough to vote Republican as the excuse to hammer the last nail into the coffin of the late, great, American middle class and ram through the Republican pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda. A further irony being, if fiscal shortfalls exist around the country, they have been the result of 30 years of abysmal Republican policies.

From Slate:

Up to now, the Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin has been frozen because all fourteen Senate Democrats will not return to the state to negotiate it. There’s no quorum — the bill, which consists of many fiscal components, can’t pass.

Republicans in the Senate are trying an end run around that now. They have called a conference committee meeting — which is open to the media — where the key fiscal component of the bill, a refinancing provision, will be stripped out. The collective bargaining component, the pay cuts, pension reform — all still there. That would allow the stripped-down bill to pass the Senate with no Democrats present.

Republicans care not about America as a whole and have no problem championing policies that have turned America from a creditor to a debtor nation and the middle class into the working poor. Republicans have no problem further empowering a handful of powerful elite who have no moral qualms about being rich people in a poor country – just as long as the Republicans themselves also get to partake in the opulence.

The American People are working harder, longer hours, and still can’t keep up with rising prices, utility bills, ballooning medical expenses, and the accelerating cost of paying for an education.

Still, the trust fund billionaire Koch Brothers yanked on their chain and their poodle Republican governors started barking in unison, well trained in obeying their masters and set out to do the business of further subjugating the people into compliant serfdom.

Teachers, nurses, cops, firefighters and other state workers did not cause the economic mess we are in – 30 years of failed Republican economic policies designed to make the rich richer and working people the working poor was the culprit.

USA Today reported “A congressionally appointed panel reported …that the financial crisis that set off the Great Recession was avoidable, casting a wide net of blame over regulators and financial giants alike.

In other words, since America swallowed the Reaganomics voodoo she is now dying from, a 30-year policy of deregulation “stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.” This caused gaping holes in the government’s regulation of the shadow banking system and over-the-counter derivatives markets into which banksters slipped and plied their greed-centered game to the detriment of the nation. As Matt Taibbi reported in his story for Rolling Stone titled, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?“, immense corruption and malfeasance before, during and after the finance meltdown has plunged American into economic Hell – NOT unionized teachers making $35,000 a year.

The economic crisis was caused by the super wealthy who pushed for deregulation of financial markets, and by lobbied for “free-trade” deals that took the jobs of manufacturing middle class members, and service jobs of white collar workers from American demanding a living wage and gave them to Chinese and Indian workers begging for slave wages.
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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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The Progressive Change Campaign Committee had a perfect response to the President’s budget proposal which proposes to cut the deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next decade by breaking the already-weary backs of working people – all so the rich can continue to party off their tax giveaways. They said, “It is unacceptable for this President to continually suck up to Wall Street banks who caused the current economic mess, legitimize the cutting of benefits earned by workers, and pretend like Republican proposals to cut Medicare and Democratic proposals to end tax cuts for the wealthy are equally legitimate proposals – they are nit. Americans did not elect a Democratic President to act like Ronald Reagan or enact a corporate agenda.”

President Obama has fallen into every trap the Republicans have laid for him and his adopting the Republican focus on “deficit” is no different. Republicans have all suddenly conveniently forgotten Cheney’s famous quote “Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter” because it was Republicans who ran up the deficit in the first place according to the first leg of their plot to “drown government in the bathtub.”

You see, for years the voodoo “Supply-siders” wanted us to believe that deficits don’t matter because tax cuts so boost investment that the economy magically grows its way out of debt. The “starve the beast” contingent, epitomized by Grover Norquist, hope that tax cuts will indeed create deep deficits that will then force spending cuts. It doesn’t matter if these two views are at odds…either way, the rich win – and that’s all that matters to Republicans.

This ballooning “deficit” Republicans are suddenly frantic about was NO ACCIDENT. It was part of Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santa Clause Theory” that REAGAN implemented – simply, cut taxes on the rich, make up the short fall by running up the debt and ultimately using it as an excuse to hand government programs over to Wall Street.

Now President Obama, once AGAIN, validates the Republican agenda by making deficit reduction his first priority when he should be concentrating on JOB CREATION… and SPENDING to to stimulate the economy from THE BOTTOM UP.

The best deficit reduction and long-term debt remedy is to get people working again.
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