Republican Dirty Tricks

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.

Unfortunately for those of us currently living during the end of the disastrous “Reagan Revolution”, much of the gains from the New Deal have been systematically stripped by the same powerful influences that have never rested in their cause to bring the working people – and the government – to heel.

Today, the same powerful influences are using their vast fortunes to back right-wing candidates who in the time of Eisenhower, would not considered viable even in jest.

It doesn’t matter how outrageous, unintelligent, radical, or Brown-Shirt-y these candidates are.  They will ensure that government turns permanently indifferent to the general welfare and slam the corporate boot across our necks.

Please read FDR’s speech. Here’s an excerpt:

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people’s money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once 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.

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 the rest here… and VOTE!