Here's a New Meme

Here's a meme that progressives should make use of. It just occurred to me, and I'd like to pass it on.

Being born rich has no intrinsic value; it is in no way productive, useful or desirable. Most rich people contribute far less to society than do ordinary factory workers, bus drivers and janitors. Therefore, living off of ancestral wealth made by Daddy, Grand-dad, or Great-great-great to the nth degree going back to pre-Civil War plantation days is no more ethical than living off of welfare. In many cases it's far less ethical. So here's the meme:

Let's start calling that condition Ancestral Welfare, and bring up the term every time people who were actually brought up by nannies complain about "The Nanny State." The term goes hand-in-hand with the already familiar terms Class Warfare and Corporate Welfare, and is intimately connected to both.

Class warfare couldn't exist if it weren't for the scions of the last generation living off of the avails of their parents. And most of those inheritances are in trust funds tied into holdings of corporate stock.

Nobody with an ounce of sense believes that prominent heirs like Rush Limbaugh or Charles Krauthammer's points of view are anything but self-serving. The idol bloated bloviaters have not only stolen America's wealth, they've also dominated any conversation concerning wealth. So whether you're talking about social benefits, education, health care, or the structure of the tax system, you'll always get only the opinions of those who can well afford those things without any help from government.

What is the solution? Start taxing capital gains at a rate at least as high as that levied against money that is actually earned. And set the estate tax to something that promotes the American ideal of all men being created equal instead of eroding it.

The estate tax should be 0% for the 1st $1 million, and 99% for anything above that. If you are survived by a wife and six kids you'd be allowed to leave a legacy worth $7,000,000. That's not too shabby when you think about it.

Anybody who can't turn a million dollar inheritance into a pretty comfortable life has demonstrated an inability to compete in any kind of economy, especially a capitalist one. With $1 million you could buy a nice house or a platinum education or you could open a small business. In fact you could probably do any two of those things with $1 million and have considerable change left over. So anyone who says their children can't make it unless they get a billion dumped in their lap is really implying that their children are drooling idiots, fit only for wasting away in a hammock.

~~~~~~~~

On a more general note, it is lamentable that the so-called 'left' in America can't come up with counters to the memes put out by The Powers That Be, even when they're staring them in the face. If you're going to change the way things are going, or even halt the slide into modern feudalism the first step is going to be to change the tenor of the conversation. If you fight the battle on the other side's terms you don't have a chance.

TAGS: Capitalism, Leads to, Oligarchy, Every. Bloody. Time.

A Wonderful Lie

Glenn Greenwald's post yesterday leaves very little left to be said about the bailout - quite brilliantly covering all the bases.

The virtues of public anger and the need for more:

The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.
[...]
...the financial crisis is a fundamental indictment on the way the country functions and of its ruling class. What would be unhealthy is if there weren't substantial amounts of public rage in the face of these revelations.
[...]
(Quoting The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi:)
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. . .Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?
[...]
(Quoting Atrios:)
The issue is that [Geithner] and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn't do it.
(Quoting Krugman:)
"The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system."

If you were to do nothing this weekend other than read this tour de force of a blog post and click a few links to Glenn's sources you would end up better informed about this issue than the vast majority. And a hell of a lot angrier.

Speaking on clicking on source links, if I have one criticism of Glenn it's that he truncated the Krugman quote robbing it of some of its impact. The original reads:

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.

Now that inevitable brings to mind the famous George Bailey speech from It's a Wonderful Life. Trying to prevent a run on an essentially sound bank, Bailey points out that the money isn't cash sitting in the bank's vault, it's invested in the homes and businesses of Bedford Falls.

A Community Chest

Try to translate that to the current system and you get,
"Well, shucks Joe, your life savings are tied up in Goldman Sachs' CDO's and Goldman Sachs is heavily into Merrill Lynch's Credit Default Swaps, and Merrill Lynch is putting it into Lehman hedge funds. Then Lehman leverages it back into Goldman and we all make a tidy profit."

No matter how homespun your cloth coat or how endearing your accent, you're going to come off more like the despicable Mr. Potter than the lovable George. Lending out money to build assets makes sense. Lending money to tear down structure is unremittingly wrong-headed.

The bottom line of this post is the source of all this righteous anger. As Glenn says, "When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo." Greenwald's underlying point, that it is well past time for an angry population to re-exert some influence on their government echoes a Thomas Jefferson sentiment - one I have always heartily agreed with.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
When the government fears the people, there is liberty."

So, keep those pitchforks sharp and be ready to light those torches at a moments notice.

TAGS: Kleptocracy, Bailout, Anger AGAINST Management
AIG - The Pirates of Wall Street

Corporate Welfare

...Worse Than You Could Have Imagined

Was anybody wondering how the DJIA miraculously rose by nearly 900 points yesterday on the news of the lowest consumer confidence results since that benchmark has been measured? It just doesn't make any sense unless there's some serious market manipulation going on. I asked myself what was happening and ran into something called the PPT, an entity whose very existence confirms some of my worst fears about how the world works.

Have you ever heard of the Plunge Protection Team? That's OK, until today neither had I. Officially it's called the Working Group on Financial Markets, and is a mechanism for manipulating the markets that is shockingly apposite to anything resembling free market principles - all the more so because it was set up under the Reagan administration. Wikipedia tells you what it is:

The Working Group on Financial Markets (also, President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the Working Group, and colloquially the Plunge Protection Team) was created by Executive Order 12631, signed on March 18, 1988 by United States President Ronald Reagan.

The Group was established explicitly in response to events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987 ("Black Monday") to give recommendations for legislative and private sector solutions for "enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of [United States] financial markets and maintaining investor confidence".[1]

As established by Executive Order 12631, the Working Group consists of:

• The Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee (as Chairman of the Working Group)
• The Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or his designee
• The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or his designee; and
  
• The Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or his designee.

The current holders of the listed offices are respectively Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Chris Cox and Walter Lukken. I'm sure you've heard about the first three. I have a theory about why you haven't heard of Lukken, the CFTC's acting chairman, which I'll tell you later.

Wiki's explanation of what the Working Group is is straightforward and uncontroversial. What it does is another thing entirely. Indeed the reasoning behind the PPT epithet brings out conspiracy theory accusations:

"Plunge Protection Team" was originally the headline for an article in The Washington Post on February 23, 1997, and has since become a colloquial term used by some mainstream publications to refer to the Working Group. Initially, the term was used to express the opinion that the Working Group was being used to prop up the markets during downturns. Financial writers for British newspapers The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, along with U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and writers Kevin Phillips (who claims “no personal firsthand knowledge” and is “not interested in becoming a conspiracy investigator”) and John Crudele, have charged the Working Group with going beyond their legal mandate. Claims about the Working Group generally include that it is an orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures—acts which are forbidden by law. However, these articles usually refer to the Working Group using moral suasion to attempt to convince banks to buy stock index futures.

Let's first address this idea that the characterization of the PPT as market manipulators using tax dollars is a conspiracy theory. The pertinent question to ask is "if the group cannot buy or sell stocks, how can it intervene to prop up the market?" And unless you can come up with a believable answer to that, the whole conspiracy theory idea evaporates. Which, by the way, puts you by the fire in the conspiracy camp. And me, I'm not buying the moral suasion argument, so pass the coffee please.

Anyway, the recent $700 BILLION government intervention in the banks renders the question moot. Having a direct interest in the banks through the TARP program, the government can directly intervene in the markets through something rather less moral than mere suasion. And all apparently with nothing approaching meaningful oversight.

Unlike Wikipedia, this extremely persuasive article from WebofDebt.com makes no bones about what is really going on in the markets. Note that it was published last Saturday, before the inexplicable Dow Jones Miracle occurred. The author, Ellen Brown, was responding to the fact that Wall Street somehow managed to weather the storm relatively speaking on Friday after "Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell nearly 10% during the [previous] night, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 8%, and Germany’s and Britain’s fell 5%".

THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND:
HOW THE PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM
KILLED THE FREE MARKET

Traders prepared for the worst, but remarkably, disaster was averted. The U.S. market fell only 3.5%, just another “ordinary” bearish day.

Why the more modest drop in the U.S., where the financial debacle originated and should have hit hardest? Suspicious observers saw the covert hand of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), the group set up under President Reagan to maintain market “stability” by manipulating markets behind the scenes. Bill Murphy commented in LeMetropoleCafe.com:

“Today the Muppets on CNBC were remarking how well our market acted, not falling apart as expected. All day long they spoke of how our market was acting differently today than every other stock market in the world. Well hello, the other countries don’t have a PPT, which is WHY our market is so different.

“There are those who might think what the PPT is doing is right. What they don’t realize is their making ‘Everything is fine’ for so long, and not allowing the market to trade freely . . . like allowing the stock market to fall the way it should, has kept the individual in the market . . . when they might have been SCARED out some time ago.”

In response to Bill Saporito’s comment in Time it might be countered that Henry Paulson’s Plunge Protection Team is quite adept at rigging an economy. The difference between an acknowledged socialist state and the stealth socialism we have in the U.S. today is that in a socialist state, everyone expects the market to be rigged and operates accordingly. In a rigged pseudo-capitalist economy, investors are easily separated from their money because they expect the market to follow “free market principles” based on “supply and demand.” They are seduced into “pump and dump” schemes – artificial manipulations that allow insiders to unload stock at a high price or buy it at a low price – because they trust in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is supposed to automatically set things right in a market left to its own devices. The market today is indeed controlled by an invisible hand, but it is not necessarily serving the interests of small investors.

To quote more of this article might go beyond fair use, and I would anyway be tempted to quote the entire thing, so instead I will urge everyone to read the whole thing, maybe twice or more, because it does get pretty technical. Most important is that you understand what a 'pump and dump' scheme is, and that it always favors the big player and milks everyone else. The idea that the government is using your tax dollars to help transfer wealth out of small player's (such as retirement investment accounts) hands into the pockets of the already obscenely rich should eventually sink in.

As Ms. Brown lays it out, it's a case of "Plunge Protection for Some, Plunge Creation for Others." Her home-page (promoting her book Web of Debt) contains some excerpts from the book, which must have been published about a year ago - there are reviews from November of 2007. There is little doubt that she saw then what is happening now. And it don't look good.

To keep up appearances, the "Plunge Protection Team" has been authorized by presidential order to use U.S. taxpayer money to manipulate markets to make them appear healthier than they are, and lately it has been working overtime. But official assurances of a "soft landing" are mere window dressing, aimed at preventing another worldwide depression as home buyers and stock market investors stampede for the exits.

It's particularly galling that this brand of corporate welfare is going on while the McCain campaign rails on about Barack Obama's socialism. Apparently it's not the idea of the government redistributing wealth that bothers them, just the fact that it's going to someone who actually needs it. Anyway, it's all business as usual under the crony capitalist operating principles of the Republican Corporate Feudal State. Socializing the losses while privatizing the profits.

This whole story should give you the right to call BULL-SHIT!! to any Republican who ever opens their pie-hole and lets the words 'free market' emit from it, in perpetuity. It's worth a read if for no other reason than that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, and I said I'd tell you why you've never heard of Walter Lukken, didn't I? It's simple. He's the head of the CFTC, whose mandate under the Commodity Exchange Act is to prohibit fraudulent conduct in the trading of futures contracts. A regulatory agency. If you had heard of Walter Lukken it would have meant that he was doing his job. Which might have meant that this economic meltdown would never have occurred. Like the OSM that purportedly regulates the mining industry, or the EPA that supposedly protects the environment, the CFTC has been reduced to an office with one guy doing crossword puzzles and playing paddle-ball all day - regulators are the Maytag repairmen of the Bush administration. Business. As. Frickin'. Usual.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Addendum: There's a great related story from Wonkette about how Cindy Jacobs, a Christian dingbat associated with Pat Robertson's 700 club, declared a "Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008" “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the 'Lion’s Market,' or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said.

“While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

Because the stock market crash was caused by the sinfulness of allowing gays to marry, doncha' know?

“This is so severe in the economic area because we are facing judgment from the actions, not only for our stance towards Israel, but our blatant sin against Him in passing laws such as the one allowing homosexual marriages,” Cindy said.

Gawd, it'll be good to see the likes of those relegated to their backwaters again when the neocon/greedhead/Christofascist coalition is finally scattered to the four winds.

UPDATE: There's video of Cindy and her followers serenading the bull to the tune of God Bless America. hat-tips go to Slog the Stranger and TC.

Featured in

Mike's Blog Roundup

TAGS: Economy, Government Bailout, Bush Epic Failure
You Can't Make This Shit Up

Agribusiness to Blame for World Food Crisis

It looks like agribusiness caused the world food shortage deliberately.

The World Food Crisis by John Nichols in The Nation:

The only surprising thing about the global food crisis to Jim Goodman is the notion that anyone finds it surprising.

"So," says the Wisconsin dairy farmer, "they finally figured out, after all these years of pushing globalization and genetically modified [GM] seeds, that instead of feeding the world we've created a food system that leaves more people hungry.
[...]
The current global food system, which was designed by US-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the US government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers here and abroad to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability.
[...]
Beyond humanitarian responses, the cure for what ails the global food system--and an unsteady US farm economy--is not more of the same globalization and genetic gimmickry. That way has left thirty-seven nations with food crises while global grain giant Cargill harvests an 86 percent rise in profits and Monsanto reaps record sales from its herbicides and seeds.

Who wants to bet that the proposed solution will be more of the same globalization and genetic gimmickry? That's the way the world works these days.

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking
we used when we created them."
-- Albert Einstein --

No, but the multinationals can reap obscene profits on the crises they themselves have created.

Cross-posted to Ice Station Tango

TAGS: Food Shortages, Genetically Modified Foods, Monsanto, World Bank

The Definition of Fascism

Me and my big mouth (er, .., keyboard.) Having promised to do a series on fascism in America I find myself with an embarrassment of riches in terms of links to pursue and connections to research. Make no mistake, the idea of a movement to exert fascistic influence over American society is not a rhetorical device, nor by any means hyperbolic. Naomi Wolf points out that it's not hyperbole if one compares present day America to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s, when fascists were taking over those countries. And the ten-point blueprint that she lays out for repressive regimes certainly has a chilling similarity to the actions of the Bush regime. Just to remind you, here's Naomi's list:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a prison system outside the rule of law
3. Develop an unregulated paramilitary
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. "Dissent = Treason"
10. Suspend the Rule of Law

There's a longer list with 14 points, the work of Laurence Britt in this article at Secular Humanism.org. If that isn't convincing enough POAC (The anti-PNAC website) has posted numerous links to examples of where the U.S.A. conforms to Britt's model HERE. I daresay that some of these trends predate the Bush administration by decades. As we shall see. Without resorting to a list of methods or characteristics the most succinct definition of fascism I could come up with comes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

"While communism is the control of business by government,
fascism is the control of government by business."
-- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Fascist America --

Anyone familiar with the structure of American society would be hard pressed to deny that the country doesn't fit that definition. There are 30,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, outnumbering legislators nearly 60 to one. Large campaign contributors expect a payback from whichever horse (did I say horse? I meant whores) they back in an election, and they often back both candidates just in case. The government is adamantly trying to obtain retroactive immunity for corporations who knowingly committed crimes (on behalf of the government, or course. And when an election comes, you get to vote for one of two corporate-friendly candidates from one of two corporate-friendly parties, and the vote may be flipped by a machine running secret software that is the private property of a corporation.

One other thing you may have heard of. A recent war was infamously started for the apparent benefit of no-one other than the military industrial complex, at great cost to the nation as a whole. The US military costs the country more than the combined military budgets of the entire rest of the world, but still the government feels it has to hire contractors (all with connections to administration higher-ups) to get the job done. That is simply astonishing and can only be explained one way.

When you look at how these contract workers get paid you see what the job is, and that it will never get done under the current way of doing things. Typically a mercenary will get $500.00 a day for his services, but his employer charges $800. The thing is, he doesn't charge the government $800, he charges another contractor, who in turn charges the government $1,000. That's the way it works. So obviously the job they're trying to get done is to steal as much from the taxpayer as possible, and the Great War on Turr is merely a canard, a means of keeping the gravy train rolling. And one of the things about gravy trains is that they tend to gain a lot of momentum, especially since there are a lot of people with a vested interest in greasing the wheels and polishing the tracks they run on. Don't believe me? Google the term 'sailboat fuel.'

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
-- George Orwell --

The aim of Bu$hCo's brand of fascism is not just to provide profits to corporate cronies, but also to put them out of reach of all responsibility for their actions. The heinous acts committed without consequence by Blackwater/KBR mercenaries in Iraq are a case in point. The government has literally become a partner in crime with the multinationals. And then there's this from a recent New York Times:

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

The reaction of the corporations to this new trend are woefully predictable.

Some lawyers suggest that companies may be willing to take more risks because they know that, if they are caught, the chances of getting a deferred prosecution are good. “Some companies may bear the risk” of legally questionable business practices if they believe they can cut a deal to defer their prosecution indefinitely, Mr. Khanna said.

Legal experts say the tactic may have sent the wrong signal to corporations — the promise, in effect, of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I would be lying to you if I said that this was something new in American history. Watch this clip:

Chomsky on Corporate Propaganda

Here's the part I'd like to point out:

As (James Madison) put it, 'the primary responsibility of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.'

One of the things that emerged from the Congress of the Confederation was the Electoral College, the subject of a recent post by law professor Jonathan Turley.

While the Framers were great believers in the natural rights of the common man, they actually had little faith in the judgment of the common man. Indeed, most of the Framers were unflinching, unrepentant elitists. They wanted a representative democracy to create a buffer of educated men between citizens and their government. It was not until 1913 that the country finally amended the Constitution to allow for direct election of senators (who were originally elected by state legislatures).

Throughout U.S. history, the Electoral College has worked as designed: to place elections in the hands of an elite. Past controversies involved the same personal wheeling and dealing that we’re seeing today with superdelegates.

We've seen Turley's views before on various matters, notably the Prosecutors' Purge scandal, and the wider implication that the prosecutors who weren't purged, as well as the one's who replaced the dismissed US Attorneys have turned the Department of Justice into a partisan playground of Republican corruption. It's a good thing at least that the cases are tried before elected and uncorruptable federal judges. Er, nope.. as Turley again points out.

This week, Michael Gableman celebrated a considerable victory: the first defeat of an incumbent judge in 40 years for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His opponent Louis Butler was also the first African American on the Court. Yet, the $5 million race shows the steady trend toward high-priced campaigns to change the make-up of courts by legal and corporate interests.

So to recap: The laws of the country are written by bought and paid for corporate-friendly hacks, prosecuted by more partisan corporate hacks and tried in front of judges who are already pre-bribed by corporations before they even take the bench. If the outcome is in question the appeal could go all the way to the ultra-partisan corporate friendly Supreme Court.

Earlier I criticized James Madison for the error of the Electoral College. I should say that he WAS the author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, so on the whole he redeemed himself in spades. He also wrote this gem, another definition:

The accumulation of all powers,
legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands
may justly be pronounced the very definition of a tyranny."
-- James Madison --

But don't get me started on tyranny in America. I think I have my hands full with fascism, thank you very much.

TAGS: Fascism in America, Corporatism, Accumulation of Power, = Tyranny

The Most Unlikely Ally

Joseph Stalin's Connection
to Fascism in America

In the usual way that Americans have been taught to view history Joseph Stalin was an unrepentant monster whose Communist government suppressed and murdered its own citizens, denying them their rights and imprisoning them in cruel and inhuman gulags for the slightest act of disagreement with his regime.

As I have written before on my old blog, Friendly Neighbour, Stalin was, even after his death, an unwitting ally of far-right forces within the American system.

Stalin, while a valiant ally in the war, stands out as one of history's biggest meanest bastards. Estimates of the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin range as high as 20 Million. Most died by starvation as the result of disastrous agricultural policies that removed subsistence farmers from their land in misguided collectivization efforts. Many more died as a result of Stalin's extreme paranoia, taken out and shot or tortured to death in the infamous gulags. Stalin was evil.

...[I]n the post-war era, a great lie was sold to the American people, one I believe a vast majority of Americans still believe today. That lie was a great propaganda coup, providing the right wing with a magic hammer with which to beat its enemies mercilessly. That lie led to the cold war. That lie was that the evils of Stalin's Soviet Union were somehow the inevitable result of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Which anyone even passingly familiar with socialist doctrine can tell you is absurd. A simple comparison that clarifies the effects of this great lie is this; The Red Scare was to post-war America as International Jewry was to Nazi Germany. The great threat that justifies all excesses. The great brush to paint all our enemies. The Red Scare.

My point was and remains that it wasn't Marxist doctrine that caused Stalin to be a megalomaniac, it was his paranoia and his embrace of totalitarian tactics to eliminate any threat to his rule. The great purges carried out in the 1930s are but one case in point.

The common belief that the cold war was a struggle between western democracy and Soviet Communism was a great lie. For one thing Soviet Communism didn't fit the egalitarian model at all. There was a privileged class of party members, military officers and secret policemen who lacked for little, lived in Dachas, rode around in chauffeur-driven hand-built automobiles and feared the peasantry no less than did their czarist predecessors. So Communism in the Soviet Union was a lie. But why on earth would the western world go along with that lie, even exaggerate it when it would have been much easier to call Stalin and his successors out for their hypocrisy?

“A lie would make no sense,
unless the truth were felt to be dangerous.”
- Carl G. Jung -

The simple answer to this is that this Soviet lie served the purposes of the corporatists to a tee to keep up the idea that the Soviet Union represented the inevitable outcome of Marxism, that is that it led to totalitarian regimes like that of Stalin. Which may have some truth to it, but it is simply astonishing how quickly the idea was extended to include not only Communists, but later 'Communist sympathizers', aka 'Pinkos' (not quite 'Red' in other words,) trade unionists, and later anyone who had the audacity to consider themselves anywhere to the left of center. Indeed, by the time Ronald Reagan ran for office they were using a new rhetorical technique - they began alluding to liberalism as 'the L word,' giving the impression that it was something so obscene that it couldn't be talked about in polite company.

Another device was in play - the ratchet effect. As this unrelenting stream of vitriol (based on absolutely nothing by the way) was directed on anyone to the left of center, inevitably people started moving out of the line of fire. They stopped calling themselves liberals even if they were by any definition of the word. They now self-identify as progressives or even moderate conservatives. The result of that was that the line that defined where 'left of center' was also moved to the right. So, in the next iteration (or turn of the ratchet in my analogy) people who had previously been to the right of center were called out, and some of them moved across the new 'middle' line - to end up on what used to be the far right. You can still see this process in effect anytime someone like Rush Limbaugh points to someone who is really quite moderate in their position and describes them as being from, not just the left, but the far left. Conversely, the term far right is almost never used in the United States. Which should give people cause for concern. The real outcome of this is class warfare in America with only the upper class having declared or holding any weapons.

"Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie.
In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people,
this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country.

To ignore that--not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor--is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power...

...If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"--do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth.
Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars."

-- Howard Zinn --

Just look at how successful this undeclared class warfare has been. The Republicans opposed Social Security when it was first introduced on the grounds that it led to the 'slippery slope towards communism.' The fact that it helped the vast majority of Americans survive was not an effective counterargument in their narrow rightwing view. And they are STILL trying to dismantle the most successful program in the country's history. They have successfully blocked any form of universal health care with the same slippery slope canard. "OOOH - it might lead to communism. Slippery slope - ooga booga. Be very, very afraid." So you see how the ghost of the long dead Joseph Stalin is still acting as an ally to Corporate Fascist America. The frickin' ownership society they envisage can hardly be differentiated from a slave state.

It's really tragic that a large number of working class Americans continue to vote against their own interests for two reasons. The first is that they are afraid of being labeled 'far left' by the flying monkey brigade of Limbaugh and his putrid ilk. The second is that they cling to the myth of the American dream. They hope that somehow, against all odds, they will pass through that velvet curtain into first class, and they don't want to piss in the complimentary champagne before they get to stretch out in their generous double wide reclining seats.

The fact is, social mobility (the likelihood that you will end up in a different income bracket than your parents) is MUCH less in the US than it is in the rest of the western industrialized world. And as everybody knows, the gap between rich and poor is opening up into an absolute chasm that you will never cross if you are currently living modestly.

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal,
but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward,
the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards."
-- Bertrand Russell --

I will further cannibalize my old post by plagiarizing it's close (I hope the author doesn't go after me.)

In the opening pages of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games the hero, Jack Ryan is visiting London. Unfamiliar with the English practice of driving on the left side of the road he checks to the left, where he expects traffic, then steps out onto the road and is nearly killed by a bus coming from the right. It seems to me a fitting image of what has happened to the US in the last 7 or 8 decades. While paranoically obsessing about a perceived threat from the left, America has left itself wide open for a takeover from the corporate right.

To tie this in to what's happening today, one needs only this quote from a pre-eminent veteran of the cold war.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."

-- General Douglas MacArthur --

A chillingly familiar theme in the post 9/11 America. It's hard not to see how the fear-mongering inspired by Stalin is just like that inspired by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Stalin was of course the first bogie man bent on world domination and in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Which brings me to another pithy and pertinent quote.

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely
or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear"
-- Bertrand Russell --

---

This post was written to set the table for a series of posts I intend to do under the heading of The History of Fascism in America. (THOFIA) It should fit in well with those of you who are already Naomi Wolf fans. It might rub some of you the wrong way if you believe the fascist influence to have begun with George W. Bush, his father, or even his grandfather. But that cannot be avoided.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell --

TAGS: Class Warfare, Fascism In America, Joseph Stalin, History

Conservative Ideology Deconstructed

A Theory Gone Horribly Wrong

There is a very simple reason that reight wingnuts have such a strong aversion to facts; the facts just don't support their warped world view. This is the apparent reason that they oppose the teaching of evolution, reject the idea that global warming exists, and fail to see that George W. Bush is both a sociopath and a cretin. And they still insist that Ronald Reagan was a genius that saved the country and defeated Communism. All lies that are easily exposed as such by the application of a little reality therapy. Paul Krugman takes apart Reaganomics like a cheap toy in this NY Times article:

If this Times report is at all right, Republicans will hold any attempt to help the economy now hostage to yet another try at making the Bush tax cuts permanent — thereby, among other things, crippling future possibilities for health care reform. I suspected that’s what would happen, but thought that maybe, just maybe, the GOP would be sufficiently scared by the prospect of a nasty recession in an election year that it would back off. Guess not.

Krugman provides this chart that graphically refutes anyone still clinging to Reaganomics and the trickle down theory, as practiced under the Bush regime.

There are of course other metrics that could have been used to illustrate the same point. Government revenues also fell during both the Reagan and Bush eras, resulting in the largest deficits in American history. This refutes another Reagan myth, that the 'economic stimulus' provided by tax cuts would actually increase revenues.

So why would they still be pushing an idea that is so patently false? Well, for the same reason that dogs lick their own genitals - because they can. These tax cuts are to the benefit of the same elite, a small fraction of one percent of the populace, who also control the media, run the lobbying industry, and fund both political parties. As long as they have the American public voting against their own interests based on this pack of lies, they will continue to deal bottom cards from that same old dogeared pack. And the news whores of the media will happily distract you while they steal from your stack of chips.

It's not because they are so stupid as to believe their own lies. They don't. They just want you to believe them while they rob you.

"A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot
but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook."
-- Bertolt Brecht --

Let's back up to that Krugman quote from earlier. "If this Times report is at all right.." If you follow that link, it highlights how complicit the Democrats are in the class war the corporate elite are carrying out.

...even as Ms. Pelosi renewed a call by Democratic leaders for cooperation with President Bush and Republicans in Congress, lawmakers in both parties said that efforts to develop a short-term stimulus plan could easily fall prey to partisan disputes like whether to extend Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which expire after 2010.

The Democrats are insisting that Republicans not inject their desire to extend the tax cuts into negotiations of a short-term rescue package intended to dampen the impact of a recession. But in interviews, several Republican lawmakers said they could not imagine a debate not involving long-term tax policy.

“The planning for 2010 in a business sense is happening now,” said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan. “So it isn’t too soon to talk about making permanent the Bush tax cuts.”

Given recent history, would anyone want to bet that the spineless Democrats are going to stand up to the Republicans now on this issue? I didn't think so.

And there are a couple of good reasons to think that they won't change things much even if elected by a wide margin in November. This post from Digby points out why, as does this post from Station Agent. The two front running Democratic presidential hopefuls are entrenched corporatists, and O'Bama (put that apostrophe in there and it's a fine Irish sounding name isn't it? Should be good for a few votes in the Boston area.) has just compared himself to Ronald Reagan for crying out loud.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

And as Digby points out, as much as Obama promises to co-operate with the elite, Hillary's husband already has.

In the global economy of the 1990s, economic growth won't come from government spending. It will come instead from individuals working smarter and learning more, from entrepreneurs taking more risks and going after new markets, and from corporations designing better products and taking a longer view...

Which all goes a long way to explaining why John Edwards is invisible in the mainstream media, doesn't it? It also explains the long-term failure to bring about meaningful campaign finance reform, and how the already nearly monopolistic mass media is becoming even more consolidated than ever. They would like you to think that there is still some kind of democratic contest for control of the world's mightiest nation. There is no dualism, no duel - it's all Kabuki theater, a Punch and Judy puppet show.

The public is being played like a cheap banjo.

Right now I see John Edwards as probably America's last best hope to ever recover from the nightmare. He's having a fundraising drive right now, I hope you can contribute. You can visit his site for details. (Disclaimer: This is just me talking. The rest of the unruly mob may feel differently, support another candidate or even a third party solution.)

TAGS: Voodoo Economics, Class Warfare, Election Coverage, John Edwards