BlueBloggin

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The mantra du jour is that Obama hasn’t undone ‘Bush’. Ergo –Obama is just as evil as is Bush, or Bush Sr, or Ronald Reagan. Not so and not possible! It’s a false analogy that misses the point; it is strategy designed to deflect attention from the endemic corruption of the right wing party –the GOP; It is a false analogy that might have been tested in a focus group on K-Street. It has certainly caught on as do many another ’successful’ mantra, slogan, or buzzword. And just as worthless! One of my recent critics had clearly caught the ‘but Obama is just as bad as Bush’ virus and posted the following comment:

I used to really enjoy your blog when W was in the White house – most of your commentary was spot on (except for the part about Bush being an idiot – I don’t give damn who his father is, the USAF does NOT let morons fly jet fighter planes)

Flying an airplane is not evidence of political genius. I have known lots of pilots and would not trust one of them to run the nation, supervise a federal budget or negotiate a peace with a nuclear power. The idea that Bush was smart enough to be prez because he could fly a plane is just idiotic.

A ‘Democrat’ is in the White House! But WHAT has changed? Are we out of Iraq? Is the government no longer owned by the Axis of K-Street and the M.I.C.? Did anyone suspect that the mere election of someone whose campaign was fianced by the ruling elite of just one percent of the nation would suddenly decide, upon his election, to release their choke hold?

Where can I can find that press release to that effect.

Yes, they’re criminals, but O has continued virtually every criminal republican policy instituted by W. And anyone failing to hold the current president accountable, is no better than the GOP slime who enabled Bush to get away with murder.

At last, I am sick and tired of trying to explain to people that Democrats are just another wing of a single right wing party –the capitalist party aka the fat cat party! It’s the only party in the U.S. that wins elections. The system is so skewed that their bets are covered whomever wins the election. Get a clue, folk!

Both parties are financed by the same capitalists, a ruling one percent of the total population, a group –in fact –created and enriched by right wing GOP policies –not Democratic policies. While both parties line up for monies from the same source, Democrats get less. It is but a sop!

Many whine about O. But where is the revolution? Who is going to do anything about it? Who is going to put up or shut up?

NO ONE!

Many have missed the REAMS of cold hard stats that prove that of the two, the GOP is endemically evil and the Dems reduced to sloppy seconds. Who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

Wealth and power are concentrated in America, a trend begun, in earnest, with the end of the Civil War. Labor lost its most important battle in 1910 in Los Angele. It lost a FINAL battle under Ronald Reagan –a Republican whose administration must bear the responsibility for the most recent trend of income and wealth disparities. Now who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

A ‘progressive history’ is obviously neglected in public school curricula. So-called modern ‘progressives’ in name only come up with a whiny: “…but Obama hasn’t changed anything!” My response to them is: well, what the fuck have you done lately?

In the early days of the 20th Century, real progressives were willing to fight for what they believed in and many suffered head cracks and broken bodies because of it. Modern progressives will whine about Obama but none –I daresay –are wiling to pay the price required to effect a real change. And no one in the ‘Obama is just as bad’ camp has a plan, a strategy, a frickin’ clue! No one wants to get his/her head cracked, or shot to death as was the case at Kent State in the 60s. I’m not happy with Obama but wasting time and energy blasting Obama while the ‘real killers’ maintain power over every aspect of our lives is just plain stupid. I have no respect for and would never go into battle with any S.O.B. who is not smart enough to know who the real enemy is!
Bloggers may be forgiven their impatience when no one seems to pay attention, when the MSM gets thousands of ‘gross rating points’ with a single airing of just 30 seconds on prime time and every blogger I know (myself included) gets but a fraction of that over a period of eight years or more. That’s how long it took to be rid of Bush and –still –the message has not gotten through. Fact is, we failed! Bush served out his term and has not yet been tried for 911, Abu Ghraib, or war crimes and crimes against humanity throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan. I wonder, how much good has blogging done but for the ‘feel good’ factor among bloggers and those who read them.

Who created this situation? Democrats??? No –the concentration of media in the hands of just four or five major corporations is the result of Ronald Reagan policies and I can prove it. And Ronald Reagan –last time I checked –was not a Democrat at the time he was Prez. Reagan was, in fact, a Democrat but only before his official corruption. The concentration of wealth among a ruling elite of just one percent began with Ronald Reagan and his policies. I have proven this with the government’s own stats time and again over the last ten years or more. Yet another article may be read by a few, perhaps hundreds or even a thousand. Fox will reach that many in a minute or two and that many again in the next minute.

Of my ‘critic’, I ask: what do you want to hear? What do you want me to write or say? What makes you feel better about yourself? What makes you feel better about living in the fall of empire –a fall that is directly the result of right wing policies! Not Democratic ones.

It is symptomatic that only two Democratic candidates espoused anything resembling a ‘progressive’ platform: Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. That’s because Democrats must raise even more money than GOP incumbents if they wish to unseat them –monies that come from the same well-heeled sources. Such monies finding their way into a Democratic coffer are nothing more than a hedged bet. It is not really intended to win him/her the seat! Think of it as insurance.

Neither Gravel or Kucinich had a snow ball’s chance of becoming President and I took heat –liberal (progressive) heat –because I dared say so. I was misunderstood. I was not criticizing either Gravel or Kucinich but the evil, corrupt system that kept either man out of the White House. I was, rather, pointing up the inequities, the built-in institutionalized unfairness. I was damning a skewed and phony hologram of right wing creation!

Raising the kind of money it takes to win the Presidency requires a sell-out, a Faustian bargain, the sale of souls to the Axis of K-street and the MIC, a sacrifice to Moloch. So –sure –Obama is compromised. It almost goes without saying! That he ‘won’ is evidence of it. That’s what we’ve come to; that’s what our nation has become: a periodic auction of the offices of government! But it is not Obama’s fault. It is an endemic evil that must be addressed and changed and carping about Obama ‘ain’t’ making it. I suggest ‘progressives’ read Shakespeare and, by doing, prove to conservatives that a progressive education is money well spent:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.“

Does anyone really think that these BIG BUCKS come from the grassroots? Haven’t the American people figured out by now that the ruling elite of just one percent –created by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr primarily –is not going to fund a progressive like Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich –both smart, honest men? Personal attacks on Obama are, therefore, stupid and counter-productive and help ensure that the system that kept kept Kucinich and/or Gravel out of contention will maintain the crooked status quo.

Of my critic, I asked: would it make you feel better if I said the Axis of K-Street/MIC no longer existed? Would it make you feel better about yourself if I scolded Obama for having been bought by the same cabal that bought Bush JR? Would it make you feel better if I raised some other strawman, some other distraction while the real crooks finish off the rape of Iraq, Afghanistan or some other unknown victim of their quest for oil booty, vainglorious conquest and empmire?

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and wrote –in the spirit of equal time –that the MIC was created by Obama? It was not! And screw equal time! I would rather speak truth every time.

Would it make you feel better if I lied and said that Obama was as stupid as Bush JR? He is not! And I won’t say that he is!

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and stated that it was really Democrats or Obama who plotted with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq?

Would you feel better about living in the last days of American empire if I wrote that Obama had sat in on GOP planning sessions in which he conspired with them to transfer wealth to just one percent of the U.S. population? Clue: he didn’t! And I will not lie and say he did! So –just get off this ‘Obama is just as bad’ shit! I don’t buy it!

It’s bullshit!

But Ronald Reagan may have and if he didn’t his evil minions did, the same evil minions who sold out to the Axis of K-street/MIC, the modern Moloch, the system! His tax cut of 1982 enriched only the upper quintile and everyone else lost ground. It was a payoff to Reagan’s base, later Bush’s base. The same guys. Am I supposed to lie about that in the interest of ‘equal time’? Am I supposed to say that The Democrats were just as bad as Reagan in spite of the fact that the trend that was thus begun reversed in the Clinton administration and, clearly, as a result of Clinton’s democratic policies?

Did it ever occur to Clinton’s progressive critics, that it was the GOP who ramrodded his impeachment; it was the GOP who told every lie and pulled off every dirty trick to get him OUT of the White House? Would the GOP have bothered to do that had he failed? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton were really no different than the crooks of the GOP? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had really been doing their bidding? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had been a GOP plant as is often said of Obama because he’s black? And why have so many said that Clinton was ‘America’s first black President?’ I am convinced that it was floated up by a GOP consulting firm whose focus group results discovered that closet bigots thought it funny! I say that based upon my experiences ‘inside’ GOP consulting firms. I learned how the sonsobitches think!

I used to think goppers were stupid! Lately, whenever I heard the ‘dems are just as bad’ argument that I begin to understand how the GOP always manages to outsmart the progressives. Hence my advice to progressives: quit being stupid! Learn to identify catch phrases and slogans –memes –that most certainly originate in GOP right wing think tanks and focus groups! Unless you do, you will ensure the election of another GOP, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and you will regret it for the rest of your sorry fucking lives!

If I could reverse the GOP trend of wealth upward, I would happily procure blow jobs for Clinton! I frankly don’t gave a damn and have no interest in what he does with his wang on his own time. It was another distraction that kept ‘progressives’ and ‘Dems’ occupied while GOP power brokers plotted to steal Iraqi oil as soon as they could get ‘their man’ in the White House. Now –I know a thing or two about the oil business. There is not a Democrat to be found in the executive offices of any of them. If you think you know one, please send me his email address or phone number. I would like to know why he has turned down all the offers he must have gotten on his soul! Everyone else has sold out long ago!

There are no articles to be written about ‘lessers’ of two evils and I am not inspired to write one. Obama is neither the creator of the frickin’ disaster he inherited nor –sadly, realistically –will he be the savior that undoes it all. That’s just the way it is. So –I ask my critic –does it make you feel better about yourself and the Kafkaesque situation in which you have found yourself awakened as a cockroach to take it out on a blogger who has not made a goddamned dime on this blog nor taken a goddamned dime from the MIC/K-STREET axis? No one owns me! And if you had brain, you would focus your misplaced frustration on 1) someone who gives a shit what you think; and 2) some one who could do something about it from inside the DC bureaucracy. Clearly –if I were in a position to wave a wand, I would have done so years ago and spared myself the grief.

What makes you feel better about yourself?

Perhaps, I should write some crap about how Obama is just as stupid as Bush Jr! Forget it! If that’s what makes you feel better, you’re outta luck cause I will not sacrifice an ounce of intellectual integrity to assuage a fragile, progressive ego.

In the meantime, it would help if the American people would could break out of their matrix. Just turn off the stupid TV! READ! Throw a rock through Big Bro’s telescreen! Just say NO! Turn off FOX! Turn off CNN! Stop repeating the stale, stock phrases that pass for analysis! Wake the fuck up! De-hynotize yourself! Get a brain!

And then –when the empire falls, you will have at least learned the source of your demise. Or –to paraphrase Gen Patton to his troops –when your grand children ask you what you did during the fall of the ‘great’ American Empire, you won’t have to say ‘Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana!”

Right about now –a lot of Obama detractors are just shoveling shit and totally missing the point!

See: For the GOP If You’re Not in the Top One Percent You Can Drop Dead!

Posted by nytexan March 2nd, 2010 | Tags: Bush, Democrats, economy, GOP, Len Hart, lies, Obama, progressives, War | Category: Len Hart, Politics | Leave a comment

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Ronald Reagan was already a ‘grandfather’ figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: ‘Well….there ya’ go again!’ In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan’s empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember –not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long ‘depression’ which left millions homeless, not the act of ‘high treason’ called Iran/Contra.

Reagan was no friend of the poor, the working class, the cities. On numerous occasions, Reagan would offer up his own version of ‘let them eat cake’. Reagan implied that the poor were lazy and welfare recipients ‘crazy’. He invented –full cloth –a ‘welfare Grandma’ who drove a cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Many reputable journalists tried to find this ‘welfare cheat’! None succeeded! At last, they were forced to admit that this infamous ‘welfare cheat’ did not exist. She was either one Reagan’s bald-faced lies or one of his many psychotic delusions. I will be charitable to Reagan’s memory. She did not exist! Reagan was not nuts, he was just a common, god-damned liar! Tragically, the image stuck. Reagan might have known it would. The lasting image of the ‘Cadillac driving’ cheat was behind the 1996 ‘welfare reform law’ which the GOP stuck on Clinton who, to his shame, signed. It demonstrates the power of the ‘big lie’ technique which the GOP clearly learned from Hitler.

Of aids victims, he might as well have said what he really believed: ‘let them die and decrease the surplus population!’. Reagan is evidence if not proof that evil is what Nuremberg psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert said it was: ‘the utter lack of empathy!’.

Recessions, like the one following Ronald Reagan’s improvident tax cut of 1982, harm workers. American recessions, like periods of prosperity, are inequitable in their effects, harming wage earners at the outset and paying off a tiny elite on tax day. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter confirmed as much when he compared recessions to a “cleansing douche”, a characterization that lifelong goppers must surely apply to everyone but themselves and their country club cronies.

“When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people,” former Sen. John Edwards shot back at an event in Henderson, Nevada. “He was openly — openly– intolerant of unions and the right to organize.

He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country…He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment.”Edwards added, “I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”

Washington Post, Obama’s Reagan Comparison Sparks Debate

When I think about what Ronald Reagan did to this nation, I think of how he struck at and perhaps killed-off a viable labor movement. I think about how middle class families made homeless lived under bridges and overpasses in boom town Houston. I think about how Reagan, like Bush, waged a phony war on terrorism during which terrorist attacks increased some three fold. I think about how Ed Meese waged a war on porn even as a gay prostitution ring operated right out of the White House. I think about how Ronald Reagan neutered affirmative action, the fairness doctrine, and the industries that had kept the middle class in the middle class. I remember how Ronald Reagan was worshiped by the gullible who remembered Reagan’s reign at the Republican National convention of 1992: “Reagan made us feel good about ourselves”, they swooned.

Reagan was both a liar and hypocrite. He occupied the White House with a mandate to cut federal spending. It was his raison d’etre. Conservatives bought it. Reagan became the biggest spending ‘President’ in U.S. history, doubling the size of the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the deficit! He would escalate the military budget, enriching his crones on K-street and the Military/Industrial Complex.

Reagan can be given no credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. It was not enough that he destroyed the labor movement, he would cut off its raison d’etre by exporting jobs and industries abroad. Whatever economic growth occurred benefited only the upper quintile, a fact easily proven by cold, hard stats available to the public at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His tax cut of 1982 benefited only the upper quintile and, inevitably, the chasm between the rich and everyone else widened. To be expected, wages declined; home ownership declined; infrastructure declined.

The rich remember Reagan fondly. They alone prospered. Everyone else lost ground. In fairness, that trend was reversed briefly in Clinton’s second term but –to be expected –resumed with Bush Jr. Today –just one percent of the U.S. population owns more than 95 percent of the remaining population combined. The Reagan years were heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, only poverty and crime increased.

Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies? Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit and the budget would be balanced “…within three years, maybe even two.” It didn’t! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan’s tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover’s Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: “…Jimmy Carter’s last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan’s first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the “Reagan Revolution” was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year.”

How will Bush the lesser compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970’s and rapidly during the early 1980’s. …Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the US Census Bureau make stark reading:

• Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

• The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

• Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As “Downward Mobility,” NOW’s report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

• Twenty percent of the population own 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
• In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
• Either way — wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
• And more unequal than any other developed nation today.

—Inequality.org

The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of declining in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseum utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work? The answer is simple: the GOP sales pitch is what Reagan Budget Director David Stockman called a ‘Trojan Horse’. The purpose of the tax cut is not to trickle down. The tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them.

It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief – restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists – thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things – local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama’s remarks have done) or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left – and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering. It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission.

It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era. It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

–Found on the Democratic Underground

Paul Krugman can always be depended upon to put this kind of thing in perspective.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

–Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

Reagan/Bush tax cuts are payoffs to the very rich for their support. For everyone else, the GOP prescription is simple: just take another dose of what’s making you sick.

Reagan was clearly aloof, indifferent to anyone’s plight but his base of ultra rich robber barons, idle rich boys and the war mongers of the Military/Industrial complex. Reagan cared nothing for ‘urban voters’ which for him meant: ‘black people’ or ‘brown folk’. There was only one black face in his cabinet, that of (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce. At a reception, Reagan asked him: “How are things in your city?” Unfortunately, I don’t have the reply. I hope it was: “Fuck you, Mr. President!” Reagan got away with a housing scandal because no one knew anything about it until Reagan had left office. How convenient!

It was during the Savings and Loan Scandal, often described as an ‘orgy of commercial real estate speculation’, that Reagan managed to rise above it all by closing his eyes to ‘widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions’ across the nation. As we have seen recently, the Savings and Loan scandal preceded a huge bailout which stuck the tax payer for $billions$!

Widespread, endemic, institutionalized racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, went unrestrained and un-monitored. Big banks exploited what was called ‘red lining’, openly violating the Community Re-investment Act, to deprive minority and poor neighborhoods of capital. Only eight of some 40,000 applications from banks seeking to expand their operations were denied by the Reagan administration because they had violated CRA regulations.

Reagan cut federal assistance to local governments by some 60 percent. His administration eliminated general revenue sharing, slashed public service jobs and job training, and all but dismantled federally funded legal services for poor people. Other targets: the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and any program having to do with public transit. It was primarily the ‘inner cities’, which Reaganites considered to be ‘black’, which suffered. Reagan’s favorite ‘urban’ program’ provided aid to highways and that was favored only because it benefited ‘white suburbs’ not ‘black’ inner cities.

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.–Barack Obama, Washington Post

Following is a very brief checklist of a variety of Reagan abuses that defy easy categorization.

• During the Reagan years, federal aid to cities dropped from 22 percent to six. Causalities included urban clinics, hospitals, and police.
• In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.” And to that, I say: bullshit! Prove it!
• Various groups, community organizations et al, fought to limit the damage. Some victories were won including, during the Clinton years, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA. But funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs are still lost and may never be restored short of a revolution that will undo Reagan’s very worst legacy: the fact that the rich have gotten exponentially richer as everyone else, including the middle class, have lost gains. I will repeat this until someone gets it: today, just one percent owns more than some 95 percent combine. That is Reagan’s most horrible legacy and the one from which almost every other evil springs.
• Reagan was called the ‘great communicator’ but used his talent to divide the nation, perhaps, irreparably! Obama inherited a nation in which there is extreme wealth among the very, very, very few but obscene poverty and deteriorating conditions among the many. The middle class is no longer smug but threatened as the increase in foreclosures throughout suburbia will attest.

Iran-Contra: A Case of Treason!

In 1986, the Reagan administration was implicated in two illegal and secret U.S. Government operations stemming from the Reagan’s support for Nicaraguan ‘contra’ rebels. At the time, U.S. law prohibited aid and/or the sale of arms as, in fact, transpired in Iran/Contra. The scandal called ‘Iran/Contra’ came to light and Reagan administration officials announced that government had sold arms to Iran. Iran was, at the time, an avowed enemy of the United States. It was not so long prior that the U.S. embassy personnel, held hostage, had been released by the ‘revolutionary’ government in Iran. Proceeds from arms sales to Iran were diverted –off the books –to the ‘contra’ rebels in Nicaragua.

As the ’scandal’ came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese sought the appointment of a ’special prosecutor’, a position in which Lawrence E. Walsh would assume the role of ‘independent counsel’ to investigate and prosecute possible crimes arising from what was already called ‘Iran/Contra’.

It was alleged that Director Casey’s ‘unswerving support of President Reagan’s contra policies’ encouraged CIA officials to exceed legal restrictions in both operations, though it cannot be said that Iran/Contra was the only origin of CIA ‘off the book’ operations. The Boland Amendment of October 1984 had sought to prohibit and prevent the CIA from aiding the ‘contras’ either directly or indirectly. As the ’scandal’ came to light, it became increasingly clear that Casey had made an end run around Boland and was, in fact, the architect of North’s role in a so-called ‘contra-support team’.

North’s role –described as ‘dove-tailing’ CIA activities –violated the Boland restrictions even as Casey ordered and/or supported arms sales to Iran. ‘Operatives’ Alan Fier and Claire E. George lied to Congress to ‘keep the spotlight off the White House’. When the arms ales were made public in November, 1986, it was clear that Congress had been lied to; the people, the nation had been misled.

Four CIA officials were charged with crimes. George, the third highest-ranking CIA official, was convicted of two felony counts of false statements and perjury, i.e, ‘lying’ to Congress. Two CIA ‘operatives’ were awaiting trial when they were pardoned by Reagan whom Special Prosecutor Walsh clearly implicated in his ‘Final Report’ on Iran/Contra matters.

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation’s stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

The Reagan era was the beginning of the end. If Reagan was the American ‘Augustus’, Bush Jr is Caligula. Those writing of the Fall of the American Empire often write as if this outcome is Obama’s fault. That’s just plain stupid! If Obama were an utter incompetent, he could not possibly have duplicated the thousand cuts inflicted by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush the Lesser. Likewise, Clinton. No ‘miracle worker’, Clinton –in fact –reversed several pernicious, ruinous trends that had begun with Reagan. Given another term, the end of America would have occurred on Bush Sr’s watch. Reagan’s sorry legacy benefits from the fact that Presidents –competent and incompetent alike –are limited to eight years in which to fuck things up!

The fatal trends, however, were all in place and working overtime when Reagan exited the White House. Therefore, it is not Reagan’s fault that the evil empire he helped create did not fall immediately! He tried his best!

To be fair, U.S. Presidents are as incompetent if not as impotent as were the Emperors in Augustus’ wake. During the Cold War, the MIC, a latter-day Praetorian Guard, became accustomed to getting all the appropriations it wanted. The power accrued to the MIC during the cold war years meant that ‘they’ would not simply go quietly into that good night with the fall of the Soviet Union. A new enemy would simply have to be found. The MIC is still around and bigger and ‘badder’ than ever, openly enriching themselves with the spoils of war.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it became necessary to invent exterior threats with which to terrorize the populace, around which to build up a military infrastructure. The threat of ‘terrorism’ has filled the role to the satisfaction of Pentagon brass asses and war mongers. It does not matter to them that 99 percent of what is CALLED ‘terrorism’ is but the resistance to illegal U.S. occupations, invasions, and interventions. It does not matter to them that most U.S. incursions since World War II have been illegal and purely imperial, intended to enrich the vast and complex array of defense contractors and Pentagon suck-ups.

The most obvious example remains Bush’s attack and invasion of Iraq –clearly a violation of every international principle and/or treaty to which the U.S. is bound. Almost if not everything the U.S. has done internationally is illegal but to merely oppose it –as every people has the right under international law –is called terrorism by the U.S. govt. Bush called his opposition in Iraq either insurgents or terrorists. But if you were an Iraqi, you most certainly would take up arms to defend your nation against the invasion by the evil empire. When the British took arms to reclaim thirteen rebellious colonies, it was William Pitt in Parliament who summed up the situation precisely:

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms — never! never! never!

Because Ronald Reagan bequeathed us a legacy of imperial lawlessness and arrogance, US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq ARE terrorist acts. Deaths resulting from orders issuing from either Bush or Cheney are war crimes described precisely in the federal laws which prohibit them under the penalty of death. See: U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.

To cover their crimes, U.S. administrations since Reagan have lied to us as a matter of policy. The U.S. government has failed utterly to deal with its own citizens in good faith! It pursues its own agenda and those of its co-conspirators on K-Street and the MIC. It has dealt with the sovereign citizens in bad faith!

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.

Therefore: our ‘leaders’ are crooks and the U.S. government has become a crime syndicate if not a rogue nation. The U.S. must withdraw from every middle eastern nation from which it had hoped to steal resources. If I may paraphrase Pitt: if I were an Iraqi or an Afghan, while a foreign troop was in my country, I would never lay down my arms! NEVER!

Posted by nytexan February 21st, 2010 | Tags: Bush, GOP, Iran-Contra, Len Hart, lies, Reagan, reagan recession, right wing, Treason | Category: Len Hart, Politics | Comments (1)

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

We’ve grown up with a Christian-Roman version of European and world history, primarily the Fall of Rome. The Romans –we are taught –created a great empire characterized by a sophisticated system of arrow-straight roads that made possible commerce and travel from the far flung reaches of empire from Briton to Constantinople, from Carthage to Germania.

Just outside the borders of empire, we are taught, lived uncivilized, untutored barbarian hordes intent upon harassing, plundering, threatening the Pax Romana that defined the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen. The term Pax Romana always rang false with me. Was it ever at peace but, rather, an Orwellian perpetual war, the systemized, ‘corporatized’ taking of human life required to keep the Leviathan afloat? Much speculation about the fall of Rome is false. Fundamentalist Christians in America believe Rome fell because it indulged orgies, homosexuality and the feeding of Christians to lions. The more informed may cite Gibbon and sum up the fall of Rome in a phrase: loss of civic virtue. While no one pretends that Rome was in all ways and all times virtuous, the ‘loss of civic virtue’ applies as well to fiscal profligacy, arrogance and, perhaps most importantly, the consequences of conquest. Conquest is thought necessary by nation-states like Rome, forgetting that a truly productive nation most often substitutes conquest for real productivity. Instead of employing persons, Rome seized their farms and sent them off on wars of aggression and conquest. An obvious examples are Dacia and Gaul both of which Rome invaded for ‘gold’. George W. Bush attacked and invaded Iraq for its oil. Little has changed but names and commodities. If you are still inclined to believe the BushCo cover story, please tell me how many bona fide terrorists were captured by Bush and cite a scintilla of evidence that they were anything but Iraqis defending their nation, their homes and families, against an aggressor, a thief, a war criminal. If the BushCo case against ‘detainees’ at Guantanamo and elsewhere were sound, then why did BushCo so adamantly deny them ‘due process’ or protections afforded them under the Geneva Conventions. What had Bush to hide but war crimes and atrocities?

More than ever, I remain unimpressed with the assertion that the attack and invasion of Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with the faux ‘war on terrorism’! Without an ‘imminent threat’, the U.S. attack and invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq are war crimes as are illegal detentions, torture, murder and other atrocities.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had anything to do with 911. Someone in the Bush administration had a bright idea: “let’s call the opposition to U.S. aggression and conquest by the name ‘Insurgent’!” I would not be surprised to learn that this ‘phrase’ was tested by a DC based consulting firm and focus group.

It takes tremendous courage to speak out against the machine, the Evil Empire, Moloch, Big Brother, the M.I.C. When the Crown persisted against the colonies, William Pitt rose to protest in Parliament:

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms! Never! Never! Never! –William Pitt,

Many of Rome’s enemies were at least as civilized as Rome and, by some standards, more so. Former ‘Flying Circus’ mainstay Terry Jones, a medieval scholar with several documentaries to his credit, may have pinpointed the source of many myths about Rome: Rome itself. It was Rome, primarily –not its conquered provinces –who wrote its history. Like American historians who are biased against the Native Americans, Roman historians may have been biased against non-Roman civilizations. The ‘Empire’ may have written off its conquered as ‘uncivilized, savage and barbaric’ though many were ‘organized, motivated and intelligent individually and in groups, tribes, cities, nations’. Few, if any, posed an ‘imminent threat’ to Rome. Few, in any, had intentions of overthrowing Rome or plundering the empire. There may have been no terrorist threat to the citizens of Rome. The story of Rome from the point of view of the Britons, German, Gauls, Greeks, Persians, and Africans, is, perhaps, a foretaste of the contrarian history of the United States that is sure to be written.

The Vandals didn’t vandalize – the Romans did. The Goths didn’t sack Rome – the Romans did. Attila the Hun didn’t go to Constantinople to destroy it, but because the Emperor’s daughter wanted to marry him. And far from civilizing the societies they conquered the Romans often destroyed much of what they found. –Terry Jones’ Barbarians

Terry Jones vs The Empire

Posted by nytexan February 11th, 2010 | Tags: 911 lies, absurdity of war, barbarians, Bush, Cheney GOP, empire, Iraq, Len Hart, Roman Empire, Rome, Terry Jones, U.S. imperialism | Category: Len Hart, Politics | Leave a comment

The Texas Progressive Alliance congratulates the city of New Orleans for the Saints’ stirring Super Bowl victory, and reminds them that the “hair of the dog” trick doesn’t really help with the hangover.

The Texas Cloverleaf highlights the sentencing of GOP Denton County Constable Ken Jannereth. Probation, anger management, laying off the bottle, and maybe more to come for the disgraced lawman.

Could BeTrue of South Texas Chisme is watching 2 Texas Counties fight it out with their DAs over legal duties.

Bay Area Houston says Teabaggers claim illiterate Blacks elected Obama.

Is your gas wet or dry? Despite industry spin, it seems to not matter. TCEQ testing shows Barnett Shale “Dry Gas” health hazard. TXsharon thanks State Representative Lon Burnam for wading through the recent TCEQ testing report to find the truth. Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Over at TexasKaos, light seeker connects Obama’s big picture with our big picture, in Obama’s Problem is Our Problem In a Nutshell. Is our future Sarah Palin, Tea Partyers and failure?

This week at Left of College Station, Teddy interviews several members of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community at Texas A&M while investigating what it is like to be gay in Aggieland. Left of College Station also takes a look at American’s ignorance of current events and the political process, and a report on the local campaign spending and donations. Left of College Station also covers the week in headlines.

The Nuge was campaigning for 39% over the weekend. Can’t you just feel the greasy, smelly excitement?

WCNews at Eye On Williamson looks at how the legislature is already laying the groundwork for adding sales taxes to items currently excluded like bottled water, basic internet service, and coin operated services, House Ways and Means Committee to look at “Certain Sales Tax Exemptions & Exclusions.

Off the Kuff looks at the effect of the “Citizens United” ruling on judicial elections in Texas.

WhosPlayin is neck-deep in local issues in North Texas, having spent the weekend with the Lewisville City Council at their retreat, and noting that he local school district is discouraging candidates from running for school board.

This week at Texas Vox Citizen Sarah geeked out on the new energy generation plan presented to Austin City Council. May not sound too snazzy but there’s enormous potential there to reduce carbon emissions, build up our local economy, and improve public health with this plan, so she thinks it is pretty cool.

Neil at Texas Liberal commented that office building janitors in Houston have set up a Facebook page as they prepare for a new round of contract negotiations in 2010. All work has merit and all people should be paid a living wage.

Yesterday was huge for New Orleans but it was also TeaBagger Rally Day in northwest Harris County, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs recounted in “Rick and Ted’s (and Sarah’s) Excellent Super Bowl Sunday Venture”.

Posted by nytexan February 8th, 2010 | Tags: Texas, Texas Blogs, Texas Politics, Texas Progessive Alliance | Category: Texas Blogs, Texas Politics | Leave a comment

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of ‘conspiracies’. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the ‘conspiracy’ is called a ‘crime syndicate’ or ‘organized crime’.

If the ‘conspiracy’ in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term ‘conspirators’, you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secretary of State! So –I ask you –who is nuts?

The government often cites the specter of ‘organized crime’ in order to rally voters to a ‘right wing’ cause like ‘law and order’, a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this ‘threat’, this ‘clear and present danger’ to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears –hippies, black people, rock n’ roll, and crime syndicates. Law and order’ was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of ‘hippies’ and ‘black people’ –both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a ‘conspiracy of rich men’ –ITT, Honeywell et al –all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.

George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush –by the time I met him –has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a ‘conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities’.

The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly –I did not know what to make of Bush’s ‘non’-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!

After Bush’s second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was ‘duped’ into eating ‘dog lips’ –apparently a Chinese delicacy –at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.

Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called ‘World’s Number One Terrorist Organization’. Despite his criticism of Reagan’s “voodoo economics” , Bush became Reagan’s running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan’s conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan’s ‘voodoo economics’ caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover’s great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a ‘conspiracy’ to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This ‘conspiracy’ on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:

• The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

• The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation’s stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

• The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.–Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

No one ever called Sr a ‘conspiracy theorist’. That’s because he was not a theorist; he was a ‘conspirator’ for real!

“I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.”- Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior. In his ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’, William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a ‘conspiracy of rich men’ to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.

• Goebbels was jubilant. “Now it will be easy,” he wrote in his diary on February 3, “to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”(2)

• The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany’s leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

• Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. “Private enterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist.” He promised the businessmen that he would “eliminate” the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). “Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.” If he did not win, he would stay in power “by other means . . . with other weapons.” Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.”

• All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the “gratitude” of the businessmen “for having given us such a clear picture.” Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. “I collected three million marks,” he recalled at Nuremberg.(3)

—-William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

We are fortunate that no one ‘informed’ informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of ‘industrialists’ took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney’s ‘Energy Task Force’ which carved up an ‘allotted’ the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these ‘conspiractors’ the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney’s own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.

The results were published in a ‘National Energy Policy’ report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his “Utopia”, a classic of English literature.

• I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

• They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Another example is Heinrich Heydrich’s infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this ‘conspiracy of rich men’ planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.

• … within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.

• Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.

• The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the “Final Solution.” The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the “final solution” was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated “extermination” camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.

–The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as ‘infallible’. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.

Because conspiracy –in fact –exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It’s job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney’s oil buddies and other ‘paid thugs’ like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the moniker –’defense contractor’.

For eons wars have been fought for booty! That’s why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars –as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs –is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs’ opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling ‘fire in a crowded theater’. I ask: isn’t it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?

Today –the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men –oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term –Supreme Court –has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a ‘conspiracy of rich men’, then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won’t and never will!

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a “conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!” [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!

I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

Posted by nytexan February 7th, 2010 | Tags: 911 lies, big oil, Bush Sr. Bush Jr, Cheney GOP, conspiracies, high treason, Iraq, Len Hart, Reagan, rich men, Supreme Court, terrorism, Thomas More, War, War Crimes | Category: Bush, Len Hart, Politics, conspiracy | Leave a comment

Bill White Uses TV Commercial to Write Revisionist History

AUSTIN-Former Houston mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White released his second television ad today-”Meet Bill White,” which will air statewide in both English and Spanish starting Friday evening.

One thing the ad doesn’t do is tell the truth about Bill White’s record as Houston’s mayor. “White is trying to whitewash his record. They are using a television ad to craft a revisionist history of his term as mayor,” said Kelly Love Johnson, Communications Director for Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Farouk Shami.

White claims he cut taxes and improved the lives of people in the city of Houston. The reality, however, is that the amount Houston residents paid in Taxes increased and that the poorest and most vulnerable Houstonians did not see their lives improve under White’s tenure as mayor of that city. In addition, Houston remains one of the most polluted cities in the nation.

“Is he claiming he made people’s lives better before or after the unemployment rate increased during his time as mayor,” asked Shami. “His claims fall short of the truth,” Shami said.

FACT CHECKING BILL WHITE’S WHITEWASH

WHITE CLAIMS: As Mayor of Houston, cut the tax rate 5 times

REALITY: Although the tax rate was cut, the amount people actually paid increased. [HOUSTON CHRONICLE]

REALITY: White has previously denied playing a role in the tax cut:

“Ultimately, there will be some people whose taxes go up and some people whose taxes go down, because of the actions of the appraisal district, not the city,” Mayor Bill White said. [HOUSTON CHRONICLE]

WHITE CLAIMS: He improved lives of families in Houston

REALITY: During Bill White’s tenure as Mayor of Houston, the percentage of the population living in poverty remained relatively the same; it didn’t decrease:
Houston’s poverty rate last year was 20.7 percent, the bureau said, statistically unchanged from 2006. For children, the poverty rate last year was 3.13 percent, also unchanged from the previous year. [HOUSTON CHRONICLE]

REALITY: The unemployment rate and number of unemployed in Harris County higher when he left office than when he entered office.

Unemployment in the greater Houston area increased by nearly 42,000 people during the mayor’s tenure. Harris County’s unemployment rate went from 6.8 percent in January of 2004 when White took office to 8.3 percent when he left office in December of 2009.

REALITY: While Bill White talks about how he worked to clean up Houston, the city was ranked in 2009 as one of Forbes Magazine’s “Most Toxic Cities.” Every ranking on pollution levels has Houston in the top 5 cities in the country.

REALITY: One of four children in Harris County live at or below the poverty level. [HOUSTON CHRONICLE; 6/10/09]

Pol. Adv. by the Farouk for Governor Campaign | 2500 West Loop South #300 | Houston | TX | 77027

Posted by nytexan February 7th, 2010 | Tags: Bill White, Fact Checking, Farouk Shami, Govenor, Texas | Category: Politics, Texas | Leave a comment

Why are there two Americas?  Why is it becoming an obsession to  become the same Theocratic state that we demean in other countries?  Guess what part of the US Constitution is trashed … the part about no state endorsed religion!

What Does The Constitution say about religion? (It may not be what you think.)

By Oliver “Buzz” Thomas

Ask most Americans what the Constitution says about God, and their answers may surprise you.

“One nation under God?”

Nope, that’s the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Oh, yeah, right, right. How about, ‘Endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights’?”

Sorry, but that’s the Declaration of Independence.

“Hmmmm.”

Mostly what you’ll get is a lot of blank stares. Trust me. I’ve tried it in nearly 50 states. Fully 55% of the country, according to a recent survey by the First Amendment Center, believes that the U.S. Constitution establishes us as a “Christian nation.” Worse still, while nearly all Americans say freedom of religion is important, only 56% think it should apply to all religious groups. The truth is that the Constitution says nothing about God. Not one word. And, you can bet that some of the local clergy back in the 1780s howled about it. Newspapers, pamphlets and sermons decried the drafters’ failure to acknowledge God.

One, and only one, reference

Even more interesting is what the Constitution has to say about religion. Although many of the nation’s loudest religionists continue to assert that America is a Christian nation in some legal or constitutional sense, the language of the original Constitution itself suggests otherwise. The only reference to religion is tucked away in Article VI and reads: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a Christian nation to me. If you wished to create a Christian nation, wouldn’t you at least need to ensure that its leaders were Christian? The No Religious Test Clause stands out because most colonies did have religious qualifications for public office. Many required a belief in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity with some, like the Carolinas, going so far as to require that all elected officials be Protestant.

So, why would the framers of our Constitution do such a thing, and moreover, why two years later would they adopt a constitutional amendment declaring that the new federal government could “make no law respecting an establishment of religion?” Was it because they were militant atheists? Hardly. James Madison, the primary architect of our Constitution, studied under the tutelage of Presbyterian-preacher-turned-Princeton-president John Witherspoon and even considered a career in the ministry before opting for politics.

More likely, the framers were concerned about the corrupting influence the institutions of church and state have on each other when either becomes too cozy. These guys knew their history. They had witnessed the blood shed by governments in the name of religion. Europe was nearly destroyed by it. They also knew their politics. The Baptists, Presbyterians and other Evangelicals were fed up with religion that was “established” by the state (as was the Anglican Church in many Southern colonies and the Congregational Church in New England) and were determined to achieve full-throttle religious freedom for all — believers and non-believers alike. [Read it all including the comments]

Why then do some Americans insist on making this country, founded with secular intent, a Theocracy?  Because it is easy to manipulate, many non-cosmopolitan, religious people into electing politicians who pump their good vs evil beliefs.  OK, I said non-cosmopolitan because, rural areas are less exposed to the realities of a diverse population.  Their understanding of diversity is based on hearsay and exaggeration by biased charismatics.  Look at some of the acid comments recently made about the Haiti victims by TV Evangelist bankers.  Look at some of the nasty comments made about the Tsunami victims several years ago.  The “Christian” venom spewed is no worse than what some radical Muslim clerics spewed about September 11, 2001.   So Christian radicals are competeing for the lowest of low and deceiving America’s Laws by proselytizing on government issued weapons!  How dare they!  America’s secular Constitution made America a Democracy, not a Theocracy!

U.S. military rules prohibit any service member from proselytizing while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, which are primarily Muslim nations.

• U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes

• Contractor to stop stamping Bible verses on gear for U.S. military

• ‘Bible codes’ on Afghan army guns

US-made rifles inscribed with Bible codes are being used by US forces and Afghans to fight the Taliban.  The weapons come from Trijicon, a manufacturer based in Wixom, Michigan, that supplies the US military. The company’s now deceased founder, Glyn Bandon, started the practice which continues today.  David Chater, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the Afghan capital Kabul, said: “It is a rallying cry for the Taliban. It gives them a propaganda tool.  “They’ve always tried to paint the US efforts in Afghanistan as a Christian campaign”.

So, it looks like America is throwing off it’s secular cloak and choosing to behave like Iran: Who rules Iran? Are you kidding? Unless you’ve been on another planet for the past 30 years, everybody knows that it’s the radical Islamist clerics who rule Iran. And they dominate with an iron fist. The post of president is largely ceremonial. All of the candidates in this week’s election were hand picked by the mullahs.

And Malaysia: Religious tension is rising in Malaysia over the Christian community’s use of the Arabic word ‘Allah’ for its own god.

America wants to be ruled by TV Evangelist Bankers who are always holier than everyone else until they’re caught!  This is where Religion has buddied up with weapons manufacturers  to promote killing in the name of Jesus.  Lets make our Christian warriors feel better about killing people with other belief systems, even though they may share their foxhole with Muslims, Jews , Buddhists or Agnostics!

Posted by bosskitty January 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Proselytising, Religion, Theocracy, Trijicon | Category: Politics, Religion, Religious War | Leave a comment

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

In the worst decision since Bush v Gore, the US Supreme Court has worked a ‘miracle’. Five ‘justices’ –John G. Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antony Kennedy –have conspired to turn mere words on paper into living, breathing ‘human beings’ and have decreed that these corporations, mere ‘legal abstractions’, have the same rights of free speech as do living breathing human beings. Who is the ‘conspiracy theorist’, who is nuttiest when five ideologues in robes can dictate to you that you treat mere ‘abstractions’ –pieces of paper –as if they were people?

The crooks on K-street may resume their on-going auction of the United States knowing that their nefarious bargains have been blessed by the ‘high court’, a cult of weird robed people who believe weird things! ‘Corporations’ –mere abstractions –are given license to sell out the nation and call it ‘free speech’!

Should you dare to use the term ‘conspiracy’ to describe the activities of these crooks on K-street –the lobbies for Israel and other foreign entities –you will be labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist’! But SCOTUS, meanwhile, gets away with calling words on paper a ‘person’ and giving them rights! I ask you: who is nuttier? You for believing what volumes of federal laws have called ‘conspiracies’? Or –the SUPREME court who believes an embossed piece of paper with a corporate seal from Delaware on it is a real, living breathing person? I will tell you what I think! I think that five members of the Supreme Court of the United States are nuttier than fruit cakes!

Conspiracies Exist: SCOTUS IS One!
The Supreme Court itself has said ‘conspiracies eixst’ in numerous decisions that you can look up for yourself at Findlaw or Cornell University Law Library online. When there are thousands of pages of case law having to do with conspiracies, the notion that they don’t exist is just plain stupid! The only folk trying to discount ‘conspiracies’ are ring wing nuts who are clearly up to their necks in numerous treasonous conspiracies to undermine American democracy and wage wars of naked aggression and oil plunder! The latest SCOTUS decision is the result and the proof of my charge.

Certain types of conspiracies were made ‘legal’ long ago. They are called ‘corporations’ and ‘geniuses’ on the high court think that they are ‘real folk’ and treat them accordingly. In fact, corporations are just ink on paper! If that! Today –you can form a corporation online and save the ink! The Supreme Court will think you are ‘real’ and may even grant you privileges that you have not earned or deserve. If you can sell it, you might even enlist the US military for a little invasion and resource theft! You could line your pockets with the sacrifice of American lives and the lives of your victims.

SCOTUS has said that those ‘conspiracies of rich men’ are people –living, breathing people –who have rights and among those presumably inalienable rights is the right to bribe office seekers with monies that have most certainly bilked out of you and millions of other people, real people with hearts, lungs, mouths, and opinions. In an absurd Kafkaesque world of GOP manufacture, mere ink and paper have more rights, more power, more clout more impact upon the world than do you, a real person in a real word!

Less than two years after Buckley, Bellotti re-affirmed the First Amendment principle that the Government lacks the power to restrict political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity. 435 U.S., at 784–785. Thus the law stood until Austin up-held a corporate independent expenditure restriction, bypassing Buckley and Bellotti by recognizing a new governmental interest inpreventing “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggrega-tions of [corporate] wealth . . . that have little or no correlation to thepublic’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” 494 U. S., at 660. Pp. 25–32. (c

This Court is confronted with conflicting lines of precedent: a pre-Austin line forbidding speech restrictions based on the speaker’s corporate identity and a post-Austin line permitting them. Neither Austin’s antidistortion rationale nor the Government’s other justifica-tions support §441b’s restrictions. Pp. 32–47.–SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION, APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, No. 08–205.

Nevertheless, when a ‘conspiracy of rich men’ has been granted privilege and status, you will be told that ‘conspiracies’ do not exist! If that were so, why has the US Supreme Court handed down so many cases defining them and applying to them the laws of these United States? And why are there so many US laws having to do with ‘conspiracies’ if ‘conspiracies’ did not exist?The fascist domination of American life and debate is possible because people have ‘bought into’ the pernicious notion of ‘corporate personhood’. This notion facilitates More’s ‘conspiracy of rich men’.

Mere legal abstractions are absurdly accorded rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people. Corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality, literally, a ‘conspiracy of rich men: the Tea Baggers and idiots who have bought into it; and the GOP consultants, firms, and focus groups who dreamed it all up. And, just a egregious, the Supreme Court itself where the majority fussed about a red herring: corporations losing a voice in the political process! The words ‘censorship’ and ‘banned speech’ was banded about as if they were truly concerned about it but would not be if it had not been their corporate sponsors who were clearly most affected.

Is the Voice of ‘Labor’ Silenced?
One can only conclude that SCOTUS’s problem with the law as it had been was that labor unions were on an equal footing with the big, conservative corporations! Before the Supreme Court itself subverted Federal Election laws, both corporations and labor unions were free to voice any political opinion about any issue or candidate whenever they wanted! We can’t have that, now can we? Simply, the five right wing extremists on the court have, as they did with Bush v Gore, labored mightily to hatch a rationalization for lies and bulshit, a rationalization that sounds scholarly, legal and erudite but which is, in fact, a lod of codswallop and  highfalutin’ sounding crap!!

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

–Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Who is SCOTUS protecting and favoring? The Carvellian quick response: the richest one percent of the US population which, in fact, owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined. The Supreme Court of the Unites States, infiltrated by the likes of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and The US right wing have robbed the US population with “trickle down theory” and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence. Here are some assorted facts that paint the ugly picture.

• In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].

• The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].

• One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].

• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent….

• Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.

• Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined…

• Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We’ve gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn’t seen since the teens and 1920s.’” [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].

• The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].

• Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest.
• --US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one’s worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.

Posted by nytexan January 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Bush, corporate personhood, Len Hart, Republican, Scalia, SCOTUS, Thomas | Category: Bush, Len Hart, Politics | Comments (1)

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Chinese rulers and the US elites partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US became a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up the buck so that it can sell us junk via Wal-Mart.

These deals were all worked out with China by Bush Sr et al in the years following Nixon’s infamous visit to the forbidden city. In these talks, US leaders, primarily the right wing/GOP, the US consumer and laborer was sold out. The US would become a vassal state, a slave state, a consumer society whose raison d’etre was to buy Chinese junk. The big losers are US workers and consumers.

• I work at Wal-Mart (I’m involved in the UFCW’s effort to organize W-M). One day, right after I was hired, I went around on my lunch break and just sort of randomly looked at where a whole bunch of products were made.

• I think I found a blender that had been made in Malaysia. EVERYTHING else had been made in China.

• I wonder how the typical US consumer would feel about Wal-Mart if it were named, say, US Corporate Capital & Chinese Slave Labor Coooperative? –John Carter, on Facebook

The US used to make some of the products –appliances, electronic gear et al –that are now dumped on the US via an economic blight called Wal-Mart! The US ruling elite resented the high wages paid to unionized workers in affluent America. Nixon, Reagan et al solved the US labor ‘problem’!

The solution: EXPORT US JOBS TO CHINA!

China pays slave wages and dumps the resulting cheap product on a US which produces very little these days. Concurrently, there are fewer futures, fewer opportunities, declining hope, rising despair –all the result of some thirty or forty years of right wing bullshit, lies, crookery and outright fraud. The GOP, for example, is not a political party. It is a crime syndicate and a kooky cult to boot!

The tragic truth can be found in black and white at the CIA’s World Fact Book which lists the US at the bottom of the list with the world’s largest negative current account balance, formerly called the balance of trade deficit.

While the US was spending time, resources and personnel in running ‘elections’ for its corrupt clients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and participating in pointless mediations between its intransigent Israeli partner and its impotent Palestinian client, the South Korean government backed a consortium headed by the Korea Electric Power Corporation in its successful bid on the $20.4 billion dollar nuclear power deal, opening the way for other billion-dollar contracts in the region (FT – page 13)….In contrast, the US is a declining world power with a deteriorating society resulting from its military-driven empire building and its financial-speculative centered economy:

1. Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners – Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars. China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.
2. The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; China invests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.
3. China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country’s interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.
4. The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.
5. China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe (to threaten Venezuela), backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran.
6. China increases economic relations with dynamic Latin American economies, incorporating over 80% of the continent’s population; the US partners with the failed state of Mexico, which has the worst economic performance in the hemisphere and where powerful drug cartels control wide regions and penetrate deep into the state apparatus.

–Information Clearing House, The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning, James Petras

The US right wing robbed the US population with “trickle down theory” and other nonsense utterly unsupported with fact or evidence:

• In the late 1970s, the top one percent of the US population held 13 percent of the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent. [Source: Source: Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams ].
• The top ten percent of the US population owns 81.8 percent of the real estate, 81.2 percent of the stock, and 88 percent of the bonds. [Source: Federal Reserve Bank data in Left Business Observer, No. 72, Apr. 3, 1996, p. 5].
• One percent of the US population owns sixty percent of the stock and forty percent of the total wealth. [Source: Hawken, Paul, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: Harper Business, 1993].
• The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall 9 percent….
• Since 1973, every group in society except the top 20 percent has seen its share of the national income decline, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most. They have just 3.6 percent of national income, down from 4.4 percent a quarter century ago.
• Indeed, the top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined…
  Rebecca Blank, who recently left the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out, ‘We’ve gone back to levels of income and wealth inequality that this country hasn’t seen since the teens and 1920s.’” [Source: Merrill Goozner, Crash of '99?, Salon.com, Oct. 1, 1999; addendum: since 1999, the date the source was published, the situation is much, much worse. Today --just ONE PERCENT own more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. GOP incompetence and criminality moves so fast these days, it's hard to keep up!].
• The top one percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 40 percent. [Source: Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World, p. 108].
• Federal Reserve median family net worth by percentile for 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Federal Reserve Bulletin January 2003, pp. 1-36). Note the small gains for the bottom 75% of the population and larger gains for the upper 25% and that the 1998 to 2001 gains were largest.--US Wealth Distributions 1989-2001

Republicans bought the scam because it made them feel good about being greedy, shallow bastards. The appeal is obvious: trickle down rationalized greed but only after the fact; it made one feel good about one’s worst impulses, motives, and elitist bigotry.

Posted by nytexan January 4th, 2010 | Tags: balance of trade deficit, Bush, China, current account balance, dollar, economic crisis, Reagan, US decline, vassal state, WalMart | Category: China, GOP, Len Hart, Politics | Leave a comment