It was a tough week for the pro-rape forces. Child-raping former Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was dragged off in shackles Saturday, and his enablers were fired Wednesday. Voters in Mississippi Tuesday turned back a law banning abortions for rape victims. Even environmental rape was dealt a blow when the media reported the U.S. government had known all along that thrusting long, hard probes into mother earth and spewing disgusting fluids into her caused earthquakes, like the ones that rattled Oklahoma last weekend.
Even jovial GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain was coming under fire just for inappropriately groping some women and making a few disgusting personal suggestions.
In Pennsylvania's formerly Happy Valley college football enclave, a grand jury found in excruciating detail that Sandusky was a serial rapist who'd violated numerous young boys over decades. Aside from his eight Pennsylvania victims, Texas authorities revealed they were investigating allegations Sandusky sexually assaulted another victim while he and the Penn State Nittany Lions football team were at the 1999 Alamo Bowl in San Antonio.
In Mississippi, voters rejected Amendment 26, which would have effectively banned all abortions in the state, including for cases of rape or incest. Right-wing activists had sought to define a fertilized egg as a person, forcing women to bear the children of rapists.
As earthquakes rumbled across Oklahoma, media reports revealed the U.S. Army and the U.S. Geological Survey had long ago concluded that injecting water into deep underground rock formations caused earthquakes.
The U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal tried in the 1960s to get rid of liquid waste by injecting it deep into the ground. From 1962 to 1966, the RMA injected salty waste water containing metals, chlorides and organic waste into a 12,000-foot-deep well, but discontinued the practice because they discovered it was causing earthquakes.
"Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established," stated the 1990 Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection - A Report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The magnitudes 5.6 and 4.7 earthquakes in Oklahoma last weekend set off a new flurry of speculation that hydrofracking for gas and oil was causing earthquakes in that state. Oklahoma averaged about 50 earthquakes a year until a couple years ago. Gas and oil moguls began widespread hydrofracking in the state, and, in 2010, Oklahoma experienced 1,047 earthquakes.
By Wednesday night, the pro-rape forces had had enough of the persecution onslaught. It was getting so a multi-millionaire pizza mogul couldn't grope women and say filthy things to them without some sort of backlash.
Thus, on Wednesday night, as multi-millionaire pizza mogul and GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain was harassed with yet another question about his harassing women, the pro-rape empire struck back.
In a scene reminiscent of GOP audience members jeering health care access at the September CNN/Tea Party debate, the pro-rape, pro-harassment audience, apparently fed up with the relentless assaults on their God-given right to defile and subjugate all around them, broke into a cascade of boos and catcalls when CNBC debate moderator Maria Bartiromo broached the subject of Cain's grabby-handed, potty-mouthed conduct.
"Why should the American people hire a president if they feel there are character issues?" Bartiromo asked, and the audience howled and screamed in protest. The audience let it be known that if anyone on the right wanted to grab someone's genitals and make lewd suggestions, his or her victim had better like it.
Cain, who'd been accused of sexually harassing at least four women, and had paid undisclosed settlements to several of them, brashly retorted, "The American people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion." Or, tried at all.
Rival presidential candidate Mitt Romney had Cain's back, as the jeering audience tried to shout down moderator John Harwood's question to him about whether he would have fired Cain for his conduct.
"Would you keep Herman Cain as a CEO knowing what you know?" Harwood asked Romney.
"Herman Cain is the person to respond to these questions," Romney replied, in the Mormon mogul-turned-politico's best impression of a Roman Catholic archbishop.
With "Tora! Tora! Tora!" apparently flashing across the pro-rape com net, hordes of rabid pro-rape partisans roared onto the streets of College Station, PA, battling police, tearing down light poles, and overturning vehicles.
They were enraged that Penn State's Board of Trustees had fired university president Graham Spanier and, especially, football head coach Joe Paterno for covering up and enabling Sandusky's serial child rapes. Paterno, a football coaching legend, had in 2002 brushed off then 28-year-old graduate assistant Mike McQueary when he said he'd seen Sandusky in the school football facility raping a child. Instead of reporting the alleged crime to police as required by law, Paterno pawned McQueary off on the school's athletic director.
The grand jury indicted Athletic Director Tim Curley and school business and finance VP Gary Schultz on obstruction and perjury charges.
The imperious 'JoePa' had turned back school officials' 2004 plea that he retire, and had declared he would finish out the current football season, warning the Board of Trustees not to "spend a single minute" considering his removal.
A crowd of apparently pro-rape partisans rallied outside Paterno's home. Videos showed Paterno leading them in a call-and-response, "We are: Penn State!" chant, as most viewers mentally filled the blank following "we are" with terms other than the name of a school.
Displaying utter contempt for the children who'd been Sandusky's and Paterno's victims, the mob then tore through town, throwing rocks at police, overturning a TV van, and tearing down light poles.
"I think the point people are trying to make is the media is responsible for JoePa going down," said Penn State student Mike Clark, making the point that raping children and covering up the rape so you could rape more children was a-okay with Mike.
"We got rowdy. We got maced," Jeff Heim told the New York Times. "But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend," he said. Apparently to Jeff, raping children and sitting idly by while your friends raped children weren't reputation-tarnishing acts.
Zealots eager to force women to bear rapists' children regrouped as well. Opponents of Mississippi's Amendment 26 "lied to voters and they said lies often enough that they persuaded voters," complained Keith Mason, president of Personhood USA, an organization apparently dedicated to forcing women to bear the children of persons who were hoodlums. "The people here in Mississippi are mad, and they are ready to come back and do it again," he said, threatening serial action.
Zealots in Florida gussied up their proposed state constitutional amendment to ban abortions for rape victims with the title 'Florida ProLife Personhood.'
"We're continuing on," Personhood Florida ringleader Rev. Bryan Longworth said. "Obviously, the defeat in Mississippi means we have to work all the more harder." As did the Mississippi measure, the Florida measure would define a fertilized egg as a person, clearing the way for rapists to procreate. Supporters aimed for a 2014 vote.
By week's end, pro-rape forces had regained the initiative worldwide. Financial markets in Europe, Asia and the United States rallied Friday on news that Italy and Greece had dumped their political leaders and had voted to mollify bankers and financiers by adopting the most draconian austerity measures yet.
Nothing buoyed the pro-rape crowd more than seeing the rich rape whole countries.
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
Khadafy Killing a 'Good Thing' in an Age of 'Good Things'
They killed Khadafy.
By now, everyone knew what there was to know. Deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy was killed Thursday in his hometown of Sirte after a NATO airstrike busted up a convoy of vehicles, and rebel fighters found the bedraggled tyrant hiding in a drainage pipe. The wounded Khadafy was dragged from the pipe, and, apparently, an 18-year-old rebel fighter saved Libyan taxpayers the cost of a showy show trial.
Khadafy was the poster child among blood-thirsty dictators, and no one beyond the blood-thirsty dictator fan club shed any tears.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj of the Libyan military counsel proclaimed, "we have done a great job to liberate all the country."
The world's leaders chimed in.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "The disappearance of Moammar Khadafy is a major step in the struggle led for the last eight months by the Libyan people..."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "This day draws a line beneath the Khadafy regime: it is an important day for the Libyans."
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, "The death of Moammar Khadafy is an historic moment for the people of Libya."
In the U.S., bickering legislators found themselves grudgingly in agreement.
"The passing of Moammar Khadafy from this earth is definitely not a bad thing," said Democratic Sen. Chris Coons (DE).
"Khadafy being gone is a good thing," said Republican Sen. Roy Blunt (MO).
Even Martha Stewart would likely arrange a couple of doilies around the tyrant's bloodied corpse and pronounce it "a Good Thing."
There was no doubting Khadafy'd been a baaad man, and that he'd been, in the parlance of the Wild Old West, someone who'd "needed killin.'"
And yet, and yet...
They killed Saddam Hussein, and everyone agreed it was a good thing.
They killed Osama bin Laden, and everyone cheered.
They killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, and everyone more of less nodded in assent.
Certainly, some very bad people had gotten their comeuppance of late. Their just desserts. Paid the piper. Had their dogma run over by their karma.
Certainly President Barack Obama had gotten to step repeatedly up to a podium to tell the White House press corp that yet another enemy of freedom, democracy and goodness had bitten the dust.
And yet, and yet...
Of course, this was the way it was supposed to be. Harry killed Lord You-Know-Who. 007 killed Goldfinger. Darth Vader redeemed himself by killing the Emperor. The 47 Ronin acquitted themselves by killing the evil Lord. Countless square-jawed Sheriffs gunned down countless black-hatted villains at innumerable high noons on innumerable dusty Main Streets.
And yet, and yet...
When did civilization devolve to the point where its only victories consisted of killing someone? When had the payoff for all the hope and struggle and toil and sacrifice become reduced to a bullet through someone's brain? When was it that the only tickmarks goodness and decency and democracy dropped into the "Win" column began coming from gunning someone down or blowing someone up?
It wasn't so much that killing Khadafy wasn't the best thing since killing bin Laden, but that it was the only good thing since killing bin Laden. It wasn't so much that killing Khadafy wasn't a good thing, but that killing some bad guy had become the only good thing anybody managed to accomplish in a very, very long while.
Couldn't anybody other than the Avenging Angel please make a play?
Couldn't the Angel of Mercy break a tackle and dance into the end zone for six? Couldn't Charity step to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and crank a three-run jack to send the fans home happy? Couldn't Kindness sink a three-pointer at the buzzer and draw the foul to put the home team over the top?
Couldn't faith, or hope, or temperance, or diligence, or patience, or humility bend that last-second kick into the back of the net as the play-by-play announcer ecstatically screamed, "Goooooooooooooal?"
While the world celebrated this good thing, it seemed incapable of creating jobs for people who needed them, or nursing the sick and injured, or caring for aging parents and grandparents. While the world did its touchdown dance and spiked the football over yet another bloody corpse, it seemed incapable of cleaning up its rivers and lakes and oceans, or clearing its air, or reversing global climate change, or even agreeing such problems existed.
When the good folks of eighteenth century France set up Dr. Guillotines' amazing slicing, dicing, person-o-matic in the Place de la Revolution and began dragging powdered aristocrats to the National Razor to take a foot off the top, the crowd agreed it was a very good thing. They whacked Louis XVI, and Collenot d'Angremont. They whacked Marie Antoinette. Maximilien Robespierre and the Revolutionary Tribunal figured it was all good and whacked aristos and collaborators and crooks left and right. There seemed to be no end to good things.
And yet, and yet...
Somewhere between the time they whacked Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre himself; sometime between the rise of an obscure army officer named Napoleon and a genocidal war in Spain; at some point between Austerlitz and a miserable, freezing retreat from Russia and the maelstrom of Waterloo, it ceased being a good thing.
Killing Khadafy was a good thing, everyone agreed. Killing Hussein was a good thing, most everyone agreed. Killing bin Laden was a good thing, most everyone west of Islamabad agreed. Killing Al-Awlaki was a good thing, many people more or less agreed.
Thanks to modern technology, there was no need to trek to a guillotine for a good thing, as good things could be administered remotely. Unmanned drones fired over-the-horizon smart missiles. Snipers blew people up from a mile away. Rockets and RPGs and IEDs all administered someone's idea of a good thing.
There was no end to the number of good things that could be done, and no end to the number of folks who figured they knew a good thing when they saw one.
Someone posted a $75,000 inducement on the internet figuring that murdering Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-IL) was a good thing. Last month, someone, the same or otherwise, offered $100,000 for killing President George W. Bush. Or Donald Rumsfeld. Or Dick Cheney. Or any U.S. Senator, Congressmember, or their family members.
The FBI was investigating similar threats against Obama and other lawmakers. A lot of people seemed to have their own ideas about which things might be good.
It was a time when anger and disenfranchisement had spilled onto the streets of cities and towns around the world. It was a Time for Outrage!, declared revered diplomat and World War II French Resistance fighter Stephane Hessel.
It was a time that threatened to be full of good things.
And everyone knew how regrettable too much of a good thing could be.
By now, everyone knew what there was to know. Deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy was killed Thursday in his hometown of Sirte after a NATO airstrike busted up a convoy of vehicles, and rebel fighters found the bedraggled tyrant hiding in a drainage pipe. The wounded Khadafy was dragged from the pipe, and, apparently, an 18-year-old rebel fighter saved Libyan taxpayers the cost of a showy show trial.
Khadafy was the poster child among blood-thirsty dictators, and no one beyond the blood-thirsty dictator fan club shed any tears.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj of the Libyan military counsel proclaimed, "we have done a great job to liberate all the country."
The world's leaders chimed in.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "The disappearance of Moammar Khadafy is a major step in the struggle led for the last eight months by the Libyan people..."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "This day draws a line beneath the Khadafy regime: it is an important day for the Libyans."
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, "The death of Moammar Khadafy is an historic moment for the people of Libya."
In the U.S., bickering legislators found themselves grudgingly in agreement.
"The passing of Moammar Khadafy from this earth is definitely not a bad thing," said Democratic Sen. Chris Coons (DE).
"Khadafy being gone is a good thing," said Republican Sen. Roy Blunt (MO).
Even Martha Stewart would likely arrange a couple of doilies around the tyrant's bloodied corpse and pronounce it "a Good Thing."
There was no doubting Khadafy'd been a baaad man, and that he'd been, in the parlance of the Wild Old West, someone who'd "needed killin.'"
And yet, and yet...
They killed Saddam Hussein, and everyone agreed it was a good thing.
They killed Osama bin Laden, and everyone cheered.
They killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, and everyone more of less nodded in assent.
Certainly, some very bad people had gotten their comeuppance of late. Their just desserts. Paid the piper. Had their dogma run over by their karma.
Certainly President Barack Obama had gotten to step repeatedly up to a podium to tell the White House press corp that yet another enemy of freedom, democracy and goodness had bitten the dust.
And yet, and yet...
Of course, this was the way it was supposed to be. Harry killed Lord You-Know-Who. 007 killed Goldfinger. Darth Vader redeemed himself by killing the Emperor. The 47 Ronin acquitted themselves by killing the evil Lord. Countless square-jawed Sheriffs gunned down countless black-hatted villains at innumerable high noons on innumerable dusty Main Streets.
And yet, and yet...
When did civilization devolve to the point where its only victories consisted of killing someone? When had the payoff for all the hope and struggle and toil and sacrifice become reduced to a bullet through someone's brain? When was it that the only tickmarks goodness and decency and democracy dropped into the "Win" column began coming from gunning someone down or blowing someone up?
It wasn't so much that killing Khadafy wasn't the best thing since killing bin Laden, but that it was the only good thing since killing bin Laden. It wasn't so much that killing Khadafy wasn't a good thing, but that killing some bad guy had become the only good thing anybody managed to accomplish in a very, very long while.
Couldn't anybody other than the Avenging Angel please make a play?
Couldn't the Angel of Mercy break a tackle and dance into the end zone for six? Couldn't Charity step to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and crank a three-run jack to send the fans home happy? Couldn't Kindness sink a three-pointer at the buzzer and draw the foul to put the home team over the top?
Couldn't faith, or hope, or temperance, or diligence, or patience, or humility bend that last-second kick into the back of the net as the play-by-play announcer ecstatically screamed, "Goooooooooooooal?"
While the world celebrated this good thing, it seemed incapable of creating jobs for people who needed them, or nursing the sick and injured, or caring for aging parents and grandparents. While the world did its touchdown dance and spiked the football over yet another bloody corpse, it seemed incapable of cleaning up its rivers and lakes and oceans, or clearing its air, or reversing global climate change, or even agreeing such problems existed.
When the good folks of eighteenth century France set up Dr. Guillotines' amazing slicing, dicing, person-o-matic in the Place de la Revolution and began dragging powdered aristocrats to the National Razor to take a foot off the top, the crowd agreed it was a very good thing. They whacked Louis XVI, and Collenot d'Angremont. They whacked Marie Antoinette. Maximilien Robespierre and the Revolutionary Tribunal figured it was all good and whacked aristos and collaborators and crooks left and right. There seemed to be no end to good things.
And yet, and yet...
Somewhere between the time they whacked Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre himself; sometime between the rise of an obscure army officer named Napoleon and a genocidal war in Spain; at some point between Austerlitz and a miserable, freezing retreat from Russia and the maelstrom of Waterloo, it ceased being a good thing.
Killing Khadafy was a good thing, everyone agreed. Killing Hussein was a good thing, most everyone agreed. Killing bin Laden was a good thing, most everyone west of Islamabad agreed. Killing Al-Awlaki was a good thing, many people more or less agreed.
Thanks to modern technology, there was no need to trek to a guillotine for a good thing, as good things could be administered remotely. Unmanned drones fired over-the-horizon smart missiles. Snipers blew people up from a mile away. Rockets and RPGs and IEDs all administered someone's idea of a good thing.
There was no end to the number of good things that could be done, and no end to the number of folks who figured they knew a good thing when they saw one.
Someone posted a $75,000 inducement on the internet figuring that murdering Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-IL) was a good thing. Last month, someone, the same or otherwise, offered $100,000 for killing President George W. Bush. Or Donald Rumsfeld. Or Dick Cheney. Or any U.S. Senator, Congressmember, or their family members.
The FBI was investigating similar threats against Obama and other lawmakers. A lot of people seemed to have their own ideas about which things might be good.
It was a time when anger and disenfranchisement had spilled onto the streets of cities and towns around the world. It was a Time for Outrage!, declared revered diplomat and World War II French Resistance fighter Stephane Hessel.
It was a time that threatened to be full of good things.
And everyone knew how regrettable too much of a good thing could be.
Monday, October 17, 2011
One Month In, Media, Pols Still Don't Get Occupy Wall Street Protests
Flip any TV onto any one of the sixteen gazillion channels of its banal, mindless offerings, and you'll see the one percenters. There'll be one percenters pretending they're cops. There'll be one percenters pretending they're nerds, even if they're the best-looking nerds anyone's ever seen. There'll be one percenters pretending they're sex-crazed suburbanites, all nipped and tucked and botoxed and collagen-injected and personally-trained into that creepy faux-thirty look so prevalent at Republican conventions.
There'll even be one percenters pretending they're journalists.
The mass media, lamestream and otherwise, were of, for, and by one percenters. The mass media's banal, mindless content, lamestream and otherwise, was created by one percenters, green-lighted by boardrooms filled with one percenters, produced by one percenters, and featured photogenic one percenters hawking some other one percenters' goods and services. And, it was all dedicated to generating bottom lines that tickled one percenter fancies.
Most everyone you'd see, or hear, or read about or hear about in the mass media were one percenters. Performers, politicians, and pundits; newsreaders and novelists; even carpenters and cooks were one percenters. Utility infielders for Major League Baseball teams were one percenters.
Little wonder the one percenters' mass media were baffled by the Occupy Wall Street protests that have spread across the nation and the world, and marked their first full month with their biggest demonstrations yet in the capitols of Europe last weekend.
NBC News anchor Lester Holt Sunday acknowledged the Occupy Wall Street movement had galvanized thousands, but wondered, "toward what end?"
"It's not a middle class uprising," one well-heeled bank exec whined to the New York Times. "It's fringe groups. It's people who have time to do this," he said, likely unable to comprehend that 'middle class' didn't mean folks making only five or ten mil a year.
"For the most part, there just doesn't seem to be a coherent message," Tea Party Sen. Pat Toomey (R-FL) derided the movement Monday on Pennsylvania radio station WKOK.
"I am not sure this movement is going to last if it doesn't have some reasonably clear and cogent purpose and message and so far I haven't seen that," Toomey snorted dismissively.
The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were usually being subjected to some sort of degrading hazing ritual to win the kind of prizes one percenters understood: money; notoriety; a brand new car!
The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were being made to shed weight, or complete humiliating tasks, or sing or dance or otherwise win the approval of one percenters to be granted some cash reward, or a makeover, or, most splendid of all, admission to the ranks of the one percenters themselves.
The only other 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenter's mass media were wearing orange jumpsuits doing perpwalks.
Thus, it was no surprise that Holt and Toomey and Wall Street Financiers were plaintively asking, "What did the Occupiers want?"
Did they want a break on student loans? Did they want a makeover? Did they want a free trip to a Super Bowl party with Deion Sanders and Britney Spears? Did they want a brand new car?
What did Occupiers out in the streets of more than a hundred American cities and in the capitols of Europe demonstrating against economic injustice want? What could scruffy young people and laid-off web designers and grannies on Social Security marching and carrying signs decrying economic injustice possibly desire? What could a global backlash against economic injustice possibly be demanding?
What did the thousands gathered in New York and Tucson and Orlando protesting economic injustice want? What could countless marches and rallies in Phoenix and Sacramento and Richmond and Los Angeles and Chicago and countless other American cities denouncing economic injustice hope to accomplish? What could the massive demonstrations in London and Rome raging against economic injustice possibly have in mind?
A month into the protest, and the one percenters still didn't get it. A month of rallies and marches and demonstrations, and, with all their money, the one percenters still couldn't buy a vowel to get a clue. A month of outrage and exuberance spilling onto the streets of the world, and you still had to go full-on Charlie Sheen to get through: Duh, an end to economic injustice!
The Holts and the Toomeys and the Wall Street tycoons and all the one percenter mass media moguls couldn't imagine that the 99% wanted to stop the one percenters treating the entire planet as a plutocratic one percenter fiefdom. The Holts and the Toomeys and the tycoons and the moguls couldn't get that the 99% were fed up with one percenters preening and pontificating and plundering and pilfering and pillaging and polluting as though hitting the blind-luck, talent-and-brains-and-hard-work-had-nothing-to-do-with-it fame and fortune lottery somehow entitled them to wreck a whole civilization and demean an entire human species and degrade a whole planetary ecosystem so they could wallow in unlimited gold-plated, private jetting, ice sculpture-festooned decadence twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five-except-in-leap-years-when-it's-three-sixty-six.
The one percenters couldn't rub their brain cells together and figure out the Occupiers didn't give a fig about a makeover, or a Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney, or a brand new car.
The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone - everyone, not just one in twenty-seven million with a chance to win - could find meaningful work that was valued and respected, and provided a decent, dignified life, with promise for the future and a chance for their kids to get on, and the chance to put aside a little - a little - for a comfortable retirement. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone could get decent health care, and a decent education, and live in a decent home that wasn't underwater because so many right-wing opportunists in so many rip-off financial services institutions sliced and diced and repackaged so much debt until it all collapsed, then came and demanded mo' money, mo' money, mo' money to do it all over again.
The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all the tax and economic policies and banking and financial rules and regs didn't concentrate 84% of America's wealth into the hands of 20% of the wealthiest. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all that wealth wasn't concentrated into so few hands, giving the rich free reign to bludgeon everyone and everything with the blunt instrument of lobbyists and lawyers and bought-and-paid-for politicians to make sure the champagne kept flowing and the private jets kept jetting and Deion and Britney kept grinning and grinding in some luxury suite at the Super Bowl.
"Some of them are pretty radical," Toomey complained about Occupiers. To vilify and demean, he said, "You see the occasional sign that says 'Karl Marx was right.'"
"Karl Marx had it right," Nouriel 'Dr. Doom' Roubini, the New York University economist who'd accurately predicted the 2008 financial meltdown recently told the Wall Street Journal. "At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you can't keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."
If Marx and Roubini were too radical for Toomey, Marriner Eccles, Chair of the Federal Reserve Board from 1932-1948, said:
The period after World War II saw the greatest growth in middle class prosperity ever. Abroad, the U.S. government funded the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. At home, the U.S. government funded the education of an entire generation of Americans with the G.I. Bill, as well as the building of the Interstate Freeway System, dams, bridges, schools, libraries and even a few rocket ships to the moon.
There was just one little thing about taxes. Throughout that period of unprecedented growth, the top income tax rate never dipped below 70%.
Then, the money moguls and oil barons and corporate tycoons decided taxpayers should stop funding a decent life for the 99%, and start funding a spectacular life for the one percenters. To that end, they promised everyone that slashing taxes for corporations and the rich would make everything much, much, much better.
They didn't mention it would only make things better for themselves, and much, much worse for everyone else.
What the 99% wanted wasn't a makeover, unless it was the making over an entire dysfunctional global economic and financial system that concentrated wealth from the many to the few. What the 99% wanted wasn't a brand new car, unless it was part of a decent life with a good job, and a secure future, and universally accessible health care, and a dignified retirement.
What the 99% wanted was a world remade for the benefit of everyone, not just for the greedy, narcissistic few who gloated over their power and taunted and cheered for the deaths of those who couldn't afford health insurance.
If the one percenters ever figured that out, they could send it gift-wrapped to the 99% at that Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney. If, as was much more likely, the one percenters never figured it out, the 99% would just have to crash that party.
And that was what the 99% wanted.
There'll even be one percenters pretending they're journalists.
The mass media, lamestream and otherwise, were of, for, and by one percenters. The mass media's banal, mindless content, lamestream and otherwise, was created by one percenters, green-lighted by boardrooms filled with one percenters, produced by one percenters, and featured photogenic one percenters hawking some other one percenters' goods and services. And, it was all dedicated to generating bottom lines that tickled one percenter fancies.
Most everyone you'd see, or hear, or read about or hear about in the mass media were one percenters. Performers, politicians, and pundits; newsreaders and novelists; even carpenters and cooks were one percenters. Utility infielders for Major League Baseball teams were one percenters.
Little wonder the one percenters' mass media were baffled by the Occupy Wall Street protests that have spread across the nation and the world, and marked their first full month with their biggest demonstrations yet in the capitols of Europe last weekend.
NBC News anchor Lester Holt Sunday acknowledged the Occupy Wall Street movement had galvanized thousands, but wondered, "toward what end?"
"It's not a middle class uprising," one well-heeled bank exec whined to the New York Times. "It's fringe groups. It's people who have time to do this," he said, likely unable to comprehend that 'middle class' didn't mean folks making only five or ten mil a year.
"For the most part, there just doesn't seem to be a coherent message," Tea Party Sen. Pat Toomey (R-FL) derided the movement Monday on Pennsylvania radio station WKOK.
"I am not sure this movement is going to last if it doesn't have some reasonably clear and cogent purpose and message and so far I haven't seen that," Toomey snorted dismissively.
The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were usually being subjected to some sort of degrading hazing ritual to win the kind of prizes one percenters understood: money; notoriety; a brand new car!
The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were being made to shed weight, or complete humiliating tasks, or sing or dance or otherwise win the approval of one percenters to be granted some cash reward, or a makeover, or, most splendid of all, admission to the ranks of the one percenters themselves.
The only other 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenter's mass media were wearing orange jumpsuits doing perpwalks.
Thus, it was no surprise that Holt and Toomey and Wall Street Financiers were plaintively asking, "What did the Occupiers want?"
Did they want a break on student loans? Did they want a makeover? Did they want a free trip to a Super Bowl party with Deion Sanders and Britney Spears? Did they want a brand new car?
What did Occupiers out in the streets of more than a hundred American cities and in the capitols of Europe demonstrating against economic injustice want? What could scruffy young people and laid-off web designers and grannies on Social Security marching and carrying signs decrying economic injustice possibly desire? What could a global backlash against economic injustice possibly be demanding?
What did the thousands gathered in New York and Tucson and Orlando protesting economic injustice want? What could countless marches and rallies in Phoenix and Sacramento and Richmond and Los Angeles and Chicago and countless other American cities denouncing economic injustice hope to accomplish? What could the massive demonstrations in London and Rome raging against economic injustice possibly have in mind?
A month into the protest, and the one percenters still didn't get it. A month of rallies and marches and demonstrations, and, with all their money, the one percenters still couldn't buy a vowel to get a clue. A month of outrage and exuberance spilling onto the streets of the world, and you still had to go full-on Charlie Sheen to get through: Duh, an end to economic injustice!
The Holts and the Toomeys and the Wall Street tycoons and all the one percenter mass media moguls couldn't imagine that the 99% wanted to stop the one percenters treating the entire planet as a plutocratic one percenter fiefdom. The Holts and the Toomeys and the tycoons and the moguls couldn't get that the 99% were fed up with one percenters preening and pontificating and plundering and pilfering and pillaging and polluting as though hitting the blind-luck, talent-and-brains-and-hard-work-had-nothing-to-do-with-it fame and fortune lottery somehow entitled them to wreck a whole civilization and demean an entire human species and degrade a whole planetary ecosystem so they could wallow in unlimited gold-plated, private jetting, ice sculpture-festooned decadence twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five-except-in-leap-years-when-it's-three-sixty-six.
The one percenters couldn't rub their brain cells together and figure out the Occupiers didn't give a fig about a makeover, or a Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney, or a brand new car.
The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone - everyone, not just one in twenty-seven million with a chance to win - could find meaningful work that was valued and respected, and provided a decent, dignified life, with promise for the future and a chance for their kids to get on, and the chance to put aside a little - a little - for a comfortable retirement. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone could get decent health care, and a decent education, and live in a decent home that wasn't underwater because so many right-wing opportunists in so many rip-off financial services institutions sliced and diced and repackaged so much debt until it all collapsed, then came and demanded mo' money, mo' money, mo' money to do it all over again.
The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all the tax and economic policies and banking and financial rules and regs didn't concentrate 84% of America's wealth into the hands of 20% of the wealthiest. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all that wealth wasn't concentrated into so few hands, giving the rich free reign to bludgeon everyone and everything with the blunt instrument of lobbyists and lawyers and bought-and-paid-for politicians to make sure the champagne kept flowing and the private jets kept jetting and Deion and Britney kept grinning and grinding in some luxury suite at the Super Bowl.
"Some of them are pretty radical," Toomey complained about Occupiers. To vilify and demean, he said, "You see the occasional sign that says 'Karl Marx was right.'"
"Karl Marx had it right," Nouriel 'Dr. Doom' Roubini, the New York University economist who'd accurately predicted the 2008 financial meltdown recently told the Wall Street Journal. "At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you can't keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."
If Marx and Roubini were too radical for Toomey, Marriner Eccles, Chair of the Federal Reserve Board from 1932-1948, said:
"A mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption. Mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth....Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But, by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants."By the time Eccles stepped down from the Board in 1948, massive government spending on an alphabet soup of Roosevelt Administration stimulus programs and exponentially more massive government spending on thousands of ships, tens of thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of aircraft and artillery pieces, millions of trucks and rifles and machine guns and uniforms and boots and shovels and flashlights and bandoliers and bandages during World War II had finally jump-started the greatest economic expansion in history.
The period after World War II saw the greatest growth in middle class prosperity ever. Abroad, the U.S. government funded the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. At home, the U.S. government funded the education of an entire generation of Americans with the G.I. Bill, as well as the building of the Interstate Freeway System, dams, bridges, schools, libraries and even a few rocket ships to the moon.
There was just one little thing about taxes. Throughout that period of unprecedented growth, the top income tax rate never dipped below 70%.
Then, the money moguls and oil barons and corporate tycoons decided taxpayers should stop funding a decent life for the 99%, and start funding a spectacular life for the one percenters. To that end, they promised everyone that slashing taxes for corporations and the rich would make everything much, much, much better.
They didn't mention it would only make things better for themselves, and much, much worse for everyone else.
What the 99% wanted wasn't a makeover, unless it was the making over an entire dysfunctional global economic and financial system that concentrated wealth from the many to the few. What the 99% wanted wasn't a brand new car, unless it was part of a decent life with a good job, and a secure future, and universally accessible health care, and a dignified retirement.
What the 99% wanted was a world remade for the benefit of everyone, not just for the greedy, narcissistic few who gloated over their power and taunted and cheered for the deaths of those who couldn't afford health insurance.
If the one percenters ever figured that out, they could send it gift-wrapped to the 99% at that Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney. If, as was much more likely, the one percenters never figured it out, the 99% would just have to crash that party.
And that was what the 99% wanted.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Across America, Cops That Coddled The Tea Party Crack Down On Occupy Wall Streeters
In Denver, armoured cops Friday arrested 23 and destroyed Occupy Denver's base camp on the Colorado State Capitol grounds. In San Francisco, cops demolished Occupy SF's Market Street base camp just as the movement was getting started. In New York, Friday's planned 'clean-up' sweep of Zuccotti Park was postponed just before it was set to begin, but more than a dozen arrests added to the list of hundreds rounded up during Occupy Wall Street's first month there.
From Des Moines to Boston, the Occupy protesters have from the beginning been besieged by the same authorities that coddled and shielded the right-wing Tea Party.
Tea Party zealots spat on Democratic legislators, shouted racist epithets, and brandished guns at town hall meetings, and were rewarded with fawning television interviews and book deals.
"The left is trying to create a counter force to the Tea Party, but it's almost laughable that anyone is comparing the two, because they're totally different," Tea Party Express honcho Sal Russo told The Politico.
The two movements were completely different, as Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were spontaneous popular uprisings, while the Tea Party was a calculated propaganda organ funded and organized by billionaires and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.
No blue-uniformed law enforcement officer worth his badge and gun would dream of pepper-spraying a Tea Party screamer backed by Charles and David Koch's and Rupert Murdoch's billions.
While Occupy protesters hopped Greyhound buses or drove themselves to events they organized through social media, Tea Party zealots were limousined in climate-controlled buses chartered by Koch Industries to access-controlled Fox News media circuses.
While Occupy Wall Street protested the injustice of rampant corporate plutocracy, the Tea Party demanded the expansion of plutocratic power.
While Occupy Wall Street was protesting Wall Street excess, the Tea Party was shilling for Wall Street itself.
Occupy Wall Street was more akin to the spontaneous pro-democracy occupation of Tienanmen Square, while the Tea Party was more closely related to Iran's choreographed pro-government rallies. While Occupy Wall Street protesters were uniformly attacked by cops, just as the Tienanmen Square protesters were attacked by troops and tanks, Tea Party zealots preened for Fox News cameras behind protective phalanxes of riot police, just as Iranian pro-government demonstrators chanted and waved banners for the cameras behind the protective curtain of armed Republican Guard thugs.
Occupy Wall Street was more like the unruly mobs gathered with Danton and Desmoulins in the streets of Paris calling for removal of the aristocracy. The Tea Party was more like the organized crowds waving green flags and cheering for the continued majority of Moammar Khadafy.
In short, Occupy Wall Street was anti-establishment, while the Tea Party was super-establishment.
In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the establishment was not government, but a junta of transnational corporate plutocrats. In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the enemy was not the democratic institutions of government, but rather international corporate oligarchies and the overwhelming power of the wealth they wielded.
The enemy wasn't government per se, but those who had implemented policies that had concentrated 84% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 20% of the nation's wealthiest, and would maintain and expand those policies.
Republicans, spearheaded by their Tea Party shock troops, pushed to dismantle oversight of banks and financial institutions, and suspend regulation of oil, gas and coal companies. After defeating President Barack Obama's popular $447 billion jobs bill and its 5.6% surtax on millionaires and billionaires, Republicans taunted him with a GOP jobs plan comprised of warmed-over GOP demands to gut the National Labor Relations Board, impose a moratorium on government regulation, eliminate oil, gas and mining regulations, impose a balanced budget amendment, roll back health care reform, and repeal financial regulations. None of the GOP demands would create any jobs.
"We have to be for something," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said.
It was Tea Party stalwart Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), undaunted by his disgraced bid to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of health care costs, who plotted to expand his scheme by dismantling employer-sponsored health care benefits was well as Medicare and Medicaid.
It was Tea Party ringleader Rand Paul (R-KY) who was behind the GOP's Jobs Through Growth Act, the Republican scheme to dismantle environmental, business, and financial oversight, and slash spending at a time when the government should be stimulating the economy.
Meanwhile, it was Occupy Wall Street that railed against corporations and the ultra-wealthy running roughshod over 99% of Americans.
Inexplicably, the police seemed always to coddle the tax-dodging wealthy elite that busted police unions and raided police pension funds, and seemed always to brutalize the taxpaying citizens that paid for police wages.
From Des Moines to Boston, the Occupy protesters have from the beginning been besieged by the same authorities that coddled and shielded the right-wing Tea Party.
- In Des Moines, police arrested dozens, including a 14-year-old girl, at Occupy Des Moine's first event Sunday.
- 10 Occupy Seattle protesters were arrested in Westlake Park Thursday.
- In San Diego, police detained demonstrators and broke up their camp Friday.
- Police Thursday arrested four Occupy Austin protesters for refusing to clear City Hall Plaza.
- Eight Occupy Houston protesters were arrested and charged with criminal trespass Wednesday outside the Mickey Leland Federal Building, site of Republican U.S. Sens. John Cornyn's and Kay Bailey Hutchison's offices.
- Police arrested 100 Occupy Boston protesters Tuesday when they refused to evacuate their Rose Kennedy Greenway park camp.
- 10 Occupy LA protesters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday at a Bank Of America branch when they demanded the bank cash a $673 billion check.
Tea Party zealots spat on Democratic legislators, shouted racist epithets, and brandished guns at town hall meetings, and were rewarded with fawning television interviews and book deals.
"The left is trying to create a counter force to the Tea Party, but it's almost laughable that anyone is comparing the two, because they're totally different," Tea Party Express honcho Sal Russo told The Politico.
The two movements were completely different, as Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were spontaneous popular uprisings, while the Tea Party was a calculated propaganda organ funded and organized by billionaires and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.
No blue-uniformed law enforcement officer worth his badge and gun would dream of pepper-spraying a Tea Party screamer backed by Charles and David Koch's and Rupert Murdoch's billions.
While Occupy protesters hopped Greyhound buses or drove themselves to events they organized through social media, Tea Party zealots were limousined in climate-controlled buses chartered by Koch Industries to access-controlled Fox News media circuses.
While Occupy Wall Street protested the injustice of rampant corporate plutocracy, the Tea Party demanded the expansion of plutocratic power.
While Occupy Wall Street was protesting Wall Street excess, the Tea Party was shilling for Wall Street itself.
Occupy Wall Street was more akin to the spontaneous pro-democracy occupation of Tienanmen Square, while the Tea Party was more closely related to Iran's choreographed pro-government rallies. While Occupy Wall Street protesters were uniformly attacked by cops, just as the Tienanmen Square protesters were attacked by troops and tanks, Tea Party zealots preened for Fox News cameras behind protective phalanxes of riot police, just as Iranian pro-government demonstrators chanted and waved banners for the cameras behind the protective curtain of armed Republican Guard thugs.
Occupy Wall Street was more like the unruly mobs gathered with Danton and Desmoulins in the streets of Paris calling for removal of the aristocracy. The Tea Party was more like the organized crowds waving green flags and cheering for the continued majority of Moammar Khadafy.
In short, Occupy Wall Street was anti-establishment, while the Tea Party was super-establishment.
In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the establishment was not government, but a junta of transnational corporate plutocrats. In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the enemy was not the democratic institutions of government, but rather international corporate oligarchies and the overwhelming power of the wealth they wielded.
The enemy wasn't government per se, but those who had implemented policies that had concentrated 84% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 20% of the nation's wealthiest, and would maintain and expand those policies.
Republicans, spearheaded by their Tea Party shock troops, pushed to dismantle oversight of banks and financial institutions, and suspend regulation of oil, gas and coal companies. After defeating President Barack Obama's popular $447 billion jobs bill and its 5.6% surtax on millionaires and billionaires, Republicans taunted him with a GOP jobs plan comprised of warmed-over GOP demands to gut the National Labor Relations Board, impose a moratorium on government regulation, eliminate oil, gas and mining regulations, impose a balanced budget amendment, roll back health care reform, and repeal financial regulations. None of the GOP demands would create any jobs.
"We have to be for something," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said.
It was Tea Party stalwart Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), undaunted by his disgraced bid to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of health care costs, who plotted to expand his scheme by dismantling employer-sponsored health care benefits was well as Medicare and Medicaid.
It was Tea Party ringleader Rand Paul (R-KY) who was behind the GOP's Jobs Through Growth Act, the Republican scheme to dismantle environmental, business, and financial oversight, and slash spending at a time when the government should be stimulating the economy.
Meanwhile, it was Occupy Wall Street that railed against corporations and the ultra-wealthy running roughshod over 99% of Americans.
Inexplicably, the police seemed always to coddle the tax-dodging wealthy elite that busted police unions and raided police pension funds, and seemed always to brutalize the taxpaying citizens that paid for police wages.
Monday, October 10, 2011
'Mormonism Is Cult' Pastor Declares Christians Are Evil And Immoral
For days now, there's been a bit of a brouhaha over the Dallas Baptist preacher who called Mormonism a cult.
Poor ol' Robert Jeffress, pressed into introducing his fave GOP presidential hopeful Texas Gov. Rick Perry at the Values Voter summit in Washington, D.C. Friday happened to opine afterward that he figured Mormonism was a cult, and that rival Republican candidate Mitt Romney, an adherent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wasn't a Christian.
And the media, lamestream and otherwise, had been burning up the airwaves over the matter ever since. On CBS' Face the Nation, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich criticized Jeffress for criticizing someone else's religion. GOP presidential candidate and pizza mogul Herman Cain told CNN's State of the Union that he "didn't want to get into that."
Lost in all that was what Jeffress actually said.
"Mormonism is a cult," Jeffress told reporters gathered outside the Values Voter auditorium. "I believe Mitt Romney is a good, moral person and has a wonderful family, but that's not what makes you a Christian."
Well, thank gawd that's been straightened out. And thank Robert Jeffress for explaining the Inquisition, the Reformation Wars, burning women at the stake, slavery, and the genocide of Native Americans, Jews, and Muslims.
Jeffress said that Mitt Romney was good and moral and had a wonderful family, and couldn't possibly be a Christian. Of course, as Mormons accept Jesus Christ as their Savior, apparently what made you a Christian was being evil and immoral and having a horrible family.
Granted, the whole point of Christianity was that it was for people who were evil and rotten and immoral and despicable. Grace was Amazing because it Saved evil, rotten, immoral, despicable, slave-trading white supremacist wretch John Newton. Grace, or anyone else, didn't get credit for a Save, amazing or otherwise, with a nine-run lead.
Thus, Christianity was a sort of get-out-of-Hell-free card for the truly vile and repugnant. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was a Christian.
Maybe Jeffress meant that Romney and the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, didn't need Christianity. Just as Gandhi was a maha (great) atma (soul), maybe Jeffress meant Romney, too, was already working with a nine-run lead, and could go the distance without bringing in a bearded closer to nail down the Save.
In fact, back in the day, Protestants invented Protestantism in part because they figured their doing good deeds couldn't get them into Heaven at all, as Catholics had earlier figured. Protestants figured they were so far gone good deeds weren't even in it. They figured the only way they could get into Heaven was through Grace and Grace alone. Jesus had to cut them some slack. Toss out some low scores. Look the other karmic way.
Conveniently, that precluded having to part with any ill-gotten gains they'd spent a lifetime of doing ill to get just to buy a lousy admission to Heaven with a priestly Indulgence.
Which also explained the origins of the Tea Party.
Of course, perusing the liturgical fine print revealed that Heaven in the Judeo-Christian tradition was a special kind of Heaven. In the Christian Heaven, your dead bones arose and were clothed in new flesh, and you lived, in your taut new meatsuit, forever and ever with Jesus in a special plane specifically created for meat-suited reanimated Christians.
This was significantly different from the sort of Heaven other religions promised, which mostly all featured a non-corporeal afterlife of hanging with the Big Guy. So, maybe there was a regular, non-corporeal Heaven for good, moral, wonderful-family-raising Mahatmas and Romneys and Buddhists and Hindus and such with sufficiently good karma, and a separate, fleshy Heaven made just for folks on the good/evil bubble who called in the Beard and squeaked out a one-run victory in the bottom of the ninth.
This separate, fleshy Christian Heaven was the one for reanimated meat-suited Christians like Jeffress and Rick Perry. All the Christians would be there. Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition, would be there. The Borgias would be there. Gangland mobsters would be there.
All the child-raping priests would be there.
And, it being Heaven, all those torturers and murderers and gangsters and child molesters, not to mention Texas politicians, got to spend all Eternity doing just as they pleased as much and as long as they wanted. The only real requirement was having to say you were on Jesus' pass list.
Which might make one wonder whether Christian Heaven wasn't actually some sort of supernatural diversion program for the otherwise Hell-bound. Sort of a maximum-security afterlife for flesh-clothed undead miscreants administered by an omnipotent bleeding-heart liberal Rabbi from Nazareth.
After all, anyplace that was designed to keep anyone or anything out was likewise effectively designed to keep something in. Maybe, the whole being-reclothed-in-flesh thing was the innovation that kept spiritual third-strike offenders out of hard time by guaranteeing they couldn't wander off into regular, non-corporeal Heaven to frighten the locals with tommy guns and loud country rock music. No need for an ankle monitor when just having an ankle would do.
Thus, the only real issue in the whole Mormonism-Christianity-cult kerfuffle was whether Romney was ticketed for Christian Heaven, with bones and a fresh new meatsuit, whenever he finally got his ticket punched. Being a good and moral person, as Jeffress had already assured one and all, Romney clearly had already made the cut for regular, unfleshy Heaven, along with Krishna and the Buddha and the Dalai Lama.
Either way, Visiting Hours were on Tuesdays.
Poor ol' Robert Jeffress, pressed into introducing his fave GOP presidential hopeful Texas Gov. Rick Perry at the Values Voter summit in Washington, D.C. Friday happened to opine afterward that he figured Mormonism was a cult, and that rival Republican candidate Mitt Romney, an adherent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wasn't a Christian.
And the media, lamestream and otherwise, had been burning up the airwaves over the matter ever since. On CBS' Face the Nation, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich criticized Jeffress for criticizing someone else's religion. GOP presidential candidate and pizza mogul Herman Cain told CNN's State of the Union that he "didn't want to get into that."
Lost in all that was what Jeffress actually said.
"Mormonism is a cult," Jeffress told reporters gathered outside the Values Voter auditorium. "I believe Mitt Romney is a good, moral person and has a wonderful family, but that's not what makes you a Christian."
Well, thank gawd that's been straightened out. And thank Robert Jeffress for explaining the Inquisition, the Reformation Wars, burning women at the stake, slavery, and the genocide of Native Americans, Jews, and Muslims.
Jeffress said that Mitt Romney was good and moral and had a wonderful family, and couldn't possibly be a Christian. Of course, as Mormons accept Jesus Christ as their Savior, apparently what made you a Christian was being evil and immoral and having a horrible family.
Granted, the whole point of Christianity was that it was for people who were evil and rotten and immoral and despicable. Grace was Amazing because it Saved evil, rotten, immoral, despicable, slave-trading white supremacist wretch John Newton. Grace, or anyone else, didn't get credit for a Save, amazing or otherwise, with a nine-run lead.
Thus, Christianity was a sort of get-out-of-Hell-free card for the truly vile and repugnant. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was a Christian.
Maybe Jeffress meant that Romney and the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, didn't need Christianity. Just as Gandhi was a maha (great) atma (soul), maybe Jeffress meant Romney, too, was already working with a nine-run lead, and could go the distance without bringing in a bearded closer to nail down the Save.
In fact, back in the day, Protestants invented Protestantism in part because they figured their doing good deeds couldn't get them into Heaven at all, as Catholics had earlier figured. Protestants figured they were so far gone good deeds weren't even in it. They figured the only way they could get into Heaven was through Grace and Grace alone. Jesus had to cut them some slack. Toss out some low scores. Look the other karmic way.
Conveniently, that precluded having to part with any ill-gotten gains they'd spent a lifetime of doing ill to get just to buy a lousy admission to Heaven with a priestly Indulgence.
Which also explained the origins of the Tea Party.
Of course, perusing the liturgical fine print revealed that Heaven in the Judeo-Christian tradition was a special kind of Heaven. In the Christian Heaven, your dead bones arose and were clothed in new flesh, and you lived, in your taut new meatsuit, forever and ever with Jesus in a special plane specifically created for meat-suited reanimated Christians.
This was significantly different from the sort of Heaven other religions promised, which mostly all featured a non-corporeal afterlife of hanging with the Big Guy. So, maybe there was a regular, non-corporeal Heaven for good, moral, wonderful-family-raising Mahatmas and Romneys and Buddhists and Hindus and such with sufficiently good karma, and a separate, fleshy Heaven made just for folks on the good/evil bubble who called in the Beard and squeaked out a one-run victory in the bottom of the ninth.
This separate, fleshy Christian Heaven was the one for reanimated meat-suited Christians like Jeffress and Rick Perry. All the Christians would be there. Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition, would be there. The Borgias would be there. Gangland mobsters would be there.
All the child-raping priests would be there.
And, it being Heaven, all those torturers and murderers and gangsters and child molesters, not to mention Texas politicians, got to spend all Eternity doing just as they pleased as much and as long as they wanted. The only real requirement was having to say you were on Jesus' pass list.
Which might make one wonder whether Christian Heaven wasn't actually some sort of supernatural diversion program for the otherwise Hell-bound. Sort of a maximum-security afterlife for flesh-clothed undead miscreants administered by an omnipotent bleeding-heart liberal Rabbi from Nazareth.
After all, anyplace that was designed to keep anyone or anything out was likewise effectively designed to keep something in. Maybe, the whole being-reclothed-in-flesh thing was the innovation that kept spiritual third-strike offenders out of hard time by guaranteeing they couldn't wander off into regular, non-corporeal Heaven to frighten the locals with tommy guns and loud country rock music. No need for an ankle monitor when just having an ankle would do.
Thus, the only real issue in the whole Mormonism-Christianity-cult kerfuffle was whether Romney was ticketed for Christian Heaven, with bones and a fresh new meatsuit, whenever he finally got his ticket punched. Being a good and moral person, as Jeffress had already assured one and all, Romney clearly had already made the cut for regular, unfleshy Heaven, along with Krishna and the Buddha and the Dalai Lama.
Either way, Visiting Hours were on Tuesdays.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Gaffe-Prone, Science-Bashing Right-Wing Derides Occupy Wall Street
Tea Party darling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called them a "mob." New York Mayor and sometime-Republican Michael Bloomberg sicced his pepper spray-wielding cops on them and bemoaned their besieging of poor, defenseless banking giants. Right-wing chatrooms and bloggers derided them as "even dumber than first thought."
A right-wing obsessed with black helicopter plots, bashing climate change science and decrying evolution denounced Occupy Wall Street, the grassroots movement fed up with big-money plutocrats subjugating middle America.
"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs on Wall Street and the other cities across the country," Cantor opined Friday at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., the Politico reported. "And, believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was unimpressed. "I didn't hear him (Cantor) say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol. And, he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them," she told ABC's This Week.
Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer complained the demonstrators, "don't even know why they're out there protesting on Wall Street," but that their goals were "completely unrealistic." Kremer did not explain how a group that didn't know why they were protesting could have goals, unrealistic or not.
Right-wing talk radio's Sean Hannity, under the guise of interviewing an OWS participant, launched into a hysterical tirade, deriding his guest as a "Marxist," and screaming "you don't believe in liberty, you don't believe in freedom."
Tea Party zealots alternately whined that Occupy Wall Street was being lavished with media coverage, and shrieked that the Occupy Wall Street movement was nothing like their own.
In fact, Occupy Wall Street was very different from the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street was a spontaneous, grassroots movement, which, unlike the Tea Party, wasn't organized and funded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and coal magnates Charles and David Koch. Occupy Wall Street didn't ride into town on air-conditioned buses chartered by Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth. Occupy Wall Street wasn't shilling for, well, Wall Street.
Right-wing chatrooms and blogs were filled with anti-Occupy Wall Street hate, decrying the movement as "even dumber than first thought."
However, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED's This Week in Northern California found Occupy SF protesters, the local Occupy Wall Street group, remarkably well-informed and eager to discuss arcane details about the fractional reserve banking system. "This is not your grandfather's protest," reporter Mark Calvey said.
Nonetheless, a right-wing that denied climate change science, declared vaccines caused autism, and rejected evolution to maintain a supernatural justification for white supremacy said Occupy Wall Street was deluded.
A right-wing, whose champion, Sarah Palin, said Paul Revere warned the British; told disgraced racist talk show host Laura Schlessinger "don't retreat, reload!;" and said, "obviously, we have to stand with our North Korean allies!" derided Occupy Wall Street as dumb.
A right-wing, whose presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said HPV vaccine caused mental retardation; lethal carbon dioxide wasn't a harmful gas; John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father at age nine; swine flu outbreaks occurred during the Carter Administration instead of the Ford Administration; and actor John Wayne was from Waterloo IA, although he was from Winterset, IA, and the John Wayne from Waterloo was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, ridiculed Occupy Wall Street as ignorant.
A right-wing, whose presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and orchestrated his state's infamous pay-for-play influence peddling regimen, but dipped in recent polls for being soft on immigrants, denounced Occupy Wall Street as anti-American.
A right-wing, whose American Family Association leader Bryan Fischer claimed gays caused the Holocaust; wanted Muslims banned from military service; and said freedom of religion didn't apply to Mormons, decried Occupy Wall Street as divisive.
A right-wing, whose Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress Friday introduced Perry to the Values Voters crowd as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," then went outside and called the Mormon Church a cult and said rival candidate Mitt Romney "was not a Christian," mocked Occupy Wall Street's values.
A right-wing, whose Tea Party minions would abolish Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health care benefits, then cheer for the deaths of the uninsured, dared to insinuate Occupy Wall Street, or anyone or anything else alive on the Earth, was more repugnant, more despicable, more irredeemably evil than themselves.
Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing were schoolyard cliques of jocks and cheerleaders, inanely obsessed with their nipped, tucked, siliconed, botoxed, collagen-injected Stepford appearances, deriding anyone outside their clique.
Republicans, Tea Party zealots, and the right-wing, seemingly obsessed with taking off their clothes whenever possible, reigned over social conservative legions of schoolyard goons and toadies that coveted approval while indulging their own hatred of foreigners, immigrants, persons of color, gays, science, and followers of non-evangelical faiths.
Together, they devoted themselves to currying the favor of the rich, lavishing them with more and bigger tax cuts, breaks and subsidies, while scheming to pay for that largess by dismantling vital health care entitlements, plundering Social Security, and slashing all the services and oversight all Americans depended on.
That Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing denounced Occupy Wall Street proved Occupy Wall Street was on the right side of history
A right-wing obsessed with black helicopter plots, bashing climate change science and decrying evolution denounced Occupy Wall Street, the grassroots movement fed up with big-money plutocrats subjugating middle America.
"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs on Wall Street and the other cities across the country," Cantor opined Friday at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., the Politico reported. "And, believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was unimpressed. "I didn't hear him (Cantor) say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol. And, he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them," she told ABC's This Week.
Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer complained the demonstrators, "don't even know why they're out there protesting on Wall Street," but that their goals were "completely unrealistic." Kremer did not explain how a group that didn't know why they were protesting could have goals, unrealistic or not.
Right-wing talk radio's Sean Hannity, under the guise of interviewing an OWS participant, launched into a hysterical tirade, deriding his guest as a "Marxist," and screaming "you don't believe in liberty, you don't believe in freedom."
Tea Party zealots alternately whined that Occupy Wall Street was being lavished with media coverage, and shrieked that the Occupy Wall Street movement was nothing like their own.
In fact, Occupy Wall Street was very different from the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street was a spontaneous, grassroots movement, which, unlike the Tea Party, wasn't organized and funded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and coal magnates Charles and David Koch. Occupy Wall Street didn't ride into town on air-conditioned buses chartered by Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth. Occupy Wall Street wasn't shilling for, well, Wall Street.
Right-wing chatrooms and blogs were filled with anti-Occupy Wall Street hate, decrying the movement as "even dumber than first thought."
However, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED's This Week in Northern California found Occupy SF protesters, the local Occupy Wall Street group, remarkably well-informed and eager to discuss arcane details about the fractional reserve banking system. "This is not your grandfather's protest," reporter Mark Calvey said.
Nonetheless, a right-wing that denied climate change science, declared vaccines caused autism, and rejected evolution to maintain a supernatural justification for white supremacy said Occupy Wall Street was deluded.
A right-wing, whose champion, Sarah Palin, said Paul Revere warned the British; told disgraced racist talk show host Laura Schlessinger "don't retreat, reload!;" and said, "obviously, we have to stand with our North Korean allies!" derided Occupy Wall Street as dumb.
A right-wing, whose presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said HPV vaccine caused mental retardation; lethal carbon dioxide wasn't a harmful gas; John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father at age nine; swine flu outbreaks occurred during the Carter Administration instead of the Ford Administration; and actor John Wayne was from Waterloo IA, although he was from Winterset, IA, and the John Wayne from Waterloo was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, ridiculed Occupy Wall Street as ignorant.
A right-wing, whose presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and orchestrated his state's infamous pay-for-play influence peddling regimen, but dipped in recent polls for being soft on immigrants, denounced Occupy Wall Street as anti-American.
A right-wing, whose American Family Association leader Bryan Fischer claimed gays caused the Holocaust; wanted Muslims banned from military service; and said freedom of religion didn't apply to Mormons, decried Occupy Wall Street as divisive.
A right-wing, whose Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress Friday introduced Perry to the Values Voters crowd as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," then went outside and called the Mormon Church a cult and said rival candidate Mitt Romney "was not a Christian," mocked Occupy Wall Street's values.
A right-wing, whose Tea Party minions would abolish Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health care benefits, then cheer for the deaths of the uninsured, dared to insinuate Occupy Wall Street, or anyone or anything else alive on the Earth, was more repugnant, more despicable, more irredeemably evil than themselves.
Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing were schoolyard cliques of jocks and cheerleaders, inanely obsessed with their nipped, tucked, siliconed, botoxed, collagen-injected Stepford appearances, deriding anyone outside their clique.
Republicans, Tea Party zealots, and the right-wing, seemingly obsessed with taking off their clothes whenever possible, reigned over social conservative legions of schoolyard goons and toadies that coveted approval while indulging their own hatred of foreigners, immigrants, persons of color, gays, science, and followers of non-evangelical faiths.
Together, they devoted themselves to currying the favor of the rich, lavishing them with more and bigger tax cuts, breaks and subsidies, while scheming to pay for that largess by dismantling vital health care entitlements, plundering Social Security, and slashing all the services and oversight all Americans depended on.
That Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing denounced Occupy Wall Street proved Occupy Wall Street was on the right side of history
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Rove's Crossroads To Pour $240 Million Into GOP Races
The ragtag gathering clustered around the folding tables in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, which they referred to by its pre-2006, pre-corporate name of Liberty Square, were an amorphous bunch protesting the overwhelming power of the trans-national corporate megaliths that reigned over Western Plutocracy.
Occupy Wall Street wasn't yet an army, despite inspiring parallel protests in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Occupy Wall Street's supporters managed to raise $8,000 for pizzas to feed the mostly-young stalwarts.
Meanwhile, the big money powers Occupy Wall Street were arrayed against had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. The money those Goliaths funnelled into just one Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)4 group whose donors remained anonymous, aimed to flood the 2012 elections with $240 million for their right-wing Republican candidates.
The Crossroads groups spent $70 million in 2010 to put Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They figured $240 million should be enough to defeat President Barack Obama and take over the U.S. Senate in 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling that anonymous corporate donors could pump unlimited amounts of cash into elections cleared the way for Crossroads' donors to bludgeon the American electoral process with the blunt instruments of Mammon.
"I believe that I am not represented by the big interest groups and the big money corporations, which have increasing control of our money and our politics," OWS participant Elise Whitaker told The New York Times.
"Now, the energy, intensity and money is flowing to Republicans and to promote conservative causes," American Crossroads' Jonathan Collegio told The Politico. "Understandably, the left is anxious."
When 84% of America's wealth was concentrated into the hands of 20% America's wealthiest, a political process fueled by money was, for the vast majority, hardly a democratic one.
"This is what the Citizen's United decision has brought us to," said former Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, who lost his seat in 2010 after Republican money moguls spent millions to defeat him. "All of those Democrats are going to need to be prepared for the onslaught."
Former George W. Bush mastermind Karl Rove helped set up Crossroads in 2010, which has lately enlisted another of the GOP's most prolific fund raisers, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
"Both Gov. Barbour and Karl Rove are prodigious fund raisers and brilliant strategists," said Crossroads president Steven Law. Barbour raised $115 million for the Republican Governors Association between 2009 and 2010. "We are reaching high in our fundraising goals because we believe this is going to be a destiny shaping-election for our country."
The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned to shape for America was one in which tens of millions would be denied access to health care, in which seniors and future seniors would be denied Social Security and retirement pensions, and in which only the sons and daughters of the privileged elite could afford higher education. Not that any of those privileged sons and daughters would do anything at a university except drink and vomit and spend trust fund checks.
Crossroads and the GOP were eager to implement their Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) retooled scheme to dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health insurance benefits, forcing everyone to buy expensive private insurance policies, and pawning everyone off with scant aid from limited 'premium support' tax credits. That way, the rich could enjoy nice taxpayer-funded discounts off pricey private insurance plans they were going to buy anyway, while most Americans would become uninsured and be frozen out of health care completely. Crowds of Tea Party zealots waited their chance to taunt and chant "let them die."
Crossroads and the GOP were eager to plunder all the money in the Social Security Trust Funds, and hand the cash to their Wall Street cronies to pile onto the roulette wheel of international equity markets while pawning Americans off with nothing at all. While the money changers always got their rake, nothing at all was what anyone who'd spent the last ten years buying shares in an S&P 500 index fund got, seeing how the index was at 1,147.39 on October 1, 2001, and closed today at 1,123.95.
The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned for America was one in which the wealthy and the big corporations got even fatter and surlier as ever more and bigger tax cuts, tax breaks, and tax subsidies transferred ever more of the nation's wealth from the many to the few.
America had once been a country where progressive income taxes created a nation for the middle class, where ordinary people pooled their money and acted through government to provide for themselves public schools, freeways, affordable health care and pensions for the aged, and the promise of a better life for all.
Crossroads and the GOP preferred a country where tax cuts, breaks and subsidies gave the rich a free ride, while anyone who couldn't pay top dollar was consigned to misery, squalor and death.
And, the Crossroads Groups were just two of many groups funded by the torrents of cash trans-national plutocrats siphoned out of America and funnelled into their coffers. Coal magnates Charles and David Koch, with $50 billion between them, would hardly miss a billion or two should it vanish between the seat cushions over at Americans for Prosperity. Rupert Murdoch, a pauper with just $7 billion, could still throw a Tea Party or three.
The ragtag assemblage milling about the folding tables at Liberty Square weren't yet an army. For democracy to stand a chance, they would have to become one.
Occupy Wall Street wasn't yet an army, despite inspiring parallel protests in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Occupy Wall Street's supporters managed to raise $8,000 for pizzas to feed the mostly-young stalwarts.
Meanwhile, the big money powers Occupy Wall Street were arrayed against had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. The money those Goliaths funnelled into just one Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)4 group whose donors remained anonymous, aimed to flood the 2012 elections with $240 million for their right-wing Republican candidates.
The Crossroads groups spent $70 million in 2010 to put Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They figured $240 million should be enough to defeat President Barack Obama and take over the U.S. Senate in 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling that anonymous corporate donors could pump unlimited amounts of cash into elections cleared the way for Crossroads' donors to bludgeon the American electoral process with the blunt instruments of Mammon.
"I believe that I am not represented by the big interest groups and the big money corporations, which have increasing control of our money and our politics," OWS participant Elise Whitaker told The New York Times.
"Now, the energy, intensity and money is flowing to Republicans and to promote conservative causes," American Crossroads' Jonathan Collegio told The Politico. "Understandably, the left is anxious."
When 84% of America's wealth was concentrated into the hands of 20% America's wealthiest, a political process fueled by money was, for the vast majority, hardly a democratic one.
"This is what the Citizen's United decision has brought us to," said former Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, who lost his seat in 2010 after Republican money moguls spent millions to defeat him. "All of those Democrats are going to need to be prepared for the onslaught."
Former George W. Bush mastermind Karl Rove helped set up Crossroads in 2010, which has lately enlisted another of the GOP's most prolific fund raisers, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
"Both Gov. Barbour and Karl Rove are prodigious fund raisers and brilliant strategists," said Crossroads president Steven Law. Barbour raised $115 million for the Republican Governors Association between 2009 and 2010. "We are reaching high in our fundraising goals because we believe this is going to be a destiny shaping-election for our country."
The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned to shape for America was one in which tens of millions would be denied access to health care, in which seniors and future seniors would be denied Social Security and retirement pensions, and in which only the sons and daughters of the privileged elite could afford higher education. Not that any of those privileged sons and daughters would do anything at a university except drink and vomit and spend trust fund checks.
Crossroads and the GOP were eager to implement their Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) retooled scheme to dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health insurance benefits, forcing everyone to buy expensive private insurance policies, and pawning everyone off with scant aid from limited 'premium support' tax credits. That way, the rich could enjoy nice taxpayer-funded discounts off pricey private insurance plans they were going to buy anyway, while most Americans would become uninsured and be frozen out of health care completely. Crowds of Tea Party zealots waited their chance to taunt and chant "let them die."
Crossroads and the GOP were eager to plunder all the money in the Social Security Trust Funds, and hand the cash to their Wall Street cronies to pile onto the roulette wheel of international equity markets while pawning Americans off with nothing at all. While the money changers always got their rake, nothing at all was what anyone who'd spent the last ten years buying shares in an S&P 500 index fund got, seeing how the index was at 1,147.39 on October 1, 2001, and closed today at 1,123.95.
The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned for America was one in which the wealthy and the big corporations got even fatter and surlier as ever more and bigger tax cuts, tax breaks, and tax subsidies transferred ever more of the nation's wealth from the many to the few.
America had once been a country where progressive income taxes created a nation for the middle class, where ordinary people pooled their money and acted through government to provide for themselves public schools, freeways, affordable health care and pensions for the aged, and the promise of a better life for all.
Crossroads and the GOP preferred a country where tax cuts, breaks and subsidies gave the rich a free ride, while anyone who couldn't pay top dollar was consigned to misery, squalor and death.
And, the Crossroads Groups were just two of many groups funded by the torrents of cash trans-national plutocrats siphoned out of America and funnelled into their coffers. Coal magnates Charles and David Koch, with $50 billion between them, would hardly miss a billion or two should it vanish between the seat cushions over at Americans for Prosperity. Rupert Murdoch, a pauper with just $7 billion, could still throw a Tea Party or three.
The ragtag assemblage milling about the folding tables at Liberty Square weren't yet an army. For democracy to stand a chance, they would have to become one.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Occupy Wall Street Offers Hope For American Autumn
Finally, finally, a few have stepped forward.
From the Lower Manhattan base camp they called Liberty Square, the original name for Zuccotti Park before it was rechristened in 2006 after a corporate CEO, Occupy Wall Street's marchers Saturday fanned out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, tying up traffic for a couple hours and declaring that the three-week old protest against the effects of rampant plutocracy had truly arrived.
Organized through social media as had been the Arab Spring, the originally tiny gathering mustered enough support to get 700 protesters arrested on John and Washington Roebling's noble neo-Gothic edifice.
Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and were shooting for Memphis, TN, Allentown, PA, Hilo, HI, Mason City, IA, Mobile, AL, Little Rock, AR, and Santa Fe, NM.
The group, spawned by Adbusters and US Day of Rage, Thursday issued it's Declaration of Occupancy through it's self-proclaimed General Assembly, including a pretty comprehensive list of grievances. The General Assembly promised a list of demands would be forthcoming, although horizontally-organized organizations tend to be disorganized enough they often didn't follow through in any organized way.
Hopefully, that list of demands would bear in mind the engine of the massive disequilibrium that has destabilized civilization was the massive concentration of wealth into the hands of the very few. As New York University's Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini recently pointed out, "Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."
Roubini's frightening the natives and earning himself a right-wing lambasting for mentioning Marx notwithstanding, the economist who predicted the '08 market crash was just stating what most economists not getting a paycheck from Rupert Murdoch knew.
The present social and economic catastrophe reflected in OWS's list of grievances was apparently what capitalism looked like as it self-destructed. Whenever the tipping point occurred, it was apparently around the time 84% of America's wealth ended up in the hands of 20% of its people. More importantly, it was apparently around the time the poorest 40% of Americans ended up having to get by splitting three-tenths of one percent of the nation's wealth.
For thirty years, America slashed income taxes on its wealthy and its big corporations, over-incentivizing bottom line profits, leading to cost-slashing mergers, acquisitions, staff and plant consolidations, union-busting, outsourcing, and offshoring. Corporations became less interested in making and selling things than in trading proprietary investment portfolios.
In the past, businesses needed American workers to operate their plants and offices, and needed American consumers to buy their products. Changing tax structures over-emphasized profits and eliminated the consequences of eroding indigenous skill-sets and buying power. Production and profits were plentiful over the horizon, as companies incrementally combined operations, slashed payrolls, moved operations first from union-friendly states to right-to-work-states, then overseas to a Japan, then a Taiwan, then a Thailand, then an Indonesia, then China.
"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth...to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had...drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth...By taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand...that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations," said Marriner Eccles. Eccles wasn't a Marxist pinko, but the Federal Reserve Board's chair from 1934 to 1948. And, he was referring to the Great Depression. Which explained the sexist reference to men's buying power.
In 1926, the top income tax rate went from 46% to 25%, creating Marriner Eccles' giant suction pump.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration created their giant Suction Pump 2.0 by slashing the top tax rate first from 70% to 50%, then from 50% to 28%.
Between the Roosevelt and Reagan years, America jumped its top income tax rate first to 63%, then 79%, then over 90% for the war, then down to 70%, and saw history's greatest period of growth and prosperity. Certainly, the Right loved to go on about how Roosevelt's alphabet soup of economic stimulus programs, from the CCC to the TVA to the WPA, didn't pull America out of the Great Depression, and how it was World War II that finally hauled the economy out of the doldrums. But, the Right hated mentioning that World War II didn't curtail government stimulus, but put it on steroids.
Roosevelt didn't cut government spending because Dubya Dubya Two interrupted tonight's episode of The Shadow. Instead, the federal government went out and bought 297,000 aircraft, including 12,731 B-17s and 18,482 B-24s. They went out and bought 86,000 tanks, including 49,234 M-4 Shermans. They bought 193,000 artillery pieces. They bought two million trucks.
They bought 23 aircraft carriers, and 200 submarines, and 300 destroyers, and 600 PT boats, and 1,000 Landing Ship Tanks, and 3,200 Liberty and Victory ships.
They bought rifles and mortars and machine guns, light and heavy. They bought ammo clips and ammo belts and ammo cans. They bought bandoliers, panniers, flashlights, combat boots, and cool leather jackets for pilots and bomber crews. They bought uniforms, shoulder patches, helmets, bayonets, parachutes, backpacks, duffle bags, frying pans, lip balm, camoflage paint, c-rations, k-rations, and dog tags. They bought bullets and shells and bombs and mines and rockets and torpedoes, many of which could only be used once.
They bought a whole Manhattan Project to invent and build nuclear weapons.
Then, seeing how World War II had trashed the global neighborhood, the federal government rebuilt Europe and Japan, and sent an entire generation of Americans to college or vocational training on the GI Bill. They built the Interstate Freeway System, plus state highways, county roads, suburban interchanges, city streets, bridges, dams, levees, schools, libraries, city halls, opera houses, museums, and urban redevelopments (some of which ended up pretty nasty). They bought polio shots and lunches and band classes and gym classes and driver's ed for another whole generation of kids.
The federal government ponied up cash to develop the technology that created computers, cell phones, and the Internet. They bought a whole National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put human beings on the moon.
And, the 70% income tax rate didn't keep anyone from looking good on Mad Men.
Instead, the 70% tax rate kept jobs in America, and created value in every Americans' work. Factory workers, warehouse workers, longshoremen, cooks, bartenders, clerks, secretaries (not yet admins) and stewardesses(not yet airline flight attendants) enjoyed middle class lives promising home ownership, two cars, college for the kids, and tickets to lower stand box seats at Yankee Stadium, all without going into hock up to their eyeballs for all eternity.
People didn't even need credit cards until the seventies.
Then, Ronald Reagan earned the adulation of plutocrats eveywhere by destroying everything America had created in exchange for unlimited executive compensations, and the ice sculptures and corporate jets that came with them.
It was slashing the progressive income tax rates that concentrated the all the wealth and destroyed the manufacturing base and busted up the middle class. It was dismantling progressive income tax that enabled the very few to buy up all the lawyers and lobbyists and politicians and crushed all opposition to their omnipotent reign.
It was destroying progressive income tax that destroyed a democratic America built for the many, and replaced it with a plutocratic America coddling the few.
And renamed Liberty Square for a corporate CEO.
From the Lower Manhattan base camp they called Liberty Square, the original name for Zuccotti Park before it was rechristened in 2006 after a corporate CEO, Occupy Wall Street's marchers Saturday fanned out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, tying up traffic for a couple hours and declaring that the three-week old protest against the effects of rampant plutocracy had truly arrived.
Organized through social media as had been the Arab Spring, the originally tiny gathering mustered enough support to get 700 protesters arrested on John and Washington Roebling's noble neo-Gothic edifice.
Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and were shooting for Memphis, TN, Allentown, PA, Hilo, HI, Mason City, IA, Mobile, AL, Little Rock, AR, and Santa Fe, NM.
The group, spawned by Adbusters and US Day of Rage, Thursday issued it's Declaration of Occupancy through it's self-proclaimed General Assembly, including a pretty comprehensive list of grievances. The General Assembly promised a list of demands would be forthcoming, although horizontally-organized organizations tend to be disorganized enough they often didn't follow through in any organized way.
Hopefully, that list of demands would bear in mind the engine of the massive disequilibrium that has destabilized civilization was the massive concentration of wealth into the hands of the very few. As New York University's Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini recently pointed out, "Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."
Roubini's frightening the natives and earning himself a right-wing lambasting for mentioning Marx notwithstanding, the economist who predicted the '08 market crash was just stating what most economists not getting a paycheck from Rupert Murdoch knew.
The present social and economic catastrophe reflected in OWS's list of grievances was apparently what capitalism looked like as it self-destructed. Whenever the tipping point occurred, it was apparently around the time 84% of America's wealth ended up in the hands of 20% of its people. More importantly, it was apparently around the time the poorest 40% of Americans ended up having to get by splitting three-tenths of one percent of the nation's wealth.
For thirty years, America slashed income taxes on its wealthy and its big corporations, over-incentivizing bottom line profits, leading to cost-slashing mergers, acquisitions, staff and plant consolidations, union-busting, outsourcing, and offshoring. Corporations became less interested in making and selling things than in trading proprietary investment portfolios.
In the past, businesses needed American workers to operate their plants and offices, and needed American consumers to buy their products. Changing tax structures over-emphasized profits and eliminated the consequences of eroding indigenous skill-sets and buying power. Production and profits were plentiful over the horizon, as companies incrementally combined operations, slashed payrolls, moved operations first from union-friendly states to right-to-work-states, then overseas to a Japan, then a Taiwan, then a Thailand, then an Indonesia, then China.
"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth...to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had...drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth...By taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand...that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations," said Marriner Eccles. Eccles wasn't a Marxist pinko, but the Federal Reserve Board's chair from 1934 to 1948. And, he was referring to the Great Depression. Which explained the sexist reference to men's buying power.
In 1926, the top income tax rate went from 46% to 25%, creating Marriner Eccles' giant suction pump.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration created their giant Suction Pump 2.0 by slashing the top tax rate first from 70% to 50%, then from 50% to 28%.
Between the Roosevelt and Reagan years, America jumped its top income tax rate first to 63%, then 79%, then over 90% for the war, then down to 70%, and saw history's greatest period of growth and prosperity. Certainly, the Right loved to go on about how Roosevelt's alphabet soup of economic stimulus programs, from the CCC to the TVA to the WPA, didn't pull America out of the Great Depression, and how it was World War II that finally hauled the economy out of the doldrums. But, the Right hated mentioning that World War II didn't curtail government stimulus, but put it on steroids.
Roosevelt didn't cut government spending because Dubya Dubya Two interrupted tonight's episode of The Shadow. Instead, the federal government went out and bought 297,000 aircraft, including 12,731 B-17s and 18,482 B-24s. They went out and bought 86,000 tanks, including 49,234 M-4 Shermans. They bought 193,000 artillery pieces. They bought two million trucks.
They bought 23 aircraft carriers, and 200 submarines, and 300 destroyers, and 600 PT boats, and 1,000 Landing Ship Tanks, and 3,200 Liberty and Victory ships.
They bought rifles and mortars and machine guns, light and heavy. They bought ammo clips and ammo belts and ammo cans. They bought bandoliers, panniers, flashlights, combat boots, and cool leather jackets for pilots and bomber crews. They bought uniforms, shoulder patches, helmets, bayonets, parachutes, backpacks, duffle bags, frying pans, lip balm, camoflage paint, c-rations, k-rations, and dog tags. They bought bullets and shells and bombs and mines and rockets and torpedoes, many of which could only be used once.
They bought a whole Manhattan Project to invent and build nuclear weapons.
Then, seeing how World War II had trashed the global neighborhood, the federal government rebuilt Europe and Japan, and sent an entire generation of Americans to college or vocational training on the GI Bill. They built the Interstate Freeway System, plus state highways, county roads, suburban interchanges, city streets, bridges, dams, levees, schools, libraries, city halls, opera houses, museums, and urban redevelopments (some of which ended up pretty nasty). They bought polio shots and lunches and band classes and gym classes and driver's ed for another whole generation of kids.
The federal government ponied up cash to develop the technology that created computers, cell phones, and the Internet. They bought a whole National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put human beings on the moon.
And, the 70% income tax rate didn't keep anyone from looking good on Mad Men.
Instead, the 70% tax rate kept jobs in America, and created value in every Americans' work. Factory workers, warehouse workers, longshoremen, cooks, bartenders, clerks, secretaries (not yet admins) and stewardesses(not yet airline flight attendants) enjoyed middle class lives promising home ownership, two cars, college for the kids, and tickets to lower stand box seats at Yankee Stadium, all without going into hock up to their eyeballs for all eternity.
People didn't even need credit cards until the seventies.
Then, Ronald Reagan earned the adulation of plutocrats eveywhere by destroying everything America had created in exchange for unlimited executive compensations, and the ice sculptures and corporate jets that came with them.
It was slashing the progressive income tax rates that concentrated the all the wealth and destroyed the manufacturing base and busted up the middle class. It was dismantling progressive income tax that enabled the very few to buy up all the lawyers and lobbyists and politicians and crushed all opposition to their omnipotent reign.
It was destroying progressive income tax that destroyed a democratic America built for the many, and replaced it with a plutocratic America coddling the few.
And renamed Liberty Square for a corporate CEO.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Perry Too Liberal For Republicans Leading America Into Far Right Abyss
America was in serious trouble. Recent polls revealed Texas Gov. Rick Perry, viewed as the Republicans' savior of America just weeks ago, had tumbled in his followers' esteem following his performance in televised debates with his rivals.
Perry's crime? He felt young women should be inoculated against cervical cancer. He felt pouring billions of dollars into a giant fence along his state's southern border with Mexico was wrong. He thought children of immigrants, illegal or not, should pay in-state tuition fees.
Perry was not being lambasted because he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Perry was not being ridiculed because he denied climate change science. Perry was not being scrutinized for Texas' wide-open pay-to-play influence-peddling.
Perry was not being excoriated for leveraging the environment to coddle oil and gas moguls.
In America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, those were Perry's good qualities.
Perry was being chastised throughout Republicania for being too liberal.
Perry had once opened a double-digit lead over his nearest rival, former Massachusetts Governor and perennial presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, but now, the most recent Fox News poll had Perry trailing Romney, 23% to 19%.
Perry fought back Friday, burnishing his right-wing bona fides by assuring a New Hampshire town hall gathering he denied climate change science.
"For us to take a snapshot in time and to say that what is going on in the country today, the climate change that is going on is man's fault and we need to jeopardize America's economy, I'm a skeptic about that," Perry said. "I'm not afraid to say I'm a skeptic about that."
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, a member of the Danish Conservative Party recently told reporters on behalf of the civilized world. "When more than 90% of researchers in the field are saying that we have to take (climate change) seriously, it is incredibly irresponsible to ignore it."
What was considered wild-eyed leftist raving in America was routinely accepted by Conservatives in Denmark.
America was, in fact, falling off the right-wing end of the political map.
In America, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), instead of figuring out how to extend health care to all Americans, was pushing a plan to reserve health care for those who could afford it, while abandoning everyone else to misery and death.
In America, Tea Party zealots at the nationally televised CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate cheered abandoning those without private health insurance to pain and misery. If someone was uninsured, Tea Party zealots and Republicans cheered for society to "just let him die."
GOP Presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) denounced human papillomavirus vaccine partly pandering to the Luddite anti-vaccine crowd, but mostly in solidarity with right-wing moralists who denied young womens' sexual maturation.
While the Republican Party's wealthy elite only wanted license to unfettered plundering, their social conservative masses demanded the institution of rigidly uniform cultural conformity, based in white supremacy and theocracy.
The American right wanted Sharia law with Christian-themed jargon administered by an omnipotent plutocracy. Sort of an Orwellian nightmare with corporate overlords and lots of "Thou arts," "Sayeth the Lords," and "Blessed" pronounced with two syllables. Americans displayed a frightening combination of naive cultural superiority and astonishingly fragile egotism, a sort of whiny megalomania.
Many, many Americans believed health care should be reserved for the righteous and the wealthy, climate change science was a liberal conspiracy, sustainability was a leftist plot to force whites to take public transportation and live among persons of color in inner cities, evolution was an elitist scheme to deny white supremacy, and that Jesus of Nazareth spoke in 17th Century British English.
The American political landscape had tilted so far to the right that President Barack Obama, a right-center politician, was routinely described as "liberal." The American political landscape had tilted so far right that Richard Nixon was a screaming commie.
America was so far to the right that extremist evangelical parents routinely consigned their children to right-wing torture camps throughout the South and Mountain West to be beaten into ideological conformity.
America had become a society of surgically-attained Stepford countenances spouting canned religious platitudes. America had become a bastion of narcissistic sociopaths spewing delusional conspiracy theories while obliterating thousands upon thousands of people around the world with an unprecedented arsenal of advanced weaponry. America had become obsessed with placating and coddling its wealthy elite while its infrastructure crumbled and its people descended into poverty.
America had tilted so far to the right that words like "conservative" and "right-wing" were no longer adequate to describe its rising extremism. America had gone so far to the right, it was uncertain how much further it would plunge as both global financial markets and the global environment teetered on the edge of catastrophes in large part minted in the U.S. of A.
And, America had gone to the far, far right extreme not among its policy elites, not within its ruling classes, not in its political leadership, but straight through the core of its populace.
An entire segment of American had gone so far to the right that Rick Perry was too liberal, that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was a weak-kneed appeaser, that House Majority Leader and right-wing attack-dog Eric Cantor (R-VA) was often decried as a deplorable Republican In Name Only.
America had gone so far to the right, it was no longer a very long or winding road before America reached that point where it committed crimes of historic, catastrophic magnitude. Societies that careened as far to the right as America rarely pulled back from the abyss. America had gone so far to the right, it was no longer impossible to say that America would not plummet into that abyss of infamy, and that someday, future generations alluding to the unspeakable, the reprehensible, the most utterly and completely contemptible, might use the word "American."
Perry's crime? He felt young women should be inoculated against cervical cancer. He felt pouring billions of dollars into a giant fence along his state's southern border with Mexico was wrong. He thought children of immigrants, illegal or not, should pay in-state tuition fees.
Perry was not being lambasted because he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Perry was not being ridiculed because he denied climate change science. Perry was not being scrutinized for Texas' wide-open pay-to-play influence-peddling.
Perry was not being excoriated for leveraging the environment to coddle oil and gas moguls.
In America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, those were Perry's good qualities.
Perry was being chastised throughout Republicania for being too liberal.
Perry had once opened a double-digit lead over his nearest rival, former Massachusetts Governor and perennial presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, but now, the most recent Fox News poll had Perry trailing Romney, 23% to 19%.
Perry fought back Friday, burnishing his right-wing bona fides by assuring a New Hampshire town hall gathering he denied climate change science.
"For us to take a snapshot in time and to say that what is going on in the country today, the climate change that is going on is man's fault and we need to jeopardize America's economy, I'm a skeptic about that," Perry said. "I'm not afraid to say I'm a skeptic about that."
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, a member of the Danish Conservative Party recently told reporters on behalf of the civilized world. "When more than 90% of researchers in the field are saying that we have to take (climate change) seriously, it is incredibly irresponsible to ignore it."
What was considered wild-eyed leftist raving in America was routinely accepted by Conservatives in Denmark.
America was, in fact, falling off the right-wing end of the political map.
In America, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), instead of figuring out how to extend health care to all Americans, was pushing a plan to reserve health care for those who could afford it, while abandoning everyone else to misery and death.
In America, Tea Party zealots at the nationally televised CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate cheered abandoning those without private health insurance to pain and misery. If someone was uninsured, Tea Party zealots and Republicans cheered for society to "just let him die."
GOP Presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) denounced human papillomavirus vaccine partly pandering to the Luddite anti-vaccine crowd, but mostly in solidarity with right-wing moralists who denied young womens' sexual maturation.
While the Republican Party's wealthy elite only wanted license to unfettered plundering, their social conservative masses demanded the institution of rigidly uniform cultural conformity, based in white supremacy and theocracy.
The American right wanted Sharia law with Christian-themed jargon administered by an omnipotent plutocracy. Sort of an Orwellian nightmare with corporate overlords and lots of "Thou arts," "Sayeth the Lords," and "Blessed" pronounced with two syllables. Americans displayed a frightening combination of naive cultural superiority and astonishingly fragile egotism, a sort of whiny megalomania.
Many, many Americans believed health care should be reserved for the righteous and the wealthy, climate change science was a liberal conspiracy, sustainability was a leftist plot to force whites to take public transportation and live among persons of color in inner cities, evolution was an elitist scheme to deny white supremacy, and that Jesus of Nazareth spoke in 17th Century British English.
The American political landscape had tilted so far to the right that President Barack Obama, a right-center politician, was routinely described as "liberal." The American political landscape had tilted so far right that Richard Nixon was a screaming commie.
America was so far to the right that extremist evangelical parents routinely consigned their children to right-wing torture camps throughout the South and Mountain West to be beaten into ideological conformity.
America had become a society of surgically-attained Stepford countenances spouting canned religious platitudes. America had become a bastion of narcissistic sociopaths spewing delusional conspiracy theories while obliterating thousands upon thousands of people around the world with an unprecedented arsenal of advanced weaponry. America had become obsessed with placating and coddling its wealthy elite while its infrastructure crumbled and its people descended into poverty.
America had tilted so far to the right that words like "conservative" and "right-wing" were no longer adequate to describe its rising extremism. America had gone so far to the right, it was uncertain how much further it would plunge as both global financial markets and the global environment teetered on the edge of catastrophes in large part minted in the U.S. of A.
And, America had gone to the far, far right extreme not among its policy elites, not within its ruling classes, not in its political leadership, but straight through the core of its populace.
An entire segment of American had gone so far to the right that Rick Perry was too liberal, that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was a weak-kneed appeaser, that House Majority Leader and right-wing attack-dog Eric Cantor (R-VA) was often decried as a deplorable Republican In Name Only.
America had gone so far to the right, it was no longer a very long or winding road before America reached that point where it committed crimes of historic, catastrophic magnitude. Societies that careened as far to the right as America rarely pulled back from the abyss. America had gone so far to the right, it was no longer impossible to say that America would not plummet into that abyss of infamy, and that someday, future generations alluding to the unspeakable, the reprehensible, the most utterly and completely contemptible, might use the word "American."
Monday, September 26, 2011
Obama Hopes Extremist Republicans Not Reflective of America
Addressing supporters at a California fund-raising event Sunday, President Barack Obama hoped Republicans who cheered for the deaths of uninsured Americans and denied climate change science weren't representative of America.
"I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately?" Obama asked the San Jose, CA crowd. "You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay."
"You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change," Obama said. The President offered, "That's not reflective of who we are."
It was, however, exactly who Republicans were.
The Republican breed, drunk with hostage-taking victories, have boldly revealed their true natures. At the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential grandstanding show, the audience cheered when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) whether society should abandon the uninsured and "just let them die."
Flexing their gay-bashing muscles, the audience booed gay service members in Iraq.
"Sadly, the audiences seem representative of what the Republican Party has devolved into," West Virginia State Delegate Nancy Guthrie (D) said of the GOP debate audiences, "and it reflects a very low point in our democracy."
"The audiences don't just appear this way, they are more and more becoming this way," North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern (D) told the Politico.
Iowa State Rep. Josh Byrnes (R) said of the debate crowds,"These are overblown and not representative of mainstream Republicans." He was probably right, as the debate audiences were likely made up of the most civil, well-behaved Republicans. They weren't even carrying firearms.
In the Republican Party, extremism was the new mainstream. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained unapologetic about his disgraced scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
"So here's the problem: if you don't address these issues now, they're going to steamroll us as a country," Ryan pontificated on CNN. "And the issue the more you delay fixing these problems, the uglier the solutions are going to be."
Which, of course, was why it was imperative that the nation stop coddling its millionaires and billionaires and start taxing them. Poll after poll revealed nearly seven in ten Americans agreed this was the case, but the other three were Republicans who'd hijacked the government, taken the American people hostage, and regularly ranted about Jesus.
Republicans have rejected making the rich pay taxes, and have obstructed every effort to reform revenue. Instead, they increasingly threatened the nation with increasingly ugly "solutions." Clearly, at some point, they'll eventually get to a Final one.
Typical Republicans not only cheered the prospect of locking the sick and injured out of hospitals if they weren't wealthy enough to pay, they routinely roamed southwestern deserts in pickup trucks hoping to shoot Hispanics, and regularly spouted Bible verses while denying climate change and evolution under the guise of religious freedom.
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the Copenhagen Post. "And, when you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult to take."
GOP Presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry regularly slammed climate change science while shilling for the oil companies, and rival Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) believed sustainability was a United Nations plot to destroy America by forcing white people to take public transit and live among blacks in inner cities.
These were the Republicans winning the laurel wreaths and bathing in the cheers of adoring sycophants. These were the Republican valedictorians.
Rank and file Republicans were toting firearms and feverishly reciting Bible verses after generations of being home-schooled on hate and twisted misconceptions about Christ. Rank and file Republicans were routinely sending their own kids to Christian torture camps to be beaten into accepting right-wing orthodoxy.
Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of an omnipotent ruling class wielding an impoverished and propaganda-indoctrinated peasantry to plunder at will. Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of divinely-anointed warlords reigning over bloodthirsty mobs eager to murder and pillage everyone around them.
There was no hope a Republican breed that tortured their own children for the sake of ideological orthodoxy could be made to accept that torturing foreigners and persons of color was wrong. There was no hope a Republican breed that dismissed science as heresy would ever accept climate change, evolution, or the common ancestry of all humans.
The Republican breed rejected evolution to preserve a supernatural basis for white supremacy. The Republican ruling class manipulated that rejection into a rejection of all science to bolster a climate-destroying fossil fuel industry. The Republican breed rejected civil rights as an assault on white supremacy. The Republican ruling class exploited that hate in a campaign against governance so the wealthy could evade taxes.
Obama hoped they were not reflective of the majority of Americans. After all, there was no hope they would change.
"I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately?" Obama asked the San Jose, CA crowd. "You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay."
"You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change," Obama said. The President offered, "That's not reflective of who we are."
It was, however, exactly who Republicans were.
The Republican breed, drunk with hostage-taking victories, have boldly revealed their true natures. At the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential grandstanding show, the audience cheered when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) whether society should abandon the uninsured and "just let them die."
Flexing their gay-bashing muscles, the audience booed gay service members in Iraq.
"Sadly, the audiences seem representative of what the Republican Party has devolved into," West Virginia State Delegate Nancy Guthrie (D) said of the GOP debate audiences, "and it reflects a very low point in our democracy."
"The audiences don't just appear this way, they are more and more becoming this way," North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern (D) told the Politico.
Iowa State Rep. Josh Byrnes (R) said of the debate crowds,"These are overblown and not representative of mainstream Republicans." He was probably right, as the debate audiences were likely made up of the most civil, well-behaved Republicans. They weren't even carrying firearms.
In the Republican Party, extremism was the new mainstream. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained unapologetic about his disgraced scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
"So here's the problem: if you don't address these issues now, they're going to steamroll us as a country," Ryan pontificated on CNN. "And the issue the more you delay fixing these problems, the uglier the solutions are going to be."
Which, of course, was why it was imperative that the nation stop coddling its millionaires and billionaires and start taxing them. Poll after poll revealed nearly seven in ten Americans agreed this was the case, but the other three were Republicans who'd hijacked the government, taken the American people hostage, and regularly ranted about Jesus.
Republicans have rejected making the rich pay taxes, and have obstructed every effort to reform revenue. Instead, they increasingly threatened the nation with increasingly ugly "solutions." Clearly, at some point, they'll eventually get to a Final one.
Typical Republicans not only cheered the prospect of locking the sick and injured out of hospitals if they weren't wealthy enough to pay, they routinely roamed southwestern deserts in pickup trucks hoping to shoot Hispanics, and regularly spouted Bible verses while denying climate change and evolution under the guise of religious freedom.
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the Copenhagen Post. "And, when you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult to take."
GOP Presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry regularly slammed climate change science while shilling for the oil companies, and rival Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) believed sustainability was a United Nations plot to destroy America by forcing white people to take public transit and live among blacks in inner cities.
These were the Republicans winning the laurel wreaths and bathing in the cheers of adoring sycophants. These were the Republican valedictorians.
Rank and file Republicans were toting firearms and feverishly reciting Bible verses after generations of being home-schooled on hate and twisted misconceptions about Christ. Rank and file Republicans were routinely sending their own kids to Christian torture camps to be beaten into accepting right-wing orthodoxy.
Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of an omnipotent ruling class wielding an impoverished and propaganda-indoctrinated peasantry to plunder at will. Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of divinely-anointed warlords reigning over bloodthirsty mobs eager to murder and pillage everyone around them.
There was no hope a Republican breed that tortured their own children for the sake of ideological orthodoxy could be made to accept that torturing foreigners and persons of color was wrong. There was no hope a Republican breed that dismissed science as heresy would ever accept climate change, evolution, or the common ancestry of all humans.
The Republican breed rejected evolution to preserve a supernatural basis for white supremacy. The Republican ruling class manipulated that rejection into a rejection of all science to bolster a climate-destroying fossil fuel industry. The Republican breed rejected civil rights as an assault on white supremacy. The Republican ruling class exploited that hate in a campaign against governance so the wealthy could evade taxes.
Obama hoped they were not reflective of the majority of Americans. After all, there was no hope they would change.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Teen Torture Camps Reveal Depth of GOP, Right-Wing Depravity
In 2032, a woman will lay dying of cervical cancer because her parents, devout Republicans inspired by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), forbade her from receiving the human papillomavirus vaccine.
That the woman, considering Republican ascendancy in America, probably won't have health insurance, was conjecture. That the woman, considering Republican ascendancy in America, probably won't have access to any sort of health care at all, was also conjecture.
That she will die because Michele Bachmann was an shameless self-promoter who so lusted for limelight and cheering crowds that she unconscionably, mindlessly pandered to the reprehensible aspirations of a Luddite anti-vaccine crowd was both an immutable fact and an unimpeachable damnation.
Michele Bachmann was not the only sociopath spewing devastation without the least consideration for the carnage she wrought. She was just one sociopath in a tidal surge of sociopaths called the Republican Party.
The Republicans were an army, a horde, a pestilential swarm of sociopaths. Before a national television audience, Republicans cheered for the extermination of Americans who couldn't buy retail health insurance. During last week's CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debates, even Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) hesitated to condemn the uninsured to misery and death outside the locked doors of a hospital emergency room , but when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked what should happen to someone who couldn't pay for needed medical intensive care, hundreds of Republican Tea Party zealots in the audience cheered that society should "just let him die."
That Republicans would condemn millions to death and misery was already known from Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) Tea Party scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to GOP insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
That Michele Bachmann would casually kill countless women to score political points with an extremist anti-vaccine sect was not in the least surprising.
The Republican breed was so abhorrent, so utterly depraved, so thoroughly corrupted they routinely and casually discarded and abused even their own children. The Republican breed routinely condemned their own sons and daughters to unspeakable abuse and torture in barbaric concentration camps, Mother Jones reported.
What chance did anyone stand against a breed that remorselessly brutalized their own offspring?
Throughout the South and the Mountain West, Republicans have discarded thousands upon thousands of so-called "troubled" teens in countless torture camps. To perpetrate their depravity, Republicans have systematically proscribed any oversight or regulation of these torture camps under the guise of religious freedom. Missouri's Republican state legislature, which last April infamously outlawed Sharia law in a brazen outpouring of Muslim-bashing, has repeatedly scuttled oversight of its teen torture camps citing obeisance to Christian faith-based institutions. Montana's Republican legislature also recently defeated legislation to regulate their Christian torture camps.
Republican state Representative Christy Clark dismissed those testifying about abuse at Montana's torture camps as unreliable witnesses who "struggle with truthfulness," a condition Clark was undoubtedly intimately familiar with.
Throughout their fief, Republicans proscribed law enforcement and child welfare services even tallying the number and location of these torture centers, let alone inspecting or regulating them.
This was what Republicans called eliminating overbearing government regulation.
Shielded from the law, sadistic overseers subjected their helpless victims to beatings, isolation, and deprivation tortures. At New Beginnings' torture camp in Missouri, victims were locked in isolation cells, given only two bathroom breaks a day when they could only use two squares of toilet paper, monitored while bathing and using the toilet, and forced into endless calisthenics. Infractions such as making eye contact with other inmates and eating too little resulted in punishments.
Forbidden from contacting their parents, desperate inmates attempted smuggling distress pleas to the recipients of Bibles they were forced to distribute. More punishments ensued.
New Beginnings operated countless camps under various names in Florida, Mississippi and Texas as well as Missouri.
The Christian torture camps have been brutalizing children for years. In isolated compounds, inmates have been beaten while covered with blankets, forced to scour kitchen pots with undiluted bleach, bludgeoned with paddles, whipped with belts, and forced to drink copious quantities of water and forbidden to use the toilet.
The handful of mortified parents who fought to rescue their kids from torture centers and the handful of courageous survivors strong enough to break their conditioning and speak out were the only breaches in the wall of secrecy Republicans and evangelical supremacists operated behind.
A people who subjected their own children to torture and abuse was certain to have no scruples about torturing and abusing foreign combatants.
A breed that abandoned their own children to torture and abuse was certain to dismantle Medicare, eliminate Social Security and abandon a nation's poor and elderly to misery and death.
A coven that tortured and abused children they supposedly loved was certain to inflict any horror upon gays, persons of color, and followers of different faiths they openly hated.
The Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Stalinist Soviets bore no more depraved roots, committed no more horrific preludes, or perpetrated no more terrible precursors than this Republican breed. Where, then, would history eventually find this sect?
For the children abandoned to Christian faith-based torture camps, and a yet unnamed woman dying of cervical cancer in 2032, the horrors have already begun.
That the woman, considering Republican ascendancy in America, probably won't have health insurance, was conjecture. That the woman, considering Republican ascendancy in America, probably won't have access to any sort of health care at all, was also conjecture.
That she will die because Michele Bachmann was an shameless self-promoter who so lusted for limelight and cheering crowds that she unconscionably, mindlessly pandered to the reprehensible aspirations of a Luddite anti-vaccine crowd was both an immutable fact and an unimpeachable damnation.
Michele Bachmann was not the only sociopath spewing devastation without the least consideration for the carnage she wrought. She was just one sociopath in a tidal surge of sociopaths called the Republican Party.
The Republicans were an army, a horde, a pestilential swarm of sociopaths. Before a national television audience, Republicans cheered for the extermination of Americans who couldn't buy retail health insurance. During last week's CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debates, even Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) hesitated to condemn the uninsured to misery and death outside the locked doors of a hospital emergency room , but when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked what should happen to someone who couldn't pay for needed medical intensive care, hundreds of Republican Tea Party zealots in the audience cheered that society should "just let him die."
That Republicans would condemn millions to death and misery was already known from Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) Tea Party scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to GOP insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
That Michele Bachmann would casually kill countless women to score political points with an extremist anti-vaccine sect was not in the least surprising.
The Republican breed was so abhorrent, so utterly depraved, so thoroughly corrupted they routinely and casually discarded and abused even their own children. The Republican breed routinely condemned their own sons and daughters to unspeakable abuse and torture in barbaric concentration camps, Mother Jones reported.
What chance did anyone stand against a breed that remorselessly brutalized their own offspring?
Throughout the South and the Mountain West, Republicans have discarded thousands upon thousands of so-called "troubled" teens in countless torture camps. To perpetrate their depravity, Republicans have systematically proscribed any oversight or regulation of these torture camps under the guise of religious freedom. Missouri's Republican state legislature, which last April infamously outlawed Sharia law in a brazen outpouring of Muslim-bashing, has repeatedly scuttled oversight of its teen torture camps citing obeisance to Christian faith-based institutions. Montana's Republican legislature also recently defeated legislation to regulate their Christian torture camps.
Republican state Representative Christy Clark dismissed those testifying about abuse at Montana's torture camps as unreliable witnesses who "struggle with truthfulness," a condition Clark was undoubtedly intimately familiar with.
Throughout their fief, Republicans proscribed law enforcement and child welfare services even tallying the number and location of these torture centers, let alone inspecting or regulating them.
This was what Republicans called eliminating overbearing government regulation.
Shielded from the law, sadistic overseers subjected their helpless victims to beatings, isolation, and deprivation tortures. At New Beginnings' torture camp in Missouri, victims were locked in isolation cells, given only two bathroom breaks a day when they could only use two squares of toilet paper, monitored while bathing and using the toilet, and forced into endless calisthenics. Infractions such as making eye contact with other inmates and eating too little resulted in punishments.
Forbidden from contacting their parents, desperate inmates attempted smuggling distress pleas to the recipients of Bibles they were forced to distribute. More punishments ensued.
New Beginnings operated countless camps under various names in Florida, Mississippi and Texas as well as Missouri.
The Christian torture camps have been brutalizing children for years. In isolated compounds, inmates have been beaten while covered with blankets, forced to scour kitchen pots with undiluted bleach, bludgeoned with paddles, whipped with belts, and forced to drink copious quantities of water and forbidden to use the toilet.
The handful of mortified parents who fought to rescue their kids from torture centers and the handful of courageous survivors strong enough to break their conditioning and speak out were the only breaches in the wall of secrecy Republicans and evangelical supremacists operated behind.
A people who subjected their own children to torture and abuse was certain to have no scruples about torturing and abusing foreign combatants.
A breed that abandoned their own children to torture and abuse was certain to dismantle Medicare, eliminate Social Security and abandon a nation's poor and elderly to misery and death.
A coven that tortured and abused children they supposedly loved was certain to inflict any horror upon gays, persons of color, and followers of different faiths they openly hated.
The Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Stalinist Soviets bore no more depraved roots, committed no more horrific preludes, or perpetrated no more terrible precursors than this Republican breed. Where, then, would history eventually find this sect?
For the children abandoned to Christian faith-based torture camps, and a yet unnamed woman dying of cervical cancer in 2032, the horrors have already begun.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Lamestream America Blundering Toward Tawdry National Identity
It turned out Sarah Palin was right about the mainstream media being pretty lame.
The mainstream media was so lame, it had actually taken to defending Palin at every turn. The swimsuit-modelling former Alaska governor and present-day peddler of self-branded books, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and DVDs has come under a bit more scrutiny than the usual unadulterated adulation of fawning sycophants, and such august institutions as the New York Times have leapt to Palin's defense, seriously taking to task any number of unadoring books, DVDs and even comic strips that weren't fawning over Palin, the Politico reported.
Which goes to show just how much show biz adores and fawns over its A-listers. Palin is, after all, a television star.
But the celebrity-coddling didn't stop with the New York Times Book Review's scathing rejection of Joe McGinniss' Palin-skewering tome The Rogue, or the Chicago Tribune's censorship of Palin-skewering Doonesbury strips, or Variety's savage panning of Nick Broomfield's Palin-skewering mockumentary You Betcha!
The celebrity-coddling ran clear through the serious pandering to such so-not-ready-for-primetime politicelebrities as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Gov. Rick Perry. And, the celebrity-coddling by no means was confined to the media, lamestream or otherwise.
And to think they used to make fun of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). Paul came off like a pipe-smoking Oxford don compared to Bachmann, Perry, Palin and the whole panoply of Republican perps and suspects.
For instance, defacto compulsive liar Bachmann's out-and-out prevarications included, according to Politifact:
"Maybe she's a little passionate, but she's not scripted. She's real," Iowa state senator and Bachmann lackey Kent Sorenson told the New York Times, lowering the bar for the era of reality TV.
If Bachmann's lies hadn't made her a real A-lister, she'd better jump the couch.
Most recently, Bachmann jumped on the right-wing mental deficients' vaccinophobia band wagon, declaring that the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine caused mental retardation. Bachmann lambasted rival ideo-demagogue Gov. Rick Perry for wanting young girls to get "an injection of what could potentially be a very dangerous drug."
Previous versions of right-wing vaccinophobia included the hysterical ravings led by noted conservative nude centerfold model Jenny McCarthy against the Measles, Mumps and Rubella triple-shot vaccine, which supposedly caused autism.
Incidentally, the phrase 'conservative nude centerfold model' should preclude any necessity for having to buy a vowel while deciphering the exact depth to which the right-of-center movement had plunged of late.
Or the depth of gratuitous celebrity-coddling in America.
Because, despite intervals of lucidity during which nearly seven in ten Americans wanted those making $250,000 or much, much more a year to pay higher taxes to shore up Social Security, or Medicare, or to pay down the nation's debts, Americans repeatedly thronged any square-jawed, blow-dried, right-wing demagogue with a peroxide smile openly calling for the elimination of Social Security and Medicare to fund ever more and bigger tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for big corporations and the rich.
The problem with lamestream America was by no means confined to the media. The problem with lamestream America wasn't even confined to its politicians.
Lamestream America was lame because an ever rising tide of Americans were lame.
Lamest of all the lame were the lamos cheering for uninsured Americans to die.
On Monday's CNN/Tea Party GOP presidential pretenders' debate, mediator Wolf Blitzer asked Paul if a 30-year-old without health insurance needed intensive care, whether society should "just let him die." Paul hemmed and hawed, but the audience didn't.
Like a surly Roman Colosseum crowd, the audience erupted into cheers and catcalls. "Yeah!" they cried and hooted. Thumbs down.
Like Nazis exterminating the handicapped and the retarded. Like Spartans abandoning the weak. Like the Khmer Rouge, Serbian militias, and Hutu hordes slaughtering anyone they hated.
The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's audience didn't need HPV vaccine to be retarded. The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's audience didn't need MMR shots to be autistic. The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's GOP CNN/Tea Party crowd were lame just the way they were.
The mainstream media was so lame, it had actually taken to defending Palin at every turn. The swimsuit-modelling former Alaska governor and present-day peddler of self-branded books, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and DVDs has come under a bit more scrutiny than the usual unadulterated adulation of fawning sycophants, and such august institutions as the New York Times have leapt to Palin's defense, seriously taking to task any number of unadoring books, DVDs and even comic strips that weren't fawning over Palin, the Politico reported.
Which goes to show just how much show biz adores and fawns over its A-listers. Palin is, after all, a television star.
But the celebrity-coddling didn't stop with the New York Times Book Review's scathing rejection of Joe McGinniss' Palin-skewering tome The Rogue, or the Chicago Tribune's censorship of Palin-skewering Doonesbury strips, or Variety's savage panning of Nick Broomfield's Palin-skewering mockumentary You Betcha!
The celebrity-coddling ran clear through the serious pandering to such so-not-ready-for-primetime politicelebrities as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Gov. Rick Perry. And, the celebrity-coddling by no means was confined to the media, lamestream or otherwise.
And to think they used to make fun of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). Paul came off like a pipe-smoking Oxford don compared to Bachmann, Perry, Palin and the whole panoply of Republican perps and suspects.
For instance, defacto compulsive liar Bachmann's out-and-out prevarications included, according to Politifact:
- President Barack Obama had "virtually no one in his cabinet with private sector experience."
- "One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office."
- Small businesses with "$250,000 in gross sales for the business. They're the ones that are looking at massive tax increases."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "has been sticking the taxpayer with her $100,000 bar tab for alcohol on the military jets that she's flying."
- ACORN will be a paid partner of the U.S. Census Bureau.
- "Swine flu broke out" under Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
- "My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from (their family's) farm."
- "The President released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve."
"Maybe she's a little passionate, but she's not scripted. She's real," Iowa state senator and Bachmann lackey Kent Sorenson told the New York Times, lowering the bar for the era of reality TV.
If Bachmann's lies hadn't made her a real A-lister, she'd better jump the couch.
Most recently, Bachmann jumped on the right-wing mental deficients' vaccinophobia band wagon, declaring that the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine caused mental retardation. Bachmann lambasted rival ideo-demagogue Gov. Rick Perry for wanting young girls to get "an injection of what could potentially be a very dangerous drug."
Previous versions of right-wing vaccinophobia included the hysterical ravings led by noted conservative nude centerfold model Jenny McCarthy against the Measles, Mumps and Rubella triple-shot vaccine, which supposedly caused autism.
Incidentally, the phrase 'conservative nude centerfold model' should preclude any necessity for having to buy a vowel while deciphering the exact depth to which the right-of-center movement had plunged of late.
Or the depth of gratuitous celebrity-coddling in America.
Because, despite intervals of lucidity during which nearly seven in ten Americans wanted those making $250,000 or much, much more a year to pay higher taxes to shore up Social Security, or Medicare, or to pay down the nation's debts, Americans repeatedly thronged any square-jawed, blow-dried, right-wing demagogue with a peroxide smile openly calling for the elimination of Social Security and Medicare to fund ever more and bigger tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for big corporations and the rich.
The problem with lamestream America was by no means confined to the media. The problem with lamestream America wasn't even confined to its politicians.
Lamestream America was lame because an ever rising tide of Americans were lame.
Lamest of all the lame were the lamos cheering for uninsured Americans to die.
On Monday's CNN/Tea Party GOP presidential pretenders' debate, mediator Wolf Blitzer asked Paul if a 30-year-old without health insurance needed intensive care, whether society should "just let him die." Paul hemmed and hawed, but the audience didn't.
Like a surly Roman Colosseum crowd, the audience erupted into cheers and catcalls. "Yeah!" they cried and hooted. Thumbs down.
Like Nazis exterminating the handicapped and the retarded. Like Spartans abandoning the weak. Like the Khmer Rouge, Serbian militias, and Hutu hordes slaughtering anyone they hated.
The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's audience didn't need HPV vaccine to be retarded. The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's audience didn't need MMR shots to be autistic. The Americans in Wolf Blitzer's GOP CNN/Tea Party crowd were lame just the way they were.
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