2 : a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also: a group exercising such control [emphasis mine]
On April 9, 2014, this report was released on Princeton University’s website, and it’s shaken up news reports all over the world. It might come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that I’m not shocked at all by the finding. In fact, I’ve been using the term for at least the last several years, to describe in various threads just exactly what our country has become. If you think we’ve somehow escaped notice, think again:
Robert Reich’s film, Inequality For All, does a spectacular job of tying all the loose ends together to explain what happened to the U.S.A. over the last 30 years. I’ve written a lot about the symptoms in the last year and a half, but nothing connects them half as well as this simple, elegant movie.
Too many people spend their time repeating the talking points without understand the source of the platform. They trust the office without paying attention to the officer. They don’t know how to read between the lines because their education fails to explain that the subtext is just as important as the message. We got where we are today because the Republicans beat the Libertarians in 1980, and the Libertarians took a different path.
You can (and should) go back in this blog and read the articles I’ve posted on the Koch brothers, you can listen to the things Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have to say (because comedy is the best source of truth these days), or you can analyze the political rhetoric that’s starting to hit for each of the Senate and House races this year, but the bottom line is, we have maybe two years to get our act together and do something about the GO(T)P.
They’ve got a lock on two of the four (yes, four) branches of government: The Supreme Court and the House. Without cooperation across the aisles, the Senate is barely holding on. Today, the Senate leans Democratic, but that’s not a given based on the 2014 election analysis.
If the Senate flips back to the GO(T)P, and we put another Republican in the office of President, we can write off our country. The poor will become modern-day serfs and the middle class will join them because that class is a modern myth. The combined branches will finally get to do what they always wanted – rewrite the Constitution with impunity.
The Presidency depends on having enough votes in key states – most of which are undergoing the same sort of voter crap that Florida’s done. We tip one or the other (senate or presidency) in the direction of the GOP, and what little remains of our safety nets will disappear completely. Want some practice at reading between the lines? Try these articles out for size:
Purge the rolls of Democrats, lean a little in the direction most conservatives think they need to go, or split the vote a little more with the splinter parties (Green or Socialist) and the GOP will have what they want: Total control of the US government. Once that happens, they can rewrite our constitution, revise the rules for who gets to vote. Can’t happen? We have three Supreme Court Justices who are on the edge of retirement, and the guessing game for who will retire first, and who will replace them, is heating up. Have a good look at the Tea Party line and platform and you’ll see the fundamentals of the Neo-Fascists who are presently armed to the teeth, thanks to the NRA.
We can still stop the madness, but it’s getting harder, not easier. I’d hoped the GOP was the party of the Old White Male, but that ignores the younger population who are moving in through the Tea Party. I recognize that the Democrats have issues, but the things they want to support – the Social Safety Net, universal health care, public education – will ALL go away if they lose. So like I said: We’ve got maybe two years to turn this around. We can’t wait until 2020. This election is important. The next one is critical.
And consider this: In the world today, neo-Nazi and neo-Confederacy groups are working hard to control American politics. Our country is in the same place Germany was when the Third Reich rose to power. We are still putting so-called conservatives in power because many people in the south miss their rich, fat incomes thanks to the destruction of slavery. Some of them believe slavery was a good thing.
Look into our prison system, in restaurants, fields, garment factories (where they still exist) and in other places where menial labor means hard work for little pay, and you’ll find modern slavery, “human trafficking.”
It’s all well and good to view our nasty Civil War history through rose-colored filters, but then folks like Steve McQueen (director of “12 Years A Slave”) come along and blow all that rose-colored fantasy away.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if the Tea Party got its way and actually rose to power, with a representative in the Oval Office and enough of a majority to squash the actions of the Senate the way they do the House. Unthinkable, right?
We have less than a year to the 2014 elections. While I don’t see a lot of change in who’s seated in the Senate, there’s a whole mess of trouble in our House of Representatives. In case you’ve forgotten, the next government shutdown threat is scheduled for December. And unless I’ve missed something major in the news, we are no closer to a budget deal than we have been in the last five years. Where’s the discussion? Nobody’s talking. There hasn’t been an update since the end of October. Well, okay, there’s this:
Now, maybe it’s just that they’re trying to work hard and keep the press out of the discussion, or maybe it’s that there hasn’t been any progress. I’m sure everyone would be happier knowing we’re not going to wind up with another shutdown just as the Christmas season gets underway, but I’m not willing to bet we’ll be any further along than we were on the 17th.
How does this all tie in together?
Here’s a massively oversimplified description of the events that led up to the rise of Hitler:
But that really misses the bigger picture. The US wasn’t the only country to suffer in the Great Depression. It was global, no better in Germany than it was here. And that’s the key.
We are in the same depression recovery the Germans suffered in the 1930s. Look at Detroit as a clear example of what our depression has done to the people today. Who’s running Michigan, anyway? Oh, right. Rick Snyder. Not an extremist Tea Party member (in fact, they’re mad at him for promoting tax money to cover infrastructure), but a member of the GOP and a venture capitalist on the side of corporate America.
This is what World War II looked like through the lens, as compiled by The Atlantic in 2011:
It’s not theoretical racism. We are not immune. And unless we start to realize and do something about it, we’re going to wind up just like Germany 75 years ago.
You know, the more I think about this, the more I wonder. Is the President waiting for default to declare actual sedition against the members of the Tea Party and GOP who are pulling this stunt? They can try to impeach him if they want, but they don’t have the foolproof 2/3 majority they would need in the House anymore, and I imagine they’d be hard pressed to find Democrats who would back such a measure. Meanwhile, driving the country over the Debt Ceiling cliff could well be the seditious action required to arrest the key members who brought the country to its figurative knees over this.
Arguing about what sedition means, I found two links:
Might be a very good reason to backpedal, in public….
Trouble is, all you really have to do these days is follow the money. The New Yorker figured it out way back in August of 2010. It’s just not that hard to draw the lines between the dots.
On Facebook a few days ago, Matthew Rose posted this public status that’s making the rounds on my list of friends:
Oct 2008: “You’ll never get elected and pass healthcare.”
Nov 2008: “We’ll never let you pass healthcare.”
Jan 2009: “We are going to shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare.”
July 2009: “We will fight to the death every attempt you make to pass healthcare.”
Dec 2009: “We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare.”
March 2010: “We can’t believe you just passed healthcare.”
April 2010: “We are going to overturn healthcare.”
Sept 2010: “We are going to repeal healthcare.”
Jan 2011: “We are going to destroy healthcare.”
Feb 2012: “We are going to elect a candidate who will immediately revoke healthcare.”
June 2012: “We will go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare.”
Aug 2012: “The American people will never re-elect you, because they don’t want healthcare.”
Oct 2012: “We can’t wait to win the election and explode healthcare.”
Nov 2012: “We can’t believe you just got re-elected and that we can’t repeal healthcare.”
Feb 2013: “We’re still going to vote to obliterate healthcare.”
June 2013: “We can’t believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare.”
July 2013: “We’re going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare.”
Sept 2013: “We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare.”
Oct 2013: “WHY AREN’T YOU NEGOTIATING???”
I woke up this morning, obsessed with a single thought:
If the GOP don’t think there’s anything bad about the letting the Debt Ceiling collapse, then why do they think holding it hostage will get them anything?
I’ve been chewing on this all night and I think I know.
I took the name Cassandra for a reason. It’s not my given name, never been called that in my life, but I begin to think I must be one of her descendants because I’m seeing where this is headed and I’m afraid the President is going to weaken his resolve before the 17th. This MUST NOT HAPPEN.
God Bless Bernie Sanders, because he’s preaching what I’m preaching.
I have been saying for well over a year now what some news organizations are only now reporting on their main pages. On October 5th, The New York Times said that there is no issue so important that it could possibly pull the House Tea Party from their brinkmanship because this is a carefully planned process and it’s proceeding according to their hopes.
If for any reason you have failed to grasp what’s happening 10 days from now, worry no more. It’s going to happen. I’ve already sold one of my stocks and both the mutual funds (what’s left in my meager IRA), riding this one out with cash and stock in Yahoo and one Solar Energy company because I think they’ll survive this. That’s all. Everything else is cash because I simply can’t afford to lose what’s left of the teeny gains I’ve made in the last year.
Despite all the craziness on the Hill, Wall Street’s been reacting slowly. Why?
Here’s just one example, from an unlikely source, The Motley Fool:
I never once watched an episode of the X-files, but I can quote their tag line: “The truth is out there.” Just go look at the main sites for business: Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, pick one. This is where we should have been looking while the Obamacare smokescreen was in action. We haven’t paid attention. We’ve been too busy. And that’s just what the Tea Party wanted.
They’re serious. They don’t care who they railroad. And I’ll tell you why. Because they won’t lose their money if the US economy tanks over the Debt Ceiling. Let me repeat, because this is the single most important thing to understand about the Tea Party mentality:
They don’t care.
Three words, but they mean everything and you should be terrified.
I posted this before on Facebook, but I’m repeating it here because it needs to be said and you need to share it with everyone you know.
The Tea Party’s whole goal is the destruction of the U.S. government. They are happy to toss the country over the Debt Ceiling cliff and this time the Democrats aren’t going to stop them.
Why?
Stick with me, because I’m about to go off the rails, but if you are going to fight the enemy, you have to think like them, and that is precisely what we have to do. If you do, you’ll see the whole picture.
We are looking down the barrel of a semi-automatic weapon-driven Second Civil War and if we aren’t careful, that’s exactly where we will be by the end of this month.
Don’t think for one single second that the Second Amendment is about your personal rights. Or that Obamacare is about socialism or job loss. These are threats that keep the workers in their place, going to church and praying instead of noticing what’s going on in their world. How did Lenin and Stalin rise to power? By taking out the aristocracy in a bloodbath that immediately followed World War II. In their strange, twisted world, the Tea Party (the New Confederacy) paints President Obama as the charismatic leader on an equal basis with Hitler. I’m not making this up. It’s not Godwin’s law. They’ve said it themselves, so it must be true!
The Tea Party doesn’t live in our world.
They have sold their base on the idea that We the People refers only to certain people, and is not representative of their world view. It must therefor be thrown out as a useless document.
They will toss this country over the Debt Ceiling cliff because they want to see the government change and they know they can’t do it any other way. If the US defaults, they have someone to blame because he wasn’t willing to negotiate, and that isn’t John Boehner, though he richly deserves the honor. No, they believe the Gingrich model from 1996 will work this time with President Obama, too. They don’t have a Monica Lewinsky to use as leverage this time, because Barack loves Michelle too much to mess around with someone else, so they need another something to pin on him. And the Debt Ceiling is it.
Mark my words: The motion to impeach President Obama will come on either the 17th or 18th, when he is forced by law to do something about the Debt Ceiling, and they will sing to Fox News that they’ve FINALLY got him where they want him. I hope he’s ready for that next step, because it’s a mess.
This disaster in the making is larger than the two-party system. It’s larger than Us against Them. We’re talking about more than a four-year gap in the budget process, failure to hold the banks responsible for despicable acts against our people because they set up the rules and then changed the game. We’re talking about failing to preserve our social structure in the face of domestic terrorism that strikes me as so very similar to the Weimar Republic that we should all be very, very frightened.
Ask yourself: If Godwin’s law is so very bad for conversation, why does it happen so often that people pull the subject into the discussion? We narrowly avoided electing our own charismatic leader because he lacked the charisma of the German leader I refuse to name here.
I buried these comments on a Canadian friend’s Facebook wall, under comments related to this article from The Guardian:
The second individual in the comment stream suggested I didn’t know much about American politics (apparently he assumed — incorrectly — that I was Canadian, too). As flattering as that was, I resisted the urge to thank him for the compliment and wrote this instead:
The fact is that the situation here closely parallels the development of the Nazi party in more ways than we ought to be comfortable with in this country. And the parallels are no accident, either. Wanna see something really scary?
Last year I did a fairly extensive exploration of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the relationship between mid-17th Century European history and the German rise and fall in the 1940s. The Koch brothers, no doubt, have paid close attention to the way the Nazis rose to power and it shows in this current stand-off.
The American government has been more or less powerless in the last 20 years. The Kochs have exerted increasing pressure on American politics since just after Reagan was elected, which explains the Bush family’s rise to power and the Romney/Ryan ticket. They don’t want leaders. They want puppets they can control. And if they can’t control the puppets, they’ll do everything in their power to neutralize the work [we] do.
We can only hope that the electorate will remember this enormous game of Chicken come November, 2014, but I wouldn’t count on a recall election for any of these so-called representatives, and I wouldn’t imagine many of them will lose their jobs. It’s the moderate GOP who stand to lose the most when 2014 comes, and they know it.
I can hope that in another year, more voters will come to realize just how much their leaders lied to them, and do something about it in the polls.
The Kochs are making up for 150 years of failure to win the Civil War. If you can’t win one way, and replace the government the way you wanted then, there are other ways, up to and including the Tea Party, our New Confederacy. That’s precisely what the Patriot Act, Citizens United and ALEC are all about. They set the foundation for a takeover of catastrophic proportions.
And when it happens, they can finally put uppity black man back in his place, the poor can serve the RICH without educations to know they can do better, become Christian or starve to death. We don’t need government. It just takes money away from the rich who’ll take care of their own (as long as they’re rich and white).
And when Jesus comes to collect them, because the calculations were just wrong but they’ll be right soon because the Bible tells them so, the rest of the Earth won’t matter because they’re going where it’s much, much better.
And if that doesn’t happen in the near term, it’s okay because there’s always the Cayman Islands, or other off-shore locations that will welcome these guys, because they’ve got enough money invested there that they can do whatever they want, no matter what happens to the US in the process.
And if all this does come to pass, I will have to become an expat and move to Canada, because I won’t be able to live here in the US anymore.
Howl all you want about the weather, education, the environment, science, the poor, and other earthly delights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You are talking about people who Just. Don’t. Care. They have no reason to care. They have a better place to go.
The end of November is often too busy to step back and look at where we are. Between prep for Thanksgiving (which came disturbingly early this year) and all the Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday-Tuesday… and so forth, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually accomplishing anything before the Advent calendars start opening on the 1st.
In my life, today is a chance to step back and remember. Two years ago, I lost a true best friend to long-term health problems that might have been diagnosed differently if the ACA were already in place and functioning, and if medical insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industries cared more about the people they serve than they do about their own pockets.
It’s a time for me to reflect on changes in the last year, but most importantly, to review a week or so’s worth of news that could escape attention in all the craziness that leads up to the “Holiday Season” in general.
I’ve been paying attention, mostly on Facebook, so here are some of the highlights (if you can call them that) of November’s last gasp.
New York Times: SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.”
Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.
Reuters: Major tobacco companies that spent decades denying they lied to the U.S. public about the dangers of cigarettes must spend their own money on a public advertising campaign saying they did lie, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
Huffington Post: A bipartisan group of senators made a bid Wednesday to end the indefinite military detention of Americans in the United States.
Declaring that a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 put the country on a path to repeat the shame of World War II’s internment camps, they argued the offending language should be stricken in this year’s defense bill.
Daily KOS: If you or anyone you know and care about live in Michigan, or if you care whatsoever about the public school system in this country–or, for that matter, education of our children in general–I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to read up on Michigan State House Bills 6004 & 5923, and State Senate Bills 1358 & 620.
Raw Story: Televangelist Pat Robertson says that radiocarbon dating proves that the Earth is older than 6,000 years — and he’s telling Christians not to “cover it up.”
On Tuesday’s 700 Club, a viewer wrote Robertson that her “biggest fear is to not have my children and husband next to me in God’s Kingdom” because they question why the Bible could not explain the existence of dinosaurs.
And finally (because I can’t resist one last dig):
Washington Post: Call it irony or call it coincidence: Mitt Romney’s share of the popular vote in the 2012 presidential race is very likely to be 47 percent.
Mitt Romney addresses the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) annual convention in Houston on July 11, 2012. (NICHOLAS KAMM – AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Romney’s campaign, of course, was doomed in large part by comments made on a hidden camera in which he suggested that 47 percent of the country was so reliant on government services that those people would never vote for him.
There’s a LOT of reading to do on this page, but each link has value in identifying the issues we need to consider when choosing our leaders for the coming two (House), four (President) or six (Senate) years.
I may already have published one or more of these links, but if so, I think the subject’s that important and bears a re-read.
I’ve broken the page into Presidential Election, Romney, Ryan, Obama, and Congress, based on the subject.
UPDATE [10/21/12]: It’s come to my attention that Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society President Brian Antal did not tell the whole truth on the story I posted October 16th, just hours after the initial reports hit the wire. NBC News reports that Ryan did, in fact, help to clean dishes and that Antal was not there but received the story second-hand. (http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/16/14485409-ryan-did-wash-dirty-dishes-during-soup-kitchen-visit).
Ryan’s clumsy attempt at gaining public sympathy and recognition for his “care of the poor” backfired, but so has President Antal’s ham-fisted accusation of wrongdoing. No matter what, he should consider stepping down and away from the situation. Partisan politics aside, there are any number of issues with these admissions, and in the end it is the patrons of the Soup Kitchen who will be most hurt by this.
