Nixon eventually betrayed everyone on all sides on the Vietnam War. He probably secretly promised Thieu unending support in exchange for sabotaging LBJ's peace talks when Nixon was running for election. He betrayed Thieu in '73. He promised liberal Republicans like Mark Hatfield that he would end the war faster than he really intended to. He betrayed his far-right base by cutting deals with Moscow and Beijing to cover his retreat.
So what we know Nixon was good at was betrayal, strategically planned and premeditated.
What, and you think if Obama wins with a minority of the popular vote, the GOP will be as wimpy about it as the Democrats were after 2000? They will go into overdrive rallying their troops to violate federal law on the grounds that the president didn't really win the election - despite having said the opposite in 2000.
Whether the Republicans are "against" America depends on how you define America. Which is something we all need to be debating each other about right now. Are we sincere when we say America is ALL of its people, or does our religion and economic theology rest on elitist foundations that applaud the sacrifice of servants for the benefit of masters?
I've watched, over the last 30 years, the reprehensible elitism of libertarianism grow to respectibility, indoctrinating hatred and contempt for the "non-entrepreneurial", and slowly shedding its cover story of merely wanting equality of opportunity via the infallible and unbiased free market. In the last 4 years, this reveal has accelerated. For Romney to be able to get away with saying that 47% of the population are parasites because they vote Democratic means that an awful lot of the rest of the population felt that way all along.
I think that the evil secret of America is that its white culture was always that of a conquering tribe, viewing blacks and immigrants and even employees no differently than the slaves of the Hebrews were regarded in the Old Testament. We thought this culture was being reformed the last 100 years or so, but we merely saw the dilution of that culture. Its revival means all the old abuses are coming back. The well-being of America is now openly proclaimed to be only trickle-down of the victory of the patriarchs of Wall Street, and none of us must dare dissent.
But DJ, if Democrats were in the opposition and leaked about a criminal operation by a GOP president, the Democrats would go to prison. It never happens when the GOP sabotages Democratic presidents:
1968: LBJ is working out terms for an end to the Vietnam War, but candidate and private citizen Nixon apparently has far-right groupie Anna Chennault (wife of CIA asset Gen. Chennault) promise South Vietnamese president Thieu that if he stonewalls the negotiations, Nixon will give him what he wants after thus winning the election. Far-right fascist J. Edgar Hoover is supposed to investigate, but of course he wants Nixon to win and delays his findings. As a result, tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese die only for Nixon to betray Thieu in '73 and agree to the same terms LBJ would have accepted. (You've probably heard rumors of Reagan making similar promises to Khomeini during the hostage negotiations in '80.)
This is not a bug in Republican operations, it's a feature. It means: we Republicans are the only real Americans and our monopoly on power is thus the only patriotism. Doesn't this worry you?
International law does not say that even getting bombed day after day gives a country the right to steal another people's land for profit. It says the opposite. If your country occupies my country and starts bulldozing my people's farms to build colonies for immigrants you brought in for precisely that purpose, I will damn well bomb you until hell freezes over. You should feel the same way about me. International law understands that war can never end as long as occupation is profitable.
You're right that we can't afford anything drastic.
But if we can't afford it, it's because we created this economy driven by short-term greed, no savings, no R&D money, no infrastructure repairs, and a dogma that we can use military dominance to get foreigners to do our dirty work for us.
If we had any honor left, we'd admit that we are willingly sacrificing some number of our fellow citizens to climate disasters. That we've put a price tag on each others' heads out of convenience, and now the convenience has been figured into the value of everything such that we can't give it up.
I take a different position from Bill and Joe. America has ALWAYS been involved in assassination campaigns since World War II. We used the CIA to create several governments from scratch, and those weren't nice governments. Operation Phoenix in Vietnam led to the assassinations of tens of thousands, but in such a corrupt country, (a) was the Southern army really doing all the killings or were Americans doing all the tough jobs, and (b) were the targets really terrorists, or just any young men who correctly refused to accept the legitimacy of the Saigon regime and genuinely wanted to improve their country?
How large a difference is there between an American (or president-directed robot) killing a dissident and the US egging on and paying generals to overthrow their governments and kill hundreds of thousands of its supporters? We have done this many times. We've even let these monsters (from Taiwan and Chile) kill people on US soil. Like Strangers on a Train, it was only a matter of time before we would have exchanged targets, and foreign killers would eliminate US dissidents with plausible deniability.
The problem is, what are the president's powers during wartime when wars are no longer formally declared, and thus permanent? If there are no fronts, no battlefields, and no decisive battles, I contend that the cost to our military in limiting its traditional free-fire mentality is less than the cost to us of having it in our streets killing anyone accused of being an enemy based on Congressional authorizations written by paranoid bigots.
Why? Because when war is this amorphous the adage "For want of a nail the war was lost" is obsolete and evil. The Army is not going to "lose" the war this way any more than it is going to "win" the war because it gets to bomb wedding parties. You cannot say that every local colonial war (which is what we're really fighting) has unlimited boundaries that places the entire planet under battlefield rules as long as a single armed person has "enemy" beliefs.
If you can justify that, then declare the damn war and tax the hell out of the rich to pay for it. Oh, but we're not allowed to do that, are we?
If one believes his fitness to monopolize power is so absolute and the need so compelling, why sweat a few lies or political prisoners? A person who entirely lives for the sake of being on top, of ruling and bullying and commoditizing others, and comes from the ethnicity and religion that has always played that role in his society might say or do anything to stay on top.
They haven't been punished in any way for this behavior. The government can't do it unless we are willing to back it up by threatening to do something nastier if democracy is discarded. Recall 1876 - the public was tired of fighting for civil rights, so the Constitution was simply no longer enforced in the South.
They only consider city-dwellers to be Americans when they're being attacked by enemy people, not destabilized nature. Compare the response to 9/11.
Why is this? Humans can only focus on an enemy that has a face, but then it dehumanizes that face. Is it because we believe human threats can be bombed out of existence while nature can't? Is it because the act of war glorifies persons and characteristics we find desirable, but the act of ecological management doesn't?
One day, if we are unfortunate, our own Air Force will be sent by a future far-right regime to bomb our cities to punish them for their liberalism. How will various types of Americans will react then? We need to consider that now.
Romney seems ready to declare a jihad to destroy Tesla, a company that is proving that electric vehicles need only economies of scale to become competitive with more and more classes of gasoline cars.
The purpose of subsidies for electric cars and alternative energy (as opposed to those for gas and oil) is to give the technology a chance to improve via real-world experience, and show the citizens that alternatives are possible. This is seen by the Far Right as a threat to the American way of life, whether government-subsidized or not.
We are not doing enough, but the GOP is demanding to do far worse. It has no choice but to force-boom the economy to hide the failure of trickle-down economics.
I've spent a lot of time trying to nail down exactly how the Dark Ages functioned. I think that an important fact about it is that it made the leading families of the realm BOTH the owners of the commanding heights of the economy (big estates) and the only persons who could fill important positions in government. This was true in all aristocratic systems, but it is only de facto true in modern poor capitalist countries, because unequal wealth still directly buys control of government instead of it being converted to the legal status of hereditary office.
In all of these societies, you have to put quotation marks around words like "government", "business", or "size", because the aristocracy controls all others by both public and private institutions. Add in the fact of the Catholic Church being a primary landowner in many of these societies, and the cross-pollination between the aristocracy and clergy, and the former's financing of the latter, and you have the conservative dream of small government: the sovereign is merely first among the owning class, who "limit" his power so as to preserve their own depraved mini-tyrannies over the masses assuaged by a complicit religion applying token charity.
So these arrangements are now being updated for America, but we don't know the details, or whether our owners even have the slightest comprehension of the forces they are unleashing. I agree, though, that at the end of it we will have a Dark Age.
Change really happens when people have been ruined and will risk their lives to try something different, or their country has been defeated by war or by the faster economic progress of its rivals. The elites must self-destruct, and not be replaced by fascist demagogues.
The capitalists were very smart to escalate their activities from country-raping to planet-raping, as no country wants to be blacklisted by the capitalists by opposing harm that will be visited on them no matter what. All the countries will be ruined by climate change together, so none can be the environmental hero that leads the others to salvation.
After the catastrophes have lead to megadeath, the corporations need only use their wealth, all that still exists on earth, to build new kingdoms into which they will let in those survivors who will pledge undying allegiance and the rejection of all "unproductive" rights. It's a little bit like what the landlords did when Rome fell, converting themselves into feudal nobility amid a mass dieoff.
Are the rich now that evil? Under the circumstances, the burden of proof is on them to pay for a better alternative out of their own pockets.
But we did it to China too. In fact, what Britain did to China was Christian capitalist hypocrisy at its most morally bankrupt:
1. a British corporation stole the valuable parts of India from its own rulers
2. it then grew vast amounts of opium there and exported it to China, where wealthy families were ruined by their expensive addictions, transferring vast amounts of gold from Asia to Britain
3. when China used its sovereign right to ban this barbaric trade, Britain went to war on China in the name of "Free Trade", then bailed out the East India Company by conquering India as well and establishing the financial basis for the Pax Britannica and the Golden Age of Laissez-Faire capitalism.
And Americans were making money in that racket as well.
So China has a strong argument that it is better to be the hammer than the anvil, one that does not go in the other direction.
Did any pollster ask these Israelis if they DISAPPROVE of South Africa's apartheid? It sounds as though many of them think their old Afrikaner allies were right - otherwise they'd be admitting that their own system deserves the same punishment from the world community.
Excuse me, that one was meant to be a reply to Kozmo above.
Israel IS a western nation, Mr. Bodden, that is the reason Arabs saw it as a colonialist plot to re-conquer them. However, after the western nations had no one to blame the devastation of WW2 and the anticolonial wars on but themselves, their attitudes about colonies, empires, and the right to war were forced to change. The two remaining exceptions, the ones currently guilty of most of the crimes you listed, are Israel, which claimed to be a victim of European chauvinism and thus avoided any examination of its own white racism, and the USA, which declared itself the empire that would always be different than the other empires.
Obviously, Norwegian, the goal is not to eliminate abortion, but to keep it criminalized as a boogeyman, a way to permanently smear the reputation of women and those who believe in equality as essential to humanity.
Why was alcohol made illegal? The politics of American bigotry against Catholics and Jews. Protestants turned against alcohol very conveniently when they were being flooded by these immigrants and needed to posture about having superior morality.
The proof of this? Only 4 years after alcohol, the "Catholic" drug, was relegalized after a catastrophic realignment of the American political system putting the immigrant party in charge of fixing the mess made by WASP greed, marijuana was outlawed. You know, the "black" drug.
Many laws exist not to eliminate behaviors, but to stigmatize them to signal the arrangement of the caste system. It's actually desirable that "those people" keep acting in an outlaw way, to strengthen the will of Good Americans to oppress and exploit them in every way.
Religions have agendas, just like everything else. In fact, I stopped believing in God because it became obvious that His followers' worldly agendas were all that mattered. What's your agenda in making women something less than fully free, and thus less than human?
1. In an unrestrained capitalism of ever-skyrocketing inequality, people demand some form of hierarchy or status to feel better about themselves at the expense of others. We really don't enjoy "meritocracy" unless we're the 1%. Yet we hate equality too. So all the old, possible forms of inequality are back on the table. Patriarchy, as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, ties many right-wing ideas together, but it certainly requires for women to be seen as "different" such that they can be discriminated against when useful to keep males from freaking out.
2. The capitalists need cheap labor to serve them, and more consumers to sell to. Babies also put pressure on parents to earn more money.
According to Andrew Bacevich, the Abrams/Colin Powell faction at the Pentagon restored the military after Vietnam by talking about narrow conditions for using the military, but spending like crazy on it, a pretty toy never to be used. In other words, they played on the public's fears of losing boys overseas while clinging to the imperial commitment. This faction fit well with the G. H. W. Bush presidency, and Clinton afterwards, despite the fall of the USSR. But then it got stuck when crazier right-wingers came along and argued that if we were going to spend that much, we might as well blow up countries and profit thereby. Evil as that sounds, it was a popular argument among ordinary folks here in Texas and likely many other states.
Thus the Powell faction got drummed out of the GOP and in effect became the permanent doctrine of the Democrats, and the Neocon faction became the permanent doctrine of the GOP. The trap is that the Powell doctrine rewards use of cheap new toys like drones as long as body bags are avoided, but the growing arrogance of the public, seeing it can crush other countries without paying in blood, not only leads to unlimited increases in high-tech spending, but paves the way for the Neocon riposte, that if we DO get a few of our boys killed the rewards will be vastly greater. Obama-Romney looks like another round of this game, and it can be played repeatedly until the country's economic base is fully ruined. Look at the long decline of other great empires to see how long this can continue.
Because if Egypt dropped the blockade, the Israel lobby would demand the US destroy the Egyptian economy in punishment.
When you use the term "uniquely moral" you are already far down the road to racism, sounding like known racist states like Imperial Japan, South Africa, and well, the United States of America. The illegal Occupation and settlements created the "threat" that Israel is responding to.
Many of the poorest countries of the world since World War II have had the highest rates of population growth. Plenty of children starved to death as part of that.
Was there any calorie level that you would mind being implemented other than that which destroys the Palestinian people? What excuse will you be offering for the next step towards ethnic cleansing, which you undoubtedly support? When does Israeli liebensraum ever become obscene for you?
The problem with the total-number statistics at your blog link is that whites outnumber blacks 5 to 1. Therefore, the abortion rate is still much higher among black women than whites.
However, even this higher rate has not prevented the black population from growing such that the ratio of whites to blacks has substantially declined. The Hispanic proportion is growing much faster. You are correct that it is in the interest of white conservatives to eliminate abortions among white women to preserve their voting base. One Red state after another will become minority-white before the nation as a while does around 2050.
But they dare not publicly state that they only want minorities to have abortions. They rely on churches that have to crusade against all abortions. This is why the Right is moving to the next phase. For the first time, Protestant conservatives are following Catholics in attacking the existence of contraception. Likely, abortion rates among whites are lower precisely because they had contraception available. Meanwhile, the white women whose behavior can be altered, the ones in churches, are now proclaiming a new movement called "Quiverful" (I'm not making this up) which demands that Good Christians (almost all white by their definition) have massive numbers of babies to overwhelm the evil global Islamic horde. I.E., children are arrows, mere weapons, and women's wombs are arsenals for a holy war. Of course, the only modern conflicts where troop ratios are really salient are elections, so this is not really about Moslems at all.
Sarah Palin is in fact a practicing Quiverful member.
Bill, the other Bill (?!) may be saying that these lies are part of a larger meme or ideology of how Americans are supposed to live. Sure, the original purpose of TV ads was to sell a particular company's product. But about 30 years ago a friend was telling me that studies showed, for instance, that McDonalds or Burger King ads did not primarily make people want to eat at McDonalds or Burger King, but instead to crave a hamburger. The sheer saturation of ads becomes a set of cultural imperatives. Thus all the car companies work together to convince Americans to buy vehicles they don't need with features they can't use. Perhaps they even collectively say that corporations are the source of all good, and that we must not criticize them. They are the pulpits teaching the religion of what Dick Cheney called the nonnegotiable American Way of Life.
Patriarchy has been a part of that paradigm since the start, tied to the fantasy that the Covenant between the Hebrew patriarchs (justifying their treatment of family and servants as slaves) and Jehovah had been transferred to Protestants and rebooted as their America. Excessive and grotesque consumption tied to pioneer/cowboy fantasies is now celebrated as part of evangelical faith via the Prayer of Jabez and the "claiming" of goods by the righteous.
The question is, which "commercials" in our relentless propaganda environment support this religion? You are saying the difference is that the SUV ad is not an outright lie, but once we claim everything that makes us feel good is protected religious speech, then we simply reject science and Walsh's words become as valid as the SUV ad.
Kind of ironic - the anti-Cole trolls come here to talk about how evil Moslems are because they want to ban the US hate video. But the trolls never specify that Pakistan is the only government that has called for that.
Then again, they also never mention that Saudi Arabia is the real locus of takfiri activity, as the home of its lavishly-subsidized Wahhabi clergy. Nor do these persons seem to have a problem with Pakistan's nukes and how the US looked the other way while they were being developed.
So what Moslems do they specifically have a problem with?
Whichever ones Israel and the GOP tell them are a problem this week.
Even antiwar leftists go along with that. Pakistan is a thousand times more militarily powerful than Libya right now. Yet the peaceniks line up with the anti-Obama right to obsess 24-7 about Libya - whose government is pro-US and far more secular than either nuke-armed Pakistan or autocratic Saudi Arabia. In fact, they seem to want the US to punish the rulers of Libya for having overthrown Gaddafi, yet want to reward the rulers of Pakistan by stopping the undoubtedly immoral drone strikes there. Hey, your boy Gaddafi sold out socialism - while Pakistan's army murdered their country's last socialist leader!
Of course, if the Palestinians were all packed into Jordan, they would then have to be denied any voice in government since they'd be the majority. If the Palestinians then tried to take over Jordan by force the way they tried in 1970, Rep. Waxman would be the first to scream that the US has to nuke the place to protect Israel. But in fact Israel would probably already be lining up a launch window for its own nukes.
There was no place the Palestinians could go where they wouldn't be a threat to Israel, because they would always keep alive the fact of what the Zionists did to the people they found in their way. If they were "absorbed" into neighboring Arab states, those states would "absorb" that fact as proof of an unending Israeli expansionist agenda. Which may well be true.
Yours is an excellent question, but the US has a rotten track record when it comes to choosing a pet country to rule the Middle East for us. Recall that our favorite in the '60s and much of the '70s was Iran. We loaded it up with our best weapons, even "peaceful" nuclear technology. Yet the Shah was one of the most aggressive members of OPEC in terms of gouging us for oil. You know what happened next.
The problem, I guess, is that there is no culture truly native to that region that has enough in common with our elites that they can really understand what they're dealing with. We gravitated inexorably to the white European/American culture recently implanted in that region by Jewish settlers who themselves were consciously replicating the ethnic cleansing agenda of our own settler forefathers, who in turn consciously replicated the violent acts of the ancient Jews in the Old Testament.
Terribly stupid things to base a blind alliance on, but we've been just as stupid in East Asia over the last 65 years. The Republic of Vietnam was a complete waste of our time, money and lives, again based on our inability to "understand the natives".
Swimmer is in touch with reality, RBTL. He admits that as an ordinary American, he is politically ignorant. Maybe he also feels that brushing up is difficult when the corporate media is completely in the bag for Israel and the Internet is full of competing ideologues who lie in their sleep.
I guess he's actually a lot sharper than ordinary Americans.
I think Mr. Goulka's reasons for leaving the Republican Party were very similar to my own, and I don't doubt that the old grievances that Northern Republicans had against big-city machines inform their attitudes today. However, I think there are larger, more evil forces at work in the modern, Southern Strategy GOP that have created a crusade to restore Jim Crow in full among the ideological pioneers of the party.
The history of the right-wing movement has been the mainstreaming of extremist ideas from the outlaw fringes of the Aryan Nation and The Order in the '80s, to the militias of the '90s, to the Tea Party of today. If you were reading publications like "Confederate Veteran" and hard-core gun nut mags in the '90s, these statements were quite up-front:
1. America is a republic, not a democracy
2. The 14th Amendment must be overturned
3. blacks, as "14th Amendment citizens", weren't real citizens at all, and only the states could make them so
Many, many other wacky ideas from those publications now spew from the mouths of elected GOP officials; militias, nullification, secession. Is it possible that this was all planned, and that the end game was always to neutralize the long-term decline of the white majority by the radical restoration of 19th century law?
In the eyes of Southerners who never accepted either the 13th and 14th Amendment or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, it is fraud for black votes to be counted at all. By definition Obama's victory was fraud. And it is all right to lie, threaten, intimidate, and even organize violence to overcome that.
Now there is a substantial belt of the non-Southern states that has fallen under the sway of institutions like Southern evangelism/dominionism. Those are the most right-wing states in the Union, since they get to worship the past without any of that annoying Jim Crow guilt - they have no blacks of their own to oppress.
It should go without saying that if in their hearts white conservatives think that blacks are to blame for all our country's problems, then stripping them of the vote is just the beginning of a monstrous system that we keep thinking is finally dead.
There is not a single democratically-elected government in the Arab world that the Republicans approve of. There is not a single Arab population whom Republicans do not regard as an existential threat to Western civilization, unless they are thoroughly oppressed by some king, sheikh or prince.
Inescapable conclusion: all Arabs are evil enemies who must be kept under our totally subservient tyrants at all costs. Has anyone heard a single thing from conservatives that contradicts this? At all?
Yet they never have to state exactly how Romney will exercise a greater degree of hostility towards Arabs than Obama does.
You're right, and the ongoing de-feudalization of South America is the next iteration of the dismantling of US hegemony and the beginning of healing. The suffering caused by US Shock Doctrine economic coercion created an interstate resistance movement at the very moment that the US got tied down with its Middle Eastern ambitions. Now the Chinese are all over the place offering real investments, instead of plotting military coups like we do. South America is now one of the bright spots, or at least less dim spots, of a crippled global economy.
Unfortunately, Central America has further to go, and Mexico as always is so far from God, and so close to the United States of America narcotics market. Perhaps one day a modern, Social Democratic Latin America will be sucking immigration Southward, and our past crimes there will be forgiven.
(Parallel to this, the collapse of the American-trained Turkish Army regime and the economic rise of an assertive, independent Turkey where Islam coexists with law - Israel's worst nightmare.)
Did you bother to be outraged when Reagan got all those Marines killed in Beirut in '83 taking sides in a war we weren't supposed to be taking sides in? Or did you bother when he simply cut and run?
Either Romney is saying America should have kept Marxist terrorist Gadaffi (what the GOP had called him for decades) in power...
Or Romney is saying that we should keep ratcheting up the military budget to infinite levels to create an infinite state of deterrence. In other words, the solution was not to improve consular security, which is hardly an issue worth changing presidents over. His solution, implied by your Romney quotes from previous days, is that America must be feared at Machiavellian levels by everyone on earth, so that no person dares lift a gun or a hand against any lackey of our empire. Including protesting US crimes, or striking at US-owned factories, perhaps?
Wow, that's a big issue, all right. Obama can say he's spending more on state violence than all the other countries in the world put together, but we cowardly, greedy, self-centered Americans can always escalate our demands from simple national security, to our current global domination, to a fantasy future of divine omnipotence, where just looking at an American the wrong way can justify mass murder.
Unfortunately, by embracing drone strikes as a policy tool, Obama is feeding into this psychosis of omnipotence by making it seem less costly. He just wants to maintain the current hegemony as cheaply as possible - which is debatable, but is grounded in rational bureaucratic outlook. Romney is invoking the same spectre that Reagan did with Star Wars - which militarists dreamed of not only as a deterrent against Soviet ICBMs but as a deus ex Americana, establishing us as the Master Race with no consequences at all except cutting all our social programs and raising taxes on the middle class to pay for it.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the US has an eternal mandate to keep troops and installations in 130+ countries, maintain enough nuclear weapons to destroy the human race many times over, or slaughter anyone who is a threat to become a threat to become a threat to all of the above?
Amazing that Justice Scalia and the entire right side of the political spectrum have nothing to say about "original intent" here, isn't it? While Democrats who can properly say that the Constitution has had to evolve on both domestic and foreign policy should still be forced to explain why the evolution that was necessitated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union didn't evolve into anything very different after they disappeared and were replaced by guys hiding in caves. Re: John Quincy Adams and America as "dictatress of the world".
Would you consider Andrew Bacevich (US Army Ret.) to be sufficiently reality based? His arguments may be more damning than Engelhardt's, because as a real conservative he fears the same things that Eisenhower feared in 1960 - the destruction of the civilian laws, economy, and governmental legitimacy by the worship of the military and its solutions.
How about this for a backward 3rd-world republic; their first constitution was a disaster and had to be replaced; their 2nd president tried to create a police state that the future 3rd president plotted to overthrow; and their 3rd vice-president killed their secretary of the treasury in a duel and later was acquitted of treason.
Isn't Ron Paul against Glass-Steagall and all forms of regulation of financial markets, as well as the very idea that bubbles have always been a problem in capitalist systems?
Well, Romney does come from the industry that caused the global financial crash and got bailed out. How could he sleep at night if not for being in denial?
Or, it demonstrates that Obama actually recognizes the necessity of nuclear disarmament and the relative triviality of these other issues compared to thermonuclear holocaust. Which would come as a big surprise to all the peaceniks who continually complain about Obama being pro-war.
Did you have a problem with the US negotiating the SALT treaties with a USSR that was far and away our biggest enemy?
I can now report that Tesla Motors has reached a production rate of 100 cars per week, compared to maybe 30 cars a week in early August. Owner Elon Musk has claimed that he can break even at 160 (8000 per year). However, deliveries are trailing behind production, as the company tries to get cars shipped all over the country without a traditional dealer network. He might get two or three thousand shipped by New Year's, and start repaying his Federal loans next year. The company is prioritizing production of the most expensive variants of the Model S, up to $100,000 per car, so production of the first 10,000 cars on the waiting list represents nearly a billion-dollar gross, hard for investors to ignore, and if he can catch up to that waiting list then a lot of people who are sitting on the fence will place orders.
However, the cheaper, short-range versions of the S have still never been tested by outsiders. We don't know what their actual range will be. After that comes the challenge of building an SUV and a smaller sedan that most of us could imagine buying.
That's what I'm afraid of. If cowardly weapons like these sanctions can be used to impose a nuclear double-standard only on countries that the United States hates, then the United States has enslaved the world without having the courage to fight it in an honest battle. Iran's nuclear ambitions are treated differently than Pakistan's and Israel's. Why? Because the world relies on the CIA to tell them whom the proliferation threats are, and conveniently the US ignored and thus covered up Pakistan's and Israel's (and thus apartheid South Africa's) programs.
Thus the US gets to serve as detective, judge, and executioner at the trial of any country based entirely on its own biases. This makes international law into nothing more than arbitrary hegemony.
For this hegemony to be broken by US capitalist allies like South Korea is magnificent. South Korea certainly is opposed to proliferation given its own neighborhood, but it's saying the US can't be trusted to run the enforcement effort.
Well, until they're 48% of the people, then 49, then...
The GOP has moved inexorably to the next step of extremism, to start mainstreaming the idea that, yet again, minorities are not real Americans and must be prevented from voting in any way that won't provoke too much trouble. This was the trap the GOP doomed itself to when it sold it soul to the Southerners leaving the Democratic Party over the crushing of Jim Crow. This anti-democratic mania has progressed to the point that we have recently had a Tea Party congressman call for the end of general elections for senators, striking down a reform that dates all the way back to Andrew Jackson - ironically himself a Southerner.
The demographics of race will only drive this to further insanity, which Rick Perry tried to get ahead of with his half-assed insinuations that secession was an option. Be prepared.
What makes you a status-quo power is that, having won wars to get to the top, you want only those kind of wars to exist, forever. It should be taken as a given that anyone opposing them will try to evolve war in a new direction to reverse that. But to do that is to tell your citizens that you lied when you said they could win an empire and then maintain it with little or no effort.
It is clear now that many conservatives demand new enemies, and new attacks, regardless of any real danger. Thus the mature war economy produces these benefits:
1. permanent excuse to cut wages and social services
2. unbridled nationalist tribalism is easily narrowed to ethnic racism; the eternal struggle for purity is really not about foreign threats at all
3. the tribe that embraces the fake war is elevated above all others as being the only real Americans; we've seen this "real American" meme vastly increase in GOP propaganda since 2008
4. thus the military-industrial complex become permanently allied to Red State congressmen and their rural constituents, who devolve into dependency on a military welfare state since they have the worst schools and most backward views on science and technology
Does Romney's parasite 47% include the high-school dropouts in Kentucky resigned to toting rifles in Afghanistan, or the Halliburton contractors they'll become if they survive that, or the mean, xenophobic and usually Medicare-dependent veterans they'll become after that? Of course not. They are a new evolution of the American redneck into a petty knighthood. Halliburton or even working as prison guards will pay them many times what they're worth in peaceful pursuits, so they become big men in their villages, bullies and enforcers for their police departments and churches.
Isn't it obvious what this new henchman class and its masters require to bully us into submission? The wars overseas play the same role as the threat of slave rebellion and Indian resistance in the old South. Not just the fabrication of a threat, but the elevation of violent, stupid men onto a pedestal as the only American heroes, better than the rest of us, who are not good enough to deserve the right to vote against their agenda.
They have no sustainable doctrine except permanent escalation against the rest of the universe. If that leads to the bankruptcy of the country, they will simply be ordered to turn their weapons against us, and we will be the slaves. They are not unhappy contemplating this because they do not measure their well-being by objective measures, but by how high up the pecking order they are.
Hey, how about Jabotinsky's genocidal intention of eliminating the Palestinians - for which he used the USA's successful, unpunished elimination of the native Americans as the model?
But blacks had the basic right to retaliate against the terrorism inflicted on them. Abandoned by the US government in the Republican sellout of 1876, they were crushed by armed whites, though not without some of them using violence to defend their new liberties.
So are you saying that if the Palestinians simply surrendered their stolen land and accepted their status as an inferior race, they would get treated NO WORSE than blacks under Jim Crow? But American blacks hoped that one day the rest of the US would rescue them, while YOU intend for the Palestinians to remain disenfranchised forever since you don't recognize the right of other Arabs to help them.
Please, please show the guts to answer this, then, Helen. Were the people of South Africa wrong to use violence to successfully blackmail the (Israel-backed) apartheid regime to surrender to Nelson Mandela?
If I were a black person under Jim Crow I would have resorted to armed revolution rather than wait 90 years for worthless white liberals (probably like you) to temporarily restore civil rights - only to abandon them again to the march of Reaganism and its more extreme sequels. We haven't seen the end of civil war in this country.
There is a relationship between the declining white majority in America and the declining Jewish minority in Israel. Israel's 1967 victory won the love of American whites across a scary swath of the political spectrum at a time when it was losing in Vietnam and seemed to be losing control of its own streets to minorities.
With both our major parties infiltrated by the Lobby, we have no ideological line of defense against Israel's appropriation of our own fears of blacks and Latinos.
In the long run, an America with a mostly non-white electorate will simply not see the future apartheid Israel as anything to love. But aren't our own whites being inspired by Israel's "example" to find an infinitude of dirty tricks to disenfranchise and incarcerate minorities and cling to power just one more election? We might end up revisiting our own Jim Crow with the full support of the desperate Lobby, and both countries plunged into self-destruction hand-in-hand.
I wonder how many libertarians like Ryan supported the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia on the grounds that black people can NEVER govern themselves - 'cause they're not entrepreneurial!
What about Bush's failed coup against Venezuela, an act that would have completely derailed the progressive wave in South America? In fact, Obama did not launch the Honduras coup; he was cowardly in not fighting it harder and longer but we did not recognize the new president until he agreed to an election which he lost - to someone even further to the Right. The Honduran left had no resources or weapons to fight back, unlike their Venezuelan counterparts.
You people said the same things about Bush versus Gore. Boy, by 2008 no one was going to say that there was no difference between Bush and the Democrats.
And the GOP has moved far, far to the Right since Bush, embracing mandates of neo-Confederate, theocratic, and Ayn Rand craziness. Every time a Republican president wrecks the country, the far-right movement successfully sells the same lie to the GOP base: "He wasn't pure enough!"
Their attainment of purity is what you should fear, but many peaceniks hate the US government so much that neo-Confederate, theocratic and Ayn Rand craziness actually seems to attract them.
Although I agree with Mr. Bacevich on his argument, I wonder if many Moslems also believe that their way of life is under attack from American capitalism and its servant cultural imperialism; literally the selling of the American way of life as a replacement for existing community loyalties and norms. Is that not the reason for targeting the World Trade Center in conjuction with the Pentagon?
Of course this makes Boykin just as bad since the entire theocratic movement which he and the FRC labor for are also committed to the destruction of democratic government so that it may be replaced by oligarchic business power. Their churches are merely lifestyle corporations, selling mind control for scared, exhausted people. Once a Baptist stronghold, this implication that the white American's capitalism is divine proof of his supremacy and right to monopoly power even if he becomes a minority is increasingly endorsed by Pentecostals, Mormons, Jews and Catholics.
In truth, this is all a heresy, the worship of America, as birthed by whites, as God's earthly monopoly suzerain. Americanism is the religion which unites capitalists, militarists, libertarians, and racists in their goal to destroy Islam and assimilate Moslems into their global sweatshop vision. That is the religion that Moslems would do well to distinguish as a genuine enemy, but if even Democrats feel they must bomb Moslems to keep Americanist witchhunters from their electoral throats, how can people in Pakistan know any better?
And really, if Maher understands those things, why can he not see that those villians have a huge vested interest in scapegoating Moslems? It seems all his other problems with America in one way or another are caused by special interests that happen to require the war on Islam.
You may only be describing Western culture as understood by 50% of Americans. There's a whole other American out there where you can get beaten up for all kinds of things, and a lot of people whisper against the government only because it impedes them from going even further against dissidents.
The problem with that is that such bigotry against blacks and homosexuals was the norm among American Christians, and certainly Jews and agnostics too, for a long time. If we believe these things have changed, then it happened in only a few decades. Yet does that mean the tenets of the religion have changed?
You know that we are bombing Pakistan on a regular basis right now, don't you? If I were Pakistani I'd be ready to be violent about that.
If you had denounced Mahomet on a street corner in Karachi before decades of right-wing juntas, usually bankrolled by the USA and Saudi Arabia, indoctrinating their population on the need for holy war against India and the evils of secular socialism, you would not have to worry about being killed. Pakistan was re-engineered by right-wing extremists, backed for far too long by Washington, to convert it from blaming every problem on Western colonial capitalism to blaming every problem on insufficient piety.
You're looking at oil the way a sane person would. Research Dick Cheney's "Project for a New American Century." The goal was to overrun both Iraq and Iran, and then use their combined oil reserves to dictate to the world. This clearly could not have been done by restoring the alliance with Saddam Hussein.
Furthermore, the neocons still had to aggregate support for the invasion within the GOP itself, a GOP already being indoctrinated in Islamophobia by the Likud. 9/11 bloodlust meant that some Moslems were going to have to be slaughtered, more than Afghanistan then seemed to require. And slaughtering Arabs would be best of all.
For the people really in charge, it was about oil. But they needed to fill up their bandwagon with bigots, Christian expansionists, and, well, a lot of normal people who wanted to beat the Kunta Kinte out of Arabs.
Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" is at its best when it looks at the social engineering that corporations carried out to take control of our idea of food. He points out that under the old nuclear family model of his childhood, women had a lot of power over what their families ate. Everything was bought at markets, and what was bought at markets was regulated by the FDA. The foods themselves were ancient and well-recognized. When everyone started demanding "convenience" foods, not only did highly processed foods invade the home, but the convenience of eating out meant that poorly-regulated restaurant chains could sell food that was not what it seemed, engineered for maximum profitability and addictability.
Can this genie be put back into the bottle? In the special features of the movie's DVD, an interview with Eric Schlosser complimented Subway for selling more transparent food, and much of the dialogue about food among the affluent since then has pointed in that direction. But that does nothing about the cycle of degradation faced by the working class, pushed into two-income families with males unwilling to assume any homemaking duties, finding the path of least resistance is fast food (supermarkets hate inner cities), which then drains their disposable income so that they must hold onto those jobs, which themselves are increasingly only in the fast food industry.
My idea would be for inner-city neighborhoods to reorganize around community greenhouses, using modern aeroponic technology among other things. Food trucks staffed by student apprentices would carry those staples which can't be grown locally (grains & meat), and stop in these neighborhood centers to both sell items for home preparation and to combine with local crops to produce simple meals. Especially important: ice tea, not soda. The trade of goods and reduction of waste is what makes it work economically. If good food is closer and cheaper than bad food, it will win even if the bad food is engineered to be addictive.
I expect such measures would only be carried out in an all-out global food and energy emergency, which we're not ready to acknowledge yet.
Not as land, but the water between all the islands is the sovereign territory of the Filipino government, and the Filipino navy controls it. They own any oil in it, any fish in it, and any passage across it.
Now if the ocean levels rise, slowly drowning those islands, then that's similar to what the Israeli settlements are doing to the Palestinians.
Note that Ron Paul and his followers already consider Abraham Lincoln a "tyrant", and Glenn Beck has already drummed Theodore Roosevelt posthumously out of the GOP for his justifications for the permanent income tax in 1905.
What's amazing is how many Americans have accepted this Orwellian rewrite of American history, claiming to be "independents" and "libertarians".
I was a Republican 30 years ago, until I saw Reagan's movement for what it really was, a plan to radically redistribute wealth back to 19th century levels, with the inevitable result that political power is also radically redistributed back to 19th century levels of injustice.
I warned then that America's owners would cynically break the contract they'd agreed to under the New Deal to stave off revolution, and create a permanent Neo-Victorian society that would exterminate the very idea of alternatives.
Yet it has happened, just as I feared, because "liberals" and "libertarians" like yourself refused to acknowledge that going back to the past means, eventually, bringing it ALL back. The Good Old Days worked because racism was used to play ethnic groups off against each other to suppress wages, but with whites always less worse off so that they would honor robber baron J. P. Morgan's dictum, "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half."
That means, the vast increases in wages after the Depression worked as a bribe to get the white labor elite to accept cultural modernization, including racial equality. Thus to reverse those wages, the key to the entire right-wing project, it was necessary to restore the old caste system.
Similarly, reactionary religion was used to keep the poor under control, but the increase in government entitlements gave the poor leverage. So now the right is destroying government so that the poor must crawl to extremist churches for crumbs, just like in the old days.
With Scott Walker and Paul Ryan we now see from influential leaders an open call to eliminate all environmental law, minimum wages, rights to unionize, and the reappearance of the prison labor once used in the South to replace slavery.
The new ingredient is American global imperialism, far vaster than the activities in the Caribbean that General Smedley Butler admitted were invasions for corporations. Those were acceptable to the rich because they were cheap. Now they are a means to squeeze domestic spending out of existence because it can be presented as patriotic, and it rewards the arms suppliers and the sorts of right-wing citizens disproportionately willing to serve the war machine. But a Reagan staffer gave away the scam when he admitted in his memoirs that Reagan's big military increases and deficits were INTENDED to create a future budget crisis that would be used to restore the government of Reagan's senile dreams. How many people have died because of this project?
You're painting this conflict with a veneer of moral equivalency. But it's never been about anything less than bringing back an America ruled by landlords, church-based censorship boards, prison labor, Pinkerton mercenaries, and bankers instead of democratic government. Because that is required for their self-serving Classical Economics to work. The staggering increase in wealth among American elites, while the country has begun to fall apart, cannot possibly reflect some amazing increase in their "merit". It is a direct transfer of wealth through tax cuts, war spending, and financial deregulation and the resultant real estate and stock bubbles.
Since they accepted the end of oligarchy to stave off revolution, they deserve no less than to get the threat of that revolution back for this betrayal. If our ancestors only tolerated their bosses back then because they thought things would get better, then modern bosses can't conveniently come back and tell us, "Well, you have to give everything up now because the blacks and the foreigners have ruined everything and you have no right to any of the reforms responsible for past wage increases, but oh, we'll increase our own earnings tenfold." They are saying that there is no future we can build with our hard work that they can't take away.
That leaves us with the question, why does the United States of America exist? I swore, all those years ago, that I would rather see this country destroyed than live as a beast of burden in a restored, eternal 19th century, a Gucci in the face forever. Our ancestors would not, did not, put up with what is being done to us now. If we give in, then it means America is dead anyway, the Dark Ages restored, its people reduced to ignorant, superstitious peasants. What is there left to hope for under our current masters, who suffer not a single negative consequence for taking us so far down this road already?
This is the purest, most honest statement of the principles of the American Right that we have ever heard from a politician. Ironically, it's coming from a man who can't keep his statements straight for five minutes.
If the 47% are so bad and weak (and implicitly undesirables who should be eliminated from America), why did he come up with Romneycare, and why did he praise Israel's socialized medical system? Oh, because he was trying to impress the voters of Massachusetts and the fatcat contributors of Israel, respectively.
Mitt seems to be a salesman who tries to adapt to the audience immediately in front of him, so his remarks reflect that. But since this was an audience of those the most like him of any audience in this campaign, he might actually have been accurately reflecting their souls - and the paradigm they have been implementing for the last 30 years.
Oh, if only rich guys didn't have to leave their cushy little exclusive shindigs and actually get other kinds of people to vote for them! It would be so much better, hint, hint, if the vote were restricted to those who are Real Americans.
From about 1980 to 2010, the GOP played a game of pitting culturally-intolerant workers against "rich liberals" and the minorities whom they were supposedly selling them out to. But more and more, we are finally seeing the very extreme factions brought under the big tent, the ones who outright blame all of America's problems on democracy and equality, or at least the expectation of equality. More and more, the poor are openly condemned as saboteurs and traitors, waging a war against their Fatherland by voting for You-know-who.
30 years ago, I first encountered in a Houston bookstore a tract attacking progressive taxation on the grounds that the poor were intellectually inferior and by definition made bad economic decisions - therefore they should pay HIGHER taxes than the rich.
This was a fundamentalist Christian tract, by the way.
They couldn't openly proclaim such ideas in the GOP then. Extreme ideas have been carefully mainstreamed, each wave worst than the one before, while the accountants and lobbyists made regressive taxation an actual fact.
A young Herbert Hoover once declared, "If you haven't made a million dollars by the time you're 30, you're not much of a man." He got elected president despite that insult to the integrity and industry of the vast majority of Americans, only to preside over a much greater and more lethal insult.
Have we been regressed back to that point again?
It seems we will keep regressing back even further, until we can ask what Lincoln asked. Can a house stand half slave and half free? Half devoted to their local plantation oligarchs and ready to kill for the privilege of being second from the top in a caste system, and half ready to fight for the last shreds of their rational self-interest?
This is what Romney said, and you damn well know it:
"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
He said we're bad Americans, and bad people. He said that he will not be our President. He said that we're lazy welfare ni**ers. As if it weren't obvious to his followers that the "47 percent" includes almost all black and brown people, and oh, just that % of whites who don't act white enough.
It's as simple as that. Why should I vote for someone who openly declares himself my enemy?
Answer that. There is no other issue that matters in an election, but you're running away from that.
Do you think I'm a lazy worthless subhuman who doesn't deserve a voice in government, Mr. Murray? Do you have the honesty that even that least-honest of all politicians, Mitt Romney has, or are you too cowardly to have to fight up front for the ever-more-unequal oligarchy that you dream of?
Dude, the Chinese are the heirs of Mao, and they're running sweatshops to con money out of US corporations to restore their land to greatness. You really think anyone that cynical (and successful) won't try to profit from Moslems abroad while oppressing them at home?
Even the US is guilty of this. After all, who supported the Mujaheddin against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Who looked the other way while the Pakistani junta developed nuclear weapons? Who built Desert One to protect Saudi Arabia, the home of limitless financing for Wahhabi missionaries? Yet our Islamophobia never flagged where Israel was concerned.
But our corporations do not behave like our government and military, because they are fat, cowardly, and lazy and view the government as THEIR servant. Betraying America comes easily to them, but why do the hard work of betraying it in Moslem countries that DON'T have oil? Easier to rake it in by cutting deals in China.
Well, Obama didn't have the millions of dollars from American Motors either.
In fact, while once upon a time you could find liberal presidents from wealthy backgrounds like the Roosevelts and Kennedy, and conservative presidents from poor backgrounds like that bastard Nixon, it seems that the stereotypes are becoming reality, with Clinton and Obama coming from very unpromising backgrounds, and the GOP's top contenders devolving into a succession of Nth generation aristocrats - or the blatant pets of such aristocrats like the Kochs. It's not even enough to be rich; you have to be connected to many other rich people here and abroad (to Saudi Arabia by the Carlyle Group or to Israel by Adelson, for example).
This is a bad sign simply because it means the age of the public-spirited tycoon who has the connections to put together a functioning cabinet with at least the cooperation of the fatcats is coming to an end. The rich of America no longer want to compromise, negotiate, or reason. They do not want to share power; they can no longer imagine a limit on how much they deserve. They must replace Americans who feel differently with those who accept and enforce their proper place on the basis of natural, even God-made inequality.
In the Old Testament, God and his prophets repeatedly demand massacres of those who stand on land that God has designated for the Hebrews, and those who practice paganism. And where does the line "suffer not a witch to live" come from, huh?
The Ambassador's death was caused by an RPG, a Soviet weapon which countries like Gaddafy's Libya were well-supplied with. If only the US military-industrial complex still bothered to build weapons as simple, cheap and useful as the RPG!
If Israel and its US lackeys are that powerful, they would have come up with something much bigger and more specifically targeted against Iran. We haven't seen the October Surprise yet.
Why don't you google "Lavon Affair" and find out how Israel got a bad reputation for trying to trick America into blowing up Arabs via false-flag attacks?
The original justification for extreme inequality when America was founded was that a republic could only be governed by those with the "leisure time" and proper respect for prosperity and stability. Athens and Rome were used as exemplars. That meant, obviously, slaveowners.
The question is, why are Americans falling back into acceptance of this sort of thinking, which was largely swept away by the Jacksonian Democracy era 180 years ago?
A. Modern Americans are exposed to massive, overwhelming amounts of pro-rich, pro-greed propaganda, beyond Rockefeller's and Carnegie's wildest dreams. At least until Youtube and reality TV, everyone you saw on video was either a well-paid entertainer (of one sort or another) or a criminal/victim. All commercials for private companies are selling not just the ostensible goods, but the well-being that the goods, via the wonderful corporation, provide you. How can that not warp your mind?
B. A darker interpretation: now that whites can no longer openly proclaim white supremacy, they need a surrogate virtue that stereotypically favors whites over non-whites. While the pre-New Right south was always very pro-private property, the fusion of Southern "values" with libertarian extremism across the nation appears to me to be a way of saying that whites and their values are responsible for capitalism, the most wonderful and infallible thing ever intented, ergo (insert your favorite inequality here). Practical effect: the white bigot must look to the corporate CEO as his tribal leader, the only one with the power to protect his kind against the Other.
Romney, like Reagan and the Bushes before him, tries to ride this two-headed beast, both high priest and robber baron like the patriarchs of old.
How little it takes to drive white right-wing Christians into a frenzy! A frenzy of voting for maniacs like George W. Bush. With a twitch of their fingers they can put a dangerous man's finger on the nuclear button. No Moslem has that power. So Moslems do more dramatic things, which we condemn as barbarism. The far right in America can sublimate their violent natures by simply getting the government to do the violence for them, at home and abroad. They were more honest back in the old days when they went around with hoods and ropes and carried out direct action against those they wished to forever oppress.
A union is different when it consists of our brave armed centurions who exist to defend property. Just like religious liberty is different when it doesn't wear a turban, or freedom is different when you don't have a uterus, or invasion is different when the United States of America commits it.
Romney thought the cops understood they were in the "special" caste when he was attacking unions for the workers. You know, enforcer as opposed to enforcee.
A coupe of days after 9/11/2001, I sent an e-mail to all my friends. It was about the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and how it turned Great Britain into a doomed beast. At that moment Brtiain had the choice; it could walk away from the disaster caused by its greedy corporations and growing cultural imperialism, and allow India to be a collection of sovereign states with which it traded freely, or it could militarize its lucrative business in opium and other goods by conquering these states. Up to this point, the Empire consisted of lands taken from unrecognized nations by colonists, or of profitable ports seized from local rulers while leaving them with the rest of their kingdoms, or of lands won in war from other European empires. To conquer India meant to be responsible for it, to put white people on top of a vast sea of non-white people on the assumption of inherent superiority - and thus abandoning any principle that non-white states had any rights, or that non-whites had any rights to have states.
They took the wrong course, they were poisoned by the illusion of glory and the costs of responsibility, and 90 years later they lost India anyway.
I believe I mentioned at this point that I didn't think America's vengeance empire would last anything as long as Britain's. But even I am shocked at how fast America is wrecking the bases of its power.
The theory is well-established, but ignored by mainstream media. It's called "neoclassical economics", or "bankrupt the state until it cuts all money to the poor."
Its history as an imperial conspiracy by American government and industry against progressive democracies in the 3rd World is documented in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". Her contention is that it co-developed along with controversial theories of altering human behavior that the CIA investigated for use against captives. Then Milton Friedman's gang developed it as an argument for purging the "contagion" of egalitarian social beliefs in an entire country. So it was implemented by military coups at first. Then it was imposed by the World Bank and IMF via blackmailing elected governments in the 3rd World - exactly what is being done in Greece now.
The final parts of her book involve the final solution, to impose these policies in the 1st World. A Reagan administration official admitted in his memoirs that the Reagan tax cuts were intended to cause a future fiscal crisis for which destroying social programs would be the only available solution. Exactly what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin.
So the point of the tax cut is to destroy the goverment and restore it to its 19th century role, not to make it solvent. The evil assumption lurking behind this is that when the "right" Americans regain a monopoly of power, the economy will grow again as it did back when strikers could be butchered in the streets and slaves whipped in the fields and Indians dispossessed of their lands. The far greater economic growth of the big government era after 1932 is slandered and erased because too much of it went to the "bad" Americans.
By the way, Houston is having twice as many cases of some mosquito-borne illnesses this summer as it has ever had before in its history. It was the rain, the very rain that broke the worst drought in these parts since the 1950s.
Those are the choices for warmer climates; tropic or desert.
Because, Joe, if millions will die and billions have their lives ruined due to a man-made event, that implies that man can be sued for reparations. The Right endlessly battles against the idea that externalities of normal capitalist activity cause cancer, birth defects, etc because that means lawsuits and juries of normal, non-Citizens United-bought peers. That is Bad For Business. Tort reform simply means that the damage suffered by the poor is irrelevant compared to the profits of the rich. But AGW threatens the biggest reparations demands in history, demands by countries against countries. The sort of thing people go to war over.
Therefore, science must be destroyed as an authority in the eyes of the citizens of the one country that is the most responsible for spreading mass consumption as a way of life and causing the most burning of fossil fuels.
And sometimes the Earth has a mass extinction event, in which 90% of species are wiped out. Many other warming periods might have become as bad as those events if there had just been a little more CO2 or methane in the right place. What is your plan if this is one of those times?
I think that runaway short-term thinking was built into the nature of economics.
Perhaps it is inevitable that private property becomes an end-all as there is more of it, such that chasing money and goods replaces one's value in preserving society.
Or the greater rate of cultural change caused by freedom of information increasingly makes children alien even to their own parents, who then have less of an ego-stake in their children's unrecognizable future.
Or the problem is rooted in the very act of treating economic activity as something that can be calculated, analyzed, and organized. Once you can count it, why not count it faster?
One or more of these might be true, or it might be something else, but it's pervasive. Interest in the future as a utopia worth sacrificing for, whether you will live long enough to see it or not, has truly died out for most people I know. Why should anyone sacrifice for the well-being of their grandchildren when they cannot be bothered to keep their hands off of tasty food that is killing them right now, or loans to obtain pleasure-goods?
I imagine there must have been a time when the courts of the southern American colonies, later the southern United States, were known for their objectivity and independence. After all, John Marshall was a Virginian. But would you expect that a black man could get a fair trial on any issue in a Virginia court after Virginia's ruling elites, including the judges, came to believe that slavery and white supremacy was a matter of survival for Virginia? At one time, believe it or not, the black captives taken to Virginia were merely indentured servants, bound only for a set period as was English custom. But the laws were changed because the economic system demanded it.
Of course, after the successful slave revolt in Haiti, and especially the unsucessful slave revolt by Nat Turner, things got much more unfair. What kind of objective court system would let stand a law that forbade blacks to be taught how to read?
Perhaps South Africa, as a British dominion, once had fair courts too. But it certainly didn't under apartheid. Once whites convinced themselves that their system was necessary for survival, they redefined "fairness" to fit.
The Palestinians must either be broken or eliminated for Israel to survive as it has defined itself, a state where a Jew is more of a citizen than a Christian or Moslem. Is that not the supreme law in the minds of a nation's judges?
When Nixon failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
When Bush I failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
When Bush II failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
This is an old religious trick. If you double down on your fanaticism, God will like you again.
It's time we challenged them on the end game. Can they name one leader from American history who was conservative enough for them?
Glenn Beck denounced Teddy Roosevelt for instituting the income tax and daring argue that inequality was a threat to democracy. Since all Republican presidents since have failed to reverse his policies, they are all off the list.
Ron Paul denounced Lincoln as a tyrant and supported the South's right to secede. That disqualifies all Republican presidents period.
Jefferson Davis? He wouldn't have been conservative enough, because he didn't share Sarah Palin's New Apostolic Reformation belief in the dangers of witchcraft. He would have considered her ridiculously out of date. This also disqualifies all the Founding Fathers.
So confront Republicans. How far back do they want to go?
So when are the democracies of Europe going to kick us out of NATO for dragging them into stupid wars and forcing our double standards onto them? When are they going to stop trying to screw each other financially and unite against our madness? When will they become the true democratic power opposing the various creeping authoritarianisms of America, Russia and China?
As Benjamin Franklin said against the threat of another hegemon, "We must all hang together, or all hang seperately."
This neo-Victorian model will not work unless you bring back most of the evils of the past. I strongly suspect that if America's workers had not been (intentionally) divided by racism in past centuries, our bosses would have faced a tougher labor movement, and our current labor practices would be much closer to western Europe. So they'll have to bring that back. Once you've done that, it's easier to make the case for enslaving foreign lands for cheap resources. So we won't be going back to isolationist 19th Century America, but to imperialist 19th Century Britain.
We'll also need to bring back severe punishments for debtors. And use convicts for really cheap labor. Right-wing operatives have already laid the groundwork for this. After that, indentured servitude will be needed for the debtors who weren't deterred by prison.
In the final stage, we will make debt inheritable again, so that most citizens will pass their serfdom on to their children. Then the pretense of capitalism will be replaced by the reality of aristocratic rule, the most durable form of oppression in human history.
It will keep getting worse as long as the bastards know we are too cowardly and covetous to risk what we have to fight them.
Since the GOP now loudly proclaims that FDR was a Marxist tyrant (with LBJ presumably being worse), and Ron Paul even calls Lincoln a tyrant, how is the GOP a solution to the problem of not getting progressive legislation passed? You're going to vote Republican over this?
Actually, I think the hypocrisy is in the Republicans continually saying they are for "less government" period, and then supporting Guantanamo, which is certainly a form of government encroachment that happens not to ever inconvenience any right-wing Christian terrorists.
Why don't they just say they're in favor of utter whorehouse license for white male Christian businessmen, and utter tyranny for anyone who wants anything different from them, because "God" or "the Invisible Hand" or some such crap prefers the former and has granted supernatural favors for such societies since 1492?
Then why does the Republican Congress keep increasing our military spending and cutting taxes on the rich?
A Reagan administration official admitted in his biography that Reagan intentionally cut taxes and raised the military budget hoping to cause a future fiscal crisis that would lead to the destruction of social spending. This was a manufactured crisis, 30 years in the making. They would start a war just for the opportunity to cut social spending, because they believe making life worse for their enemies will bring back the Good Old Days.
The culture wars and the class war have the same hidden premise:
White male Christian entrepreneurs are a Master Race and will save us if we give up all power to them.
The different right-wing factions simply disguise this in different terminology. You can see the power of such a simple premise; it allows the holder of these views to claim that all "good" people will be saved, while in his greedy heart he expects only people like himself to make it. It is resistant to real economic statistics, because desperate people don't ruminate over the difference in well-being of the average American before and after the 1930s. It is vague about what is being "saved", so it can mean economic, moral, military or religious salvation, and jump around when in danger of refutation.
The way to get the bastards is to force them over and over to defend the past which is their shared touchstone. Most Americans are ill-educated about how horrible life was for most of our forefathers, and how the rich could send private mercenaries, bought-out state militias, or the KKK to crush their resistance. The reason they lost that power is the rise of the very institutions that the GOP wants to eliminate.
One of the last things Hunter Thompson wrote before he died was about Karl Rove. "Of course political strategists have studied the methods of the Third Reich. They worked, for a while."
"For a while" is all the justification you need now.
From reading far-right blatherings in places like gun magazines - which are not publicized as much as the ravings of Limbaugh, et al, my conclusion is that the base believes there are a large number of Americans who are subhuman and not deserving of the vote. If they could only have their vote taken away, they could be stopped from ruining the country. But these subhumans might take up arms and the Good Americans deserve not to have their well-deserved goodies damaged in the fighting, much less risk losing. So it's noble to lie and cheat until they have accumulated a monopoly on power and then can forcibly return the Constitution to its natural, pre-1860 state. Forever.
Few of these maniacs have any outline on how the economy would work at that point. Since the further into the process you prophecy, the more of an extremist you are, the only discussion of life after this Rapture comes from folks like R. J. Rushdoony, who clearly did not give a damn if the economy was reduced back to subsistence agriculture. The corporate capitalists who have helped this movement along (by owning those gun magazines, etc) do not talk about anything except infinite growth, an ever-larger Dow Index, etc., which is absurd since growth itself destabilizes and transforms social orders. The contradiction between those who want a caste system and those who want infinite growth can't be resolved logically, as if that ever stopped them.
What home guard? Sane people vote to make things "okay" so they can return to their apolitical lives. Fanatics are at it 24/7. And to admit that our richest and our most patriotic are wrong and evil is to admit that there is something wrong with the very nature of our country, which weakens our own will to fight for it. Thus the hapless, compromising liberals who can navigate the system into office.
Prosperity among the masses began to push the disease into dormancy, first in the industrialized North, then weakening the violent resistance in the South to integration.
But the rich got sick of watching us inferiors live too well, and realized they could blame the victim all the way back to levels of economic inequality last seen in the 1920s - a period which Prof. Steven Mintz called the Golden Age of American Racism.
This is logical behavior for them. A society consisting of a feudal elite and a class of henchmen presiding over misery and horror has been the normal model for humans since the invention of private property.
What makes the model fail is the success of a country devoted to something better, forcing its reactionary competitors to reform to keep up. Where is this country now when we need it so desperately?
Ironically, libertarians Ron and Rand Paul don't believe in abortion rights either. They simply want the right to be taken away by right-wing state legislatures. You know, the same ones that have always tried to take away voting rights.
But Paul Ryan is the perfect Paul for the GOP; a fanatic who consistently defines liberty only as those things white male property owners want to do, and everything else as mortal Catholic sin. We didn't need Big Government in the 13th Century; the Pope and the barons did our thinking for us.
They haven't forgotten about war. Their problem is that they make a reactionary appeal to a past when whites ruled supreme, both at home and abroad. That meant (a) no government at home to interfere with racist traditions, and (b) aggressive imperialism abroad against non-white nations lacking the technology to resist.
Well, the libertarians may pretend part (b) didn't exist, but the rednecks are still wired the same - and so are the capitalists that the Pauls tell us are the sole source of good in the world. Ron's anti-war messages are simply ignored by cognitive dissonance, like the Pope's.
It's not cheap and plentiful. Iran's oil production has peaked. It's mostly downhill from here. It's Iran's only meaningful export and the rest of the economy is in bad shape. So Iran should burn as little as possible to have more to export. Note that the Shah of Iran received a nuclear reactor from America's "Atoms for Peace" program, while he plotted to massively increase the price of oil.
Americans have a lot of misconceptions of how oil economics work. We should pray that those who have oil export as much of it as possible, yet they are rapidly increasing their own consumption.
"According to Murphy and Talley, Oklahoma Tea Party leaders are so "frustrated by recent political setbacks" that they have been talking with state legislators about the possibility of creating "a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty."
Here's the key section:
"Another Tea Party leader, J.W. Berry of the Tulsa-based OKforTea, helped initiatite the discussion through his newsletter under the subject "Buy more guns, more bullets."
"It's not a far-right crazy plan or anything like that," Berry said. "This would be done with the full cooperation of the state Legislature."
Think Progress reported that Berry "has posted rants against President Obama: the `Muslim President' -- a `reincarnation of Pol Pot' who is trying imprison Americans for resisting health reform. One ominous posting from Berry says that his militia should `launch a thousand guerrilla attacks on the plans that these people have to ruin us and our country.'"
In addition, Think Progress pointed out, "Berry frequently cites conservative news outlets like CNS [formerly the Media Research Center's Conservative News Service which now calls itself the Cybercasat News Service] and notes that he draws inspiration from the white supremacist thriller "The Turner Diaries" [the William Pierce-authored novel that inspired Tim McVeigh]. Despite his extremism, Berry has met with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and other members of the Oklahoma Republican delegation, and counts them as `rock solid.'"
The Turner Diaries is a racist manifesto. Simple as that. It calls for genocide. The militia movement of the '90s also got the ball rolling on repealing the 13th Amendment, so that state legislatures would have the power to take the right to vote away from minorities.
In other words, back to 1860 and Dred Scott.
As the article points out, no one in the Tea Party movement has opposed or denounced any of this.
Nor have any denounced Todd Akin and his no-abortion-for-rape crusade. Liberty for us Real Americans, slavery for the rest of you.
When Mitt Romney is cheered by your beloved working-class conservatives for saying, NOT that Obama wasn't born in the US, but that the only reason Obama's birthplace is questioned is that black liberals like him aren't Real Americans, I see no proof that they're any different than their lynch-mob ancestors. They just want Big Government out of the way so they can restore people like me to our "proper place" at gunpoint.
Hitler built his party on the votes of the "forgotten man", with strident nostalgia for a mythical past, worship of war, and endless blaming of minorities for getting in the way of "good Germans". The rich loved his anti-Communism, and many of them were helping him (see the story of George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush and his connections with Nazi banking in the 1930s).
If you want to hide like a coward behind Godwin's Law, then how about the Nationalist Party takeover of South Africa in 1948, where the English elite was willing to allow blacks the vote, but the Afrikaner middle class rose up as one to impose apartheid? Can you tell me the difference between Tea Party conservatism and South African conservatism? Because Ronald Reagan had no problem with the latter.
Ryan is worse than a teabagger. He is a Pinochetian fascist, whose ideal government performs no function but favoring the rich and persecuting women and minorities. Which would be just like a teabagger, except that he surely understands that the teabaggers will end up in the same debt serfdom as the people they hate, instead of the old-timey racial caste system they pine for. They want a police state run by the 20% of "real Americans", he wants a corporate tyranny run by the 1%.
The point is, each contract is now interim, in effect made personally with the current prime minister and lasting only as long as he does.
American giants and their shareholders don't like to operate this way. They have only gone at half-speed in Iraq. Iran, China and perhaps Russia will go full speed and take what they can get. Iran has the most connections with the most factions in both Arab and Kurdish Iraq, so it can make the largest commitments.
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Nixon eventually betrayed everyone on all sides on the Vietnam War. He probably secretly promised Thieu unending support in exchange for sabotaging LBJ's peace talks when Nixon was running for election. He betrayed Thieu in '73. He promised liberal Republicans like Mark Hatfield that he would end the war faster than he really intended to. He betrayed his far-right base by cutting deals with Moscow and Beijing to cover his retreat.
So what we know Nixon was good at was betrayal, strategically planned and premeditated.
What, and you think if Obama wins with a minority of the popular vote, the GOP will be as wimpy about it as the Democrats were after 2000? They will go into overdrive rallying their troops to violate federal law on the grounds that the president didn't really win the election - despite having said the opposite in 2000.
So get in a voting line now and have a chance of making a difference.
Or wait to get in a protest march once our bombers are on the way to annihilate Iran and it will make no difference, like in 2003.
Whether the Republicans are "against" America depends on how you define America. Which is something we all need to be debating each other about right now. Are we sincere when we say America is ALL of its people, or does our religion and economic theology rest on elitist foundations that applaud the sacrifice of servants for the benefit of masters?
I've watched, over the last 30 years, the reprehensible elitism of libertarianism grow to respectibility, indoctrinating hatred and contempt for the "non-entrepreneurial", and slowly shedding its cover story of merely wanting equality of opportunity via the infallible and unbiased free market. In the last 4 years, this reveal has accelerated. For Romney to be able to get away with saying that 47% of the population are parasites because they vote Democratic means that an awful lot of the rest of the population felt that way all along.
I think that the evil secret of America is that its white culture was always that of a conquering tribe, viewing blacks and immigrants and even employees no differently than the slaves of the Hebrews were regarded in the Old Testament. We thought this culture was being reformed the last 100 years or so, but we merely saw the dilution of that culture. Its revival means all the old abuses are coming back. The well-being of America is now openly proclaimed to be only trickle-down of the victory of the patriarchs of Wall Street, and none of us must dare dissent.
But DJ, if Democrats were in the opposition and leaked about a criminal operation by a GOP president, the Democrats would go to prison. It never happens when the GOP sabotages Democratic presidents:
1968: LBJ is working out terms for an end to the Vietnam War, but candidate and private citizen Nixon apparently has far-right groupie Anna Chennault (wife of CIA asset Gen. Chennault) promise South Vietnamese president Thieu that if he stonewalls the negotiations, Nixon will give him what he wants after thus winning the election. Far-right fascist J. Edgar Hoover is supposed to investigate, but of course he wants Nixon to win and delays his findings. As a result, tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese die only for Nixon to betray Thieu in '73 and agree to the same terms LBJ would have accepted. (You've probably heard rumors of Reagan making similar promises to Khomeini during the hostage negotiations in '80.)
This is not a bug in Republican operations, it's a feature. It means: we Republicans are the only real Americans and our monopoly on power is thus the only patriotism. Doesn't this worry you?
International law does not say that even getting bombed day after day gives a country the right to steal another people's land for profit. It says the opposite. If your country occupies my country and starts bulldozing my people's farms to build colonies for immigrants you brought in for precisely that purpose, I will damn well bomb you until hell freezes over. You should feel the same way about me. International law understands that war can never end as long as occupation is profitable.
To All of the Above:
You're right that we can't afford anything drastic.
But if we can't afford it, it's because we created this economy driven by short-term greed, no savings, no R&D money, no infrastructure repairs, and a dogma that we can use military dominance to get foreigners to do our dirty work for us.
If we had any honor left, we'd admit that we are willingly sacrificing some number of our fellow citizens to climate disasters. That we've put a price tag on each others' heads out of convenience, and now the convenience has been figured into the value of everything such that we can't give it up.
I take a different position from Bill and Joe. America has ALWAYS been involved in assassination campaigns since World War II. We used the CIA to create several governments from scratch, and those weren't nice governments. Operation Phoenix in Vietnam led to the assassinations of tens of thousands, but in such a corrupt country, (a) was the Southern army really doing all the killings or were Americans doing all the tough jobs, and (b) were the targets really terrorists, or just any young men who correctly refused to accept the legitimacy of the Saigon regime and genuinely wanted to improve their country?
How large a difference is there between an American (or president-directed robot) killing a dissident and the US egging on and paying generals to overthrow their governments and kill hundreds of thousands of its supporters? We have done this many times. We've even let these monsters (from Taiwan and Chile) kill people on US soil. Like Strangers on a Train, it was only a matter of time before we would have exchanged targets, and foreign killers would eliminate US dissidents with plausible deniability.
The problem is, what are the president's powers during wartime when wars are no longer formally declared, and thus permanent? If there are no fronts, no battlefields, and no decisive battles, I contend that the cost to our military in limiting its traditional free-fire mentality is less than the cost to us of having it in our streets killing anyone accused of being an enemy based on Congressional authorizations written by paranoid bigots.
Why? Because when war is this amorphous the adage "For want of a nail the war was lost" is obsolete and evil. The Army is not going to "lose" the war this way any more than it is going to "win" the war because it gets to bomb wedding parties. You cannot say that every local colonial war (which is what we're really fighting) has unlimited boundaries that places the entire planet under battlefield rules as long as a single armed person has "enemy" beliefs.
If you can justify that, then declare the damn war and tax the hell out of the rich to pay for it. Oh, but we're not allowed to do that, are we?
If one believes his fitness to monopolize power is so absolute and the need so compelling, why sweat a few lies or political prisoners? A person who entirely lives for the sake of being on top, of ruling and bullying and commoditizing others, and comes from the ethnicity and religion that has always played that role in his society might say or do anything to stay on top.
They haven't been punished in any way for this behavior. The government can't do it unless we are willing to back it up by threatening to do something nastier if democracy is discarded. Recall 1876 - the public was tired of fighting for civil rights, so the Constitution was simply no longer enforced in the South.
Don't forget GOP attempts to destroy agencies involved in meteorological and oceanographic research.
They only consider city-dwellers to be Americans when they're being attacked by enemy people, not destabilized nature. Compare the response to 9/11.
Why is this? Humans can only focus on an enemy that has a face, but then it dehumanizes that face. Is it because we believe human threats can be bombed out of existence while nature can't? Is it because the act of war glorifies persons and characteristics we find desirable, but the act of ecological management doesn't?
One day, if we are unfortunate, our own Air Force will be sent by a future far-right regime to bomb our cities to punish them for their liberalism. How will various types of Americans will react then? We need to consider that now.
Romney seems ready to declare a jihad to destroy Tesla, a company that is proving that electric vehicles need only economies of scale to become competitive with more and more classes of gasoline cars.
The purpose of subsidies for electric cars and alternative energy (as opposed to those for gas and oil) is to give the technology a chance to improve via real-world experience, and show the citizens that alternatives are possible. This is seen by the Far Right as a threat to the American way of life, whether government-subsidized or not.
We are not doing enough, but the GOP is demanding to do far worse. It has no choice but to force-boom the economy to hide the failure of trickle-down economics.
Wait 'til the Pentagon's robot learns how to dodge Constitutional obstacles.
I've spent a lot of time trying to nail down exactly how the Dark Ages functioned. I think that an important fact about it is that it made the leading families of the realm BOTH the owners of the commanding heights of the economy (big estates) and the only persons who could fill important positions in government. This was true in all aristocratic systems, but it is only de facto true in modern poor capitalist countries, because unequal wealth still directly buys control of government instead of it being converted to the legal status of hereditary office.
In all of these societies, you have to put quotation marks around words like "government", "business", or "size", because the aristocracy controls all others by both public and private institutions. Add in the fact of the Catholic Church being a primary landowner in many of these societies, and the cross-pollination between the aristocracy and clergy, and the former's financing of the latter, and you have the conservative dream of small government: the sovereign is merely first among the owning class, who "limit" his power so as to preserve their own depraved mini-tyrannies over the masses assuaged by a complicit religion applying token charity.
So these arrangements are now being updated for America, but we don't know the details, or whether our owners even have the slightest comprehension of the forces they are unleashing. I agree, though, that at the end of it we will have a Dark Age.
Change really happens when people have been ruined and will risk their lives to try something different, or their country has been defeated by war or by the faster economic progress of its rivals. The elites must self-destruct, and not be replaced by fascist demagogues.
The capitalists were very smart to escalate their activities from country-raping to planet-raping, as no country wants to be blacklisted by the capitalists by opposing harm that will be visited on them no matter what. All the countries will be ruined by climate change together, so none can be the environmental hero that leads the others to salvation.
After the catastrophes have lead to megadeath, the corporations need only use their wealth, all that still exists on earth, to build new kingdoms into which they will let in those survivors who will pledge undying allegiance and the rejection of all "unproductive" rights. It's a little bit like what the landlords did when Rome fell, converting themselves into feudal nobility amid a mass dieoff.
Are the rich now that evil? Under the circumstances, the burden of proof is on them to pay for a better alternative out of their own pockets.
But we did it to China too. In fact, what Britain did to China was Christian capitalist hypocrisy at its most morally bankrupt:
1. a British corporation stole the valuable parts of India from its own rulers
2. it then grew vast amounts of opium there and exported it to China, where wealthy families were ruined by their expensive addictions, transferring vast amounts of gold from Asia to Britain
3. when China used its sovereign right to ban this barbaric trade, Britain went to war on China in the name of "Free Trade", then bailed out the East India Company by conquering India as well and establishing the financial basis for the Pax Britannica and the Golden Age of Laissez-Faire capitalism.
And Americans were making money in that racket as well.
So China has a strong argument that it is better to be the hammer than the anvil, one that does not go in the other direction.
Did any pollster ask these Israelis if they DISAPPROVE of South Africa's apartheid? It sounds as though many of them think their old Afrikaner allies were right - otherwise they'd be admitting that their own system deserves the same punishment from the world community.
Excuse me, that one was meant to be a reply to Kozmo above.
Israel IS a western nation, Mr. Bodden, that is the reason Arabs saw it as a colonialist plot to re-conquer them. However, after the western nations had no one to blame the devastation of WW2 and the anticolonial wars on but themselves, their attitudes about colonies, empires, and the right to war were forced to change. The two remaining exceptions, the ones currently guilty of most of the crimes you listed, are Israel, which claimed to be a victim of European chauvinism and thus avoided any examination of its own white racism, and the USA, which declared itself the empire that would always be different than the other empires.
The more crowded the lifeboat gets, the more I want to push someone else out.
Obviously, Norwegian, the goal is not to eliminate abortion, but to keep it criminalized as a boogeyman, a way to permanently smear the reputation of women and those who believe in equality as essential to humanity.
Why was alcohol made illegal? The politics of American bigotry against Catholics and Jews. Protestants turned against alcohol very conveniently when they were being flooded by these immigrants and needed to posture about having superior morality.
The proof of this? Only 4 years after alcohol, the "Catholic" drug, was relegalized after a catastrophic realignment of the American political system putting the immigrant party in charge of fixing the mess made by WASP greed, marijuana was outlawed. You know, the "black" drug.
Many laws exist not to eliminate behaviors, but to stigmatize them to signal the arrangement of the caste system. It's actually desirable that "those people" keep acting in an outlaw way, to strengthen the will of Good Americans to oppress and exploit them in every way.
Religions have agendas, just like everything else. In fact, I stopped believing in God because it became obvious that His followers' worldly agendas were all that mattered. What's your agenda in making women something less than fully free, and thus less than human?
These are not unrelated issues.
1. In an unrestrained capitalism of ever-skyrocketing inequality, people demand some form of hierarchy or status to feel better about themselves at the expense of others. We really don't enjoy "meritocracy" unless we're the 1%. Yet we hate equality too. So all the old, possible forms of inequality are back on the table. Patriarchy, as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, ties many right-wing ideas together, but it certainly requires for women to be seen as "different" such that they can be discriminated against when useful to keep males from freaking out.
2. The capitalists need cheap labor to serve them, and more consumers to sell to. Babies also put pressure on parents to earn more money.
According to Andrew Bacevich, the Abrams/Colin Powell faction at the Pentagon restored the military after Vietnam by talking about narrow conditions for using the military, but spending like crazy on it, a pretty toy never to be used. In other words, they played on the public's fears of losing boys overseas while clinging to the imperial commitment. This faction fit well with the G. H. W. Bush presidency, and Clinton afterwards, despite the fall of the USSR. But then it got stuck when crazier right-wingers came along and argued that if we were going to spend that much, we might as well blow up countries and profit thereby. Evil as that sounds, it was a popular argument among ordinary folks here in Texas and likely many other states.
Thus the Powell faction got drummed out of the GOP and in effect became the permanent doctrine of the Democrats, and the Neocon faction became the permanent doctrine of the GOP. The trap is that the Powell doctrine rewards use of cheap new toys like drones as long as body bags are avoided, but the growing arrogance of the public, seeing it can crush other countries without paying in blood, not only leads to unlimited increases in high-tech spending, but paves the way for the Neocon riposte, that if we DO get a few of our boys killed the rewards will be vastly greater. Obama-Romney looks like another round of this game, and it can be played repeatedly until the country's economic base is fully ruined. Look at the long decline of other great empires to see how long this can continue.
Because if Egypt dropped the blockade, the Israel lobby would demand the US destroy the Egyptian economy in punishment.
When you use the term "uniquely moral" you are already far down the road to racism, sounding like known racist states like Imperial Japan, South Africa, and well, the United States of America. The illegal Occupation and settlements created the "threat" that Israel is responding to.
Many of the poorest countries of the world since World War II have had the highest rates of population growth. Plenty of children starved to death as part of that.
Was there any calorie level that you would mind being implemented other than that which destroys the Palestinian people? What excuse will you be offering for the next step towards ethnic cleansing, which you undoubtedly support? When does Israeli liebensraum ever become obscene for you?
The problem with the total-number statistics at your blog link is that whites outnumber blacks 5 to 1. Therefore, the abortion rate is still much higher among black women than whites.
However, even this higher rate has not prevented the black population from growing such that the ratio of whites to blacks has substantially declined. The Hispanic proportion is growing much faster. You are correct that it is in the interest of white conservatives to eliminate abortions among white women to preserve their voting base. One Red state after another will become minority-white before the nation as a while does around 2050.
But they dare not publicly state that they only want minorities to have abortions. They rely on churches that have to crusade against all abortions. This is why the Right is moving to the next phase. For the first time, Protestant conservatives are following Catholics in attacking the existence of contraception. Likely, abortion rates among whites are lower precisely because they had contraception available. Meanwhile, the white women whose behavior can be altered, the ones in churches, are now proclaiming a new movement called "Quiverful" (I'm not making this up) which demands that Good Christians (almost all white by their definition) have massive numbers of babies to overwhelm the evil global Islamic horde. I.E., children are arrows, mere weapons, and women's wombs are arsenals for a holy war. Of course, the only modern conflicts where troop ratios are really salient are elections, so this is not really about Moslems at all.
Sarah Palin is in fact a practicing Quiverful member.
Bill, the other Bill (?!) may be saying that these lies are part of a larger meme or ideology of how Americans are supposed to live. Sure, the original purpose of TV ads was to sell a particular company's product. But about 30 years ago a friend was telling me that studies showed, for instance, that McDonalds or Burger King ads did not primarily make people want to eat at McDonalds or Burger King, but instead to crave a hamburger. The sheer saturation of ads becomes a set of cultural imperatives. Thus all the car companies work together to convince Americans to buy vehicles they don't need with features they can't use. Perhaps they even collectively say that corporations are the source of all good, and that we must not criticize them. They are the pulpits teaching the religion of what Dick Cheney called the nonnegotiable American Way of Life.
Patriarchy has been a part of that paradigm since the start, tied to the fantasy that the Covenant between the Hebrew patriarchs (justifying their treatment of family and servants as slaves) and Jehovah had been transferred to Protestants and rebooted as their America. Excessive and grotesque consumption tied to pioneer/cowboy fantasies is now celebrated as part of evangelical faith via the Prayer of Jabez and the "claiming" of goods by the righteous.
The question is, which "commercials" in our relentless propaganda environment support this religion? You are saying the difference is that the SUV ad is not an outright lie, but once we claim everything that makes us feel good is protected religious speech, then we simply reject science and Walsh's words become as valid as the SUV ad.
Kind of ironic - the anti-Cole trolls come here to talk about how evil Moslems are because they want to ban the US hate video. But the trolls never specify that Pakistan is the only government that has called for that.
Then again, they also never mention that Saudi Arabia is the real locus of takfiri activity, as the home of its lavishly-subsidized Wahhabi clergy. Nor do these persons seem to have a problem with Pakistan's nukes and how the US looked the other way while they were being developed.
So what Moslems do they specifically have a problem with?
Whichever ones Israel and the GOP tell them are a problem this week.
Even antiwar leftists go along with that. Pakistan is a thousand times more militarily powerful than Libya right now. Yet the peaceniks line up with the anti-Obama right to obsess 24-7 about Libya - whose government is pro-US and far more secular than either nuke-armed Pakistan or autocratic Saudi Arabia. In fact, they seem to want the US to punish the rulers of Libya for having overthrown Gaddafi, yet want to reward the rulers of Pakistan by stopping the undoubtedly immoral drone strikes there. Hey, your boy Gaddafi sold out socialism - while Pakistan's army murdered their country's last socialist leader!
Of course, if the Palestinians were all packed into Jordan, they would then have to be denied any voice in government since they'd be the majority. If the Palestinians then tried to take over Jordan by force the way they tried in 1970, Rep. Waxman would be the first to scream that the US has to nuke the place to protect Israel. But in fact Israel would probably already be lining up a launch window for its own nukes.
There was no place the Palestinians could go where they wouldn't be a threat to Israel, because they would always keep alive the fact of what the Zionists did to the people they found in their way. If they were "absorbed" into neighboring Arab states, those states would "absorb" that fact as proof of an unending Israeli expansionist agenda. Which may well be true.
Yours is an excellent question, but the US has a rotten track record when it comes to choosing a pet country to rule the Middle East for us. Recall that our favorite in the '60s and much of the '70s was Iran. We loaded it up with our best weapons, even "peaceful" nuclear technology. Yet the Shah was one of the most aggressive members of OPEC in terms of gouging us for oil. You know what happened next.
The problem, I guess, is that there is no culture truly native to that region that has enough in common with our elites that they can really understand what they're dealing with. We gravitated inexorably to the white European/American culture recently implanted in that region by Jewish settlers who themselves were consciously replicating the ethnic cleansing agenda of our own settler forefathers, who in turn consciously replicated the violent acts of the ancient Jews in the Old Testament.
Terribly stupid things to base a blind alliance on, but we've been just as stupid in East Asia over the last 65 years. The Republic of Vietnam was a complete waste of our time, money and lives, again based on our inability to "understand the natives".
Swimmer is in touch with reality, RBTL. He admits that as an ordinary American, he is politically ignorant. Maybe he also feels that brushing up is difficult when the corporate media is completely in the bag for Israel and the Internet is full of competing ideologues who lie in their sleep.
I guess he's actually a lot sharper than ordinary Americans.
I think Mr. Goulka's reasons for leaving the Republican Party were very similar to my own, and I don't doubt that the old grievances that Northern Republicans had against big-city machines inform their attitudes today. However, I think there are larger, more evil forces at work in the modern, Southern Strategy GOP that have created a crusade to restore Jim Crow in full among the ideological pioneers of the party.
The history of the right-wing movement has been the mainstreaming of extremist ideas from the outlaw fringes of the Aryan Nation and The Order in the '80s, to the militias of the '90s, to the Tea Party of today. If you were reading publications like "Confederate Veteran" and hard-core gun nut mags in the '90s, these statements were quite up-front:
1. America is a republic, not a democracy
2. The 14th Amendment must be overturned
3. blacks, as "14th Amendment citizens", weren't real citizens at all, and only the states could make them so
Many, many other wacky ideas from those publications now spew from the mouths of elected GOP officials; militias, nullification, secession. Is it possible that this was all planned, and that the end game was always to neutralize the long-term decline of the white majority by the radical restoration of 19th century law?
In the eyes of Southerners who never accepted either the 13th and 14th Amendment or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, it is fraud for black votes to be counted at all. By definition Obama's victory was fraud. And it is all right to lie, threaten, intimidate, and even organize violence to overcome that.
Now there is a substantial belt of the non-Southern states that has fallen under the sway of institutions like Southern evangelism/dominionism. Those are the most right-wing states in the Union, since they get to worship the past without any of that annoying Jim Crow guilt - they have no blacks of their own to oppress.
It should go without saying that if in their hearts white conservatives think that blacks are to blame for all our country's problems, then stripping them of the vote is just the beginning of a monstrous system that we keep thinking is finally dead.
This just in:
There is not a single democratically-elected government in the Arab world that the Republicans approve of. There is not a single Arab population whom Republicans do not regard as an existential threat to Western civilization, unless they are thoroughly oppressed by some king, sheikh or prince.
Inescapable conclusion: all Arabs are evil enemies who must be kept under our totally subservient tyrants at all costs. Has anyone heard a single thing from conservatives that contradicts this? At all?
Yet they never have to state exactly how Romney will exercise a greater degree of hostility towards Arabs than Obama does.
You're right, and the ongoing de-feudalization of South America is the next iteration of the dismantling of US hegemony and the beginning of healing. The suffering caused by US Shock Doctrine economic coercion created an interstate resistance movement at the very moment that the US got tied down with its Middle Eastern ambitions. Now the Chinese are all over the place offering real investments, instead of plotting military coups like we do. South America is now one of the bright spots, or at least less dim spots, of a crippled global economy.
Unfortunately, Central America has further to go, and Mexico as always is so far from God, and so close to the United States of America narcotics market. Perhaps one day a modern, Social Democratic Latin America will be sucking immigration Southward, and our past crimes there will be forgiven.
(Parallel to this, the collapse of the American-trained Turkish Army regime and the economic rise of an assertive, independent Turkey where Islam coexists with law - Israel's worst nightmare.)
Did you bother to be outraged when Reagan got all those Marines killed in Beirut in '83 taking sides in a war we weren't supposed to be taking sides in? Or did you bother when he simply cut and run?
Either Romney is saying America should have kept Marxist terrorist Gadaffi (what the GOP had called him for decades) in power...
Or Romney is saying that we should keep ratcheting up the military budget to infinite levels to create an infinite state of deterrence. In other words, the solution was not to improve consular security, which is hardly an issue worth changing presidents over. His solution, implied by your Romney quotes from previous days, is that America must be feared at Machiavellian levels by everyone on earth, so that no person dares lift a gun or a hand against any lackey of our empire. Including protesting US crimes, or striking at US-owned factories, perhaps?
Wow, that's a big issue, all right. Obama can say he's spending more on state violence than all the other countries in the world put together, but we cowardly, greedy, self-centered Americans can always escalate our demands from simple national security, to our current global domination, to a fantasy future of divine omnipotence, where just looking at an American the wrong way can justify mass murder.
Unfortunately, by embracing drone strikes as a policy tool, Obama is feeding into this psychosis of omnipotence by making it seem less costly. He just wants to maintain the current hegemony as cheaply as possible - which is debatable, but is grounded in rational bureaucratic outlook. Romney is invoking the same spectre that Reagan did with Star Wars - which militarists dreamed of not only as a deterrent against Soviet ICBMs but as a deus ex Americana, establishing us as the Master Race with no consequences at all except cutting all our social programs and raising taxes on the middle class to pay for it.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the US has an eternal mandate to keep troops and installations in 130+ countries, maintain enough nuclear weapons to destroy the human race many times over, or slaughter anyone who is a threat to become a threat to become a threat to all of the above?
Amazing that Justice Scalia and the entire right side of the political spectrum have nothing to say about "original intent" here, isn't it? While Democrats who can properly say that the Constitution has had to evolve on both domestic and foreign policy should still be forced to explain why the evolution that was necessitated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union didn't evolve into anything very different after they disappeared and were replaced by guys hiding in caves. Re: John Quincy Adams and America as "dictatress of the world".
Would you consider Andrew Bacevich (US Army Ret.) to be sufficiently reality based? His arguments may be more damning than Engelhardt's, because as a real conservative he fears the same things that Eisenhower feared in 1960 - the destruction of the civilian laws, economy, and governmental legitimacy by the worship of the military and its solutions.
Hey DJ,
How about this for a backward 3rd-world republic; their first constitution was a disaster and had to be replaced; their 2nd president tried to create a police state that the future 3rd president plotted to overthrow; and their 3rd vice-president killed their secretary of the treasury in a duel and later was acquitted of treason.
Yes, it's the United States of America.
Isn't Ron Paul against Glass-Steagall and all forms of regulation of financial markets, as well as the very idea that bubbles have always been a problem in capitalist systems?
Well, Romney does come from the industry that caused the global financial crash and got bailed out. How could he sleep at night if not for being in denial?
Or, it demonstrates that Obama actually recognizes the necessity of nuclear disarmament and the relative triviality of these other issues compared to thermonuclear holocaust. Which would come as a big surprise to all the peaceniks who continually complain about Obama being pro-war.
Did you have a problem with the US negotiating the SALT treaties with a USSR that was far and away our biggest enemy?
I can now report that Tesla Motors has reached a production rate of 100 cars per week, compared to maybe 30 cars a week in early August. Owner Elon Musk has claimed that he can break even at 160 (8000 per year). However, deliveries are trailing behind production, as the company tries to get cars shipped all over the country without a traditional dealer network. He might get two or three thousand shipped by New Year's, and start repaying his Federal loans next year. The company is prioritizing production of the most expensive variants of the Model S, up to $100,000 per car, so production of the first 10,000 cars on the waiting list represents nearly a billion-dollar gross, hard for investors to ignore, and if he can catch up to that waiting list then a lot of people who are sitting on the fence will place orders.
However, the cheaper, short-range versions of the S have still never been tested by outsiders. We don't know what their actual range will be. After that comes the challenge of building an SUV and a smaller sedan that most of us could imagine buying.
That's what I'm afraid of. If cowardly weapons like these sanctions can be used to impose a nuclear double-standard only on countries that the United States hates, then the United States has enslaved the world without having the courage to fight it in an honest battle. Iran's nuclear ambitions are treated differently than Pakistan's and Israel's. Why? Because the world relies on the CIA to tell them whom the proliferation threats are, and conveniently the US ignored and thus covered up Pakistan's and Israel's (and thus apartheid South Africa's) programs.
Thus the US gets to serve as detective, judge, and executioner at the trial of any country based entirely on its own biases. This makes international law into nothing more than arbitrary hegemony.
For this hegemony to be broken by US capitalist allies like South Korea is magnificent. South Korea certainly is opposed to proliferation given its own neighborhood, but it's saying the US can't be trusted to run the enforcement effort.
Well, until they're 48% of the people, then 49, then...
The GOP has moved inexorably to the next step of extremism, to start mainstreaming the idea that, yet again, minorities are not real Americans and must be prevented from voting in any way that won't provoke too much trouble. This was the trap the GOP doomed itself to when it sold it soul to the Southerners leaving the Democratic Party over the crushing of Jim Crow. This anti-democratic mania has progressed to the point that we have recently had a Tea Party congressman call for the end of general elections for senators, striking down a reform that dates all the way back to Andrew Jackson - ironically himself a Southerner.
The demographics of race will only drive this to further insanity, which Rick Perry tried to get ahead of with his half-assed insinuations that secession was an option. Be prepared.
What makes you a status-quo power is that, having won wars to get to the top, you want only those kind of wars to exist, forever. It should be taken as a given that anyone opposing them will try to evolve war in a new direction to reverse that. But to do that is to tell your citizens that you lied when you said they could win an empire and then maintain it with little or no effort.
It is clear now that many conservatives demand new enemies, and new attacks, regardless of any real danger. Thus the mature war economy produces these benefits:
1. permanent excuse to cut wages and social services
2. unbridled nationalist tribalism is easily narrowed to ethnic racism; the eternal struggle for purity is really not about foreign threats at all
3. the tribe that embraces the fake war is elevated above all others as being the only real Americans; we've seen this "real American" meme vastly increase in GOP propaganda since 2008
4. thus the military-industrial complex become permanently allied to Red State congressmen and their rural constituents, who devolve into dependency on a military welfare state since they have the worst schools and most backward views on science and technology
Does Romney's parasite 47% include the high-school dropouts in Kentucky resigned to toting rifles in Afghanistan, or the Halliburton contractors they'll become if they survive that, or the mean, xenophobic and usually Medicare-dependent veterans they'll become after that? Of course not. They are a new evolution of the American redneck into a petty knighthood. Halliburton or even working as prison guards will pay them many times what they're worth in peaceful pursuits, so they become big men in their villages, bullies and enforcers for their police departments and churches.
Isn't it obvious what this new henchman class and its masters require to bully us into submission? The wars overseas play the same role as the threat of slave rebellion and Indian resistance in the old South. Not just the fabrication of a threat, but the elevation of violent, stupid men onto a pedestal as the only American heroes, better than the rest of us, who are not good enough to deserve the right to vote against their agenda.
They have no sustainable doctrine except permanent escalation against the rest of the universe. If that leads to the bankruptcy of the country, they will simply be ordered to turn their weapons against us, and we will be the slaves. They are not unhappy contemplating this because they do not measure their well-being by objective measures, but by how high up the pecking order they are.
Hey, how about Jabotinsky's genocidal intention of eliminating the Palestinians - for which he used the USA's successful, unpunished elimination of the native Americans as the model?
But blacks had the basic right to retaliate against the terrorism inflicted on them. Abandoned by the US government in the Republican sellout of 1876, they were crushed by armed whites, though not without some of them using violence to defend their new liberties.
So are you saying that if the Palestinians simply surrendered their stolen land and accepted their status as an inferior race, they would get treated NO WORSE than blacks under Jim Crow? But American blacks hoped that one day the rest of the US would rescue them, while YOU intend for the Palestinians to remain disenfranchised forever since you don't recognize the right of other Arabs to help them.
Please, please show the guts to answer this, then, Helen. Were the people of South Africa wrong to use violence to successfully blackmail the (Israel-backed) apartheid regime to surrender to Nelson Mandela?
If I were a black person under Jim Crow I would have resorted to armed revolution rather than wait 90 years for worthless white liberals (probably like you) to temporarily restore civil rights - only to abandon them again to the march of Reaganism and its more extreme sequels. We haven't seen the end of civil war in this country.
There is a relationship between the declining white majority in America and the declining Jewish minority in Israel. Israel's 1967 victory won the love of American whites across a scary swath of the political spectrum at a time when it was losing in Vietnam and seemed to be losing control of its own streets to minorities.
With both our major parties infiltrated by the Lobby, we have no ideological line of defense against Israel's appropriation of our own fears of blacks and Latinos.
In the long run, an America with a mostly non-white electorate will simply not see the future apartheid Israel as anything to love. But aren't our own whites being inspired by Israel's "example" to find an infinitude of dirty tricks to disenfranchise and incarcerate minorities and cling to power just one more election? We might end up revisiting our own Jim Crow with the full support of the desperate Lobby, and both countries plunged into self-destruction hand-in-hand.
I wonder how many libertarians like Ryan supported the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia on the grounds that black people can NEVER govern themselves - 'cause they're not entrepreneurial!
What about Bush's failed coup against Venezuela, an act that would have completely derailed the progressive wave in South America? In fact, Obama did not launch the Honduras coup; he was cowardly in not fighting it harder and longer but we did not recognize the new president until he agreed to an election which he lost - to someone even further to the Right. The Honduran left had no resources or weapons to fight back, unlike their Venezuelan counterparts.
You people said the same things about Bush versus Gore. Boy, by 2008 no one was going to say that there was no difference between Bush and the Democrats.
And the GOP has moved far, far to the Right since Bush, embracing mandates of neo-Confederate, theocratic, and Ayn Rand craziness. Every time a Republican president wrecks the country, the far-right movement successfully sells the same lie to the GOP base: "He wasn't pure enough!"
Their attainment of purity is what you should fear, but many peaceniks hate the US government so much that neo-Confederate, theocratic and Ayn Rand craziness actually seems to attract them.
Although I agree with Mr. Bacevich on his argument, I wonder if many Moslems also believe that their way of life is under attack from American capitalism and its servant cultural imperialism; literally the selling of the American way of life as a replacement for existing community loyalties and norms. Is that not the reason for targeting the World Trade Center in conjuction with the Pentagon?
Of course this makes Boykin just as bad since the entire theocratic movement which he and the FRC labor for are also committed to the destruction of democratic government so that it may be replaced by oligarchic business power. Their churches are merely lifestyle corporations, selling mind control for scared, exhausted people. Once a Baptist stronghold, this implication that the white American's capitalism is divine proof of his supremacy and right to monopoly power even if he becomes a minority is increasingly endorsed by Pentecostals, Mormons, Jews and Catholics.
In truth, this is all a heresy, the worship of America, as birthed by whites, as God's earthly monopoly suzerain. Americanism is the religion which unites capitalists, militarists, libertarians, and racists in their goal to destroy Islam and assimilate Moslems into their global sweatshop vision. That is the religion that Moslems would do well to distinguish as a genuine enemy, but if even Democrats feel they must bomb Moslems to keep Americanist witchhunters from their electoral throats, how can people in Pakistan know any better?
And really, if Maher understands those things, why can he not see that those villians have a huge vested interest in scapegoating Moslems? It seems all his other problems with America in one way or another are caused by special interests that happen to require the war on Islam.
You may only be describing Western culture as understood by 50% of Americans. There's a whole other American out there where you can get beaten up for all kinds of things, and a lot of people whisper against the government only because it impedes them from going even further against dissidents.
The problem with that is that such bigotry against blacks and homosexuals was the norm among American Christians, and certainly Jews and agnostics too, for a long time. If we believe these things have changed, then it happened in only a few decades. Yet does that mean the tenets of the religion have changed?
You know that we are bombing Pakistan on a regular basis right now, don't you? If I were Pakistani I'd be ready to be violent about that.
If you had denounced Mahomet on a street corner in Karachi before decades of right-wing juntas, usually bankrolled by the USA and Saudi Arabia, indoctrinating their population on the need for holy war against India and the evils of secular socialism, you would not have to worry about being killed. Pakistan was re-engineered by right-wing extremists, backed for far too long by Washington, to convert it from blaming every problem on Western colonial capitalism to blaming every problem on insufficient piety.
You're looking at oil the way a sane person would. Research Dick Cheney's "Project for a New American Century." The goal was to overrun both Iraq and Iran, and then use their combined oil reserves to dictate to the world. This clearly could not have been done by restoring the alliance with Saddam Hussein.
Furthermore, the neocons still had to aggregate support for the invasion within the GOP itself, a GOP already being indoctrinated in Islamophobia by the Likud. 9/11 bloodlust meant that some Moslems were going to have to be slaughtered, more than Afghanistan then seemed to require. And slaughtering Arabs would be best of all.
For the people really in charge, it was about oil. But they needed to fill up their bandwagon with bigots, Christian expansionists, and, well, a lot of normal people who wanted to beat the Kunta Kinte out of Arabs.
Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" is at its best when it looks at the social engineering that corporations carried out to take control of our idea of food. He points out that under the old nuclear family model of his childhood, women had a lot of power over what their families ate. Everything was bought at markets, and what was bought at markets was regulated by the FDA. The foods themselves were ancient and well-recognized. When everyone started demanding "convenience" foods, not only did highly processed foods invade the home, but the convenience of eating out meant that poorly-regulated restaurant chains could sell food that was not what it seemed, engineered for maximum profitability and addictability.
Can this genie be put back into the bottle? In the special features of the movie's DVD, an interview with Eric Schlosser complimented Subway for selling more transparent food, and much of the dialogue about food among the affluent since then has pointed in that direction. But that does nothing about the cycle of degradation faced by the working class, pushed into two-income families with males unwilling to assume any homemaking duties, finding the path of least resistance is fast food (supermarkets hate inner cities), which then drains their disposable income so that they must hold onto those jobs, which themselves are increasingly only in the fast food industry.
My idea would be for inner-city neighborhoods to reorganize around community greenhouses, using modern aeroponic technology among other things. Food trucks staffed by student apprentices would carry those staples which can't be grown locally (grains & meat), and stop in these neighborhood centers to both sell items for home preparation and to combine with local crops to produce simple meals. Especially important: ice tea, not soda. The trade of goods and reduction of waste is what makes it work economically. If good food is closer and cheaper than bad food, it will win even if the bad food is engineered to be addictive.
I expect such measures would only be carried out in an all-out global food and energy emergency, which we're not ready to acknowledge yet.
Not as land, but the water between all the islands is the sovereign territory of the Filipino government, and the Filipino navy controls it. They own any oil in it, any fish in it, and any passage across it.
Now if the ocean levels rise, slowly drowning those islands, then that's similar to what the Israeli settlements are doing to the Palestinians.
Note that Ron Paul and his followers already consider Abraham Lincoln a "tyrant", and Glenn Beck has already drummed Theodore Roosevelt posthumously out of the GOP for his justifications for the permanent income tax in 1905.
What's amazing is how many Americans have accepted this Orwellian rewrite of American history, claiming to be "independents" and "libertarians".
Answer: both.
I was a Republican 30 years ago, until I saw Reagan's movement for what it really was, a plan to radically redistribute wealth back to 19th century levels, with the inevitable result that political power is also radically redistributed back to 19th century levels of injustice.
I warned then that America's owners would cynically break the contract they'd agreed to under the New Deal to stave off revolution, and create a permanent Neo-Victorian society that would exterminate the very idea of alternatives.
Yet it has happened, just as I feared, because "liberals" and "libertarians" like yourself refused to acknowledge that going back to the past means, eventually, bringing it ALL back. The Good Old Days worked because racism was used to play ethnic groups off against each other to suppress wages, but with whites always less worse off so that they would honor robber baron J. P. Morgan's dictum, "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half."
That means, the vast increases in wages after the Depression worked as a bribe to get the white labor elite to accept cultural modernization, including racial equality. Thus to reverse those wages, the key to the entire right-wing project, it was necessary to restore the old caste system.
Similarly, reactionary religion was used to keep the poor under control, but the increase in government entitlements gave the poor leverage. So now the right is destroying government so that the poor must crawl to extremist churches for crumbs, just like in the old days.
With Scott Walker and Paul Ryan we now see from influential leaders an open call to eliminate all environmental law, minimum wages, rights to unionize, and the reappearance of the prison labor once used in the South to replace slavery.
The new ingredient is American global imperialism, far vaster than the activities in the Caribbean that General Smedley Butler admitted were invasions for corporations. Those were acceptable to the rich because they were cheap. Now they are a means to squeeze domestic spending out of existence because it can be presented as patriotic, and it rewards the arms suppliers and the sorts of right-wing citizens disproportionately willing to serve the war machine. But a Reagan staffer gave away the scam when he admitted in his memoirs that Reagan's big military increases and deficits were INTENDED to create a future budget crisis that would be used to restore the government of Reagan's senile dreams. How many people have died because of this project?
You're painting this conflict with a veneer of moral equivalency. But it's never been about anything less than bringing back an America ruled by landlords, church-based censorship boards, prison labor, Pinkerton mercenaries, and bankers instead of democratic government. Because that is required for their self-serving Classical Economics to work. The staggering increase in wealth among American elites, while the country has begun to fall apart, cannot possibly reflect some amazing increase in their "merit". It is a direct transfer of wealth through tax cuts, war spending, and financial deregulation and the resultant real estate and stock bubbles.
Since they accepted the end of oligarchy to stave off revolution, they deserve no less than to get the threat of that revolution back for this betrayal. If our ancestors only tolerated their bosses back then because they thought things would get better, then modern bosses can't conveniently come back and tell us, "Well, you have to give everything up now because the blacks and the foreigners have ruined everything and you have no right to any of the reforms responsible for past wage increases, but oh, we'll increase our own earnings tenfold." They are saying that there is no future we can build with our hard work that they can't take away.
That leaves us with the question, why does the United States of America exist? I swore, all those years ago, that I would rather see this country destroyed than live as a beast of burden in a restored, eternal 19th century, a Gucci in the face forever. Our ancestors would not, did not, put up with what is being done to us now. If we give in, then it means America is dead anyway, the Dark Ages restored, its people reduced to ignorant, superstitious peasants. What is there left to hope for under our current masters, who suffer not a single negative consequence for taking us so far down this road already?
This is the purest, most honest statement of the principles of the American Right that we have ever heard from a politician. Ironically, it's coming from a man who can't keep his statements straight for five minutes.
If the 47% are so bad and weak (and implicitly undesirables who should be eliminated from America), why did he come up with Romneycare, and why did he praise Israel's socialized medical system? Oh, because he was trying to impress the voters of Massachusetts and the fatcat contributors of Israel, respectively.
Mitt seems to be a salesman who tries to adapt to the audience immediately in front of him, so his remarks reflect that. But since this was an audience of those the most like him of any audience in this campaign, he might actually have been accurately reflecting their souls - and the paradigm they have been implementing for the last 30 years.
Oh, if only rich guys didn't have to leave their cushy little exclusive shindigs and actually get other kinds of people to vote for them! It would be so much better, hint, hint, if the vote were restricted to those who are Real Americans.
From about 1980 to 2010, the GOP played a game of pitting culturally-intolerant workers against "rich liberals" and the minorities whom they were supposedly selling them out to. But more and more, we are finally seeing the very extreme factions brought under the big tent, the ones who outright blame all of America's problems on democracy and equality, or at least the expectation of equality. More and more, the poor are openly condemned as saboteurs and traitors, waging a war against their Fatherland by voting for You-know-who.
30 years ago, I first encountered in a Houston bookstore a tract attacking progressive taxation on the grounds that the poor were intellectually inferior and by definition made bad economic decisions - therefore they should pay HIGHER taxes than the rich.
This was a fundamentalist Christian tract, by the way.
They couldn't openly proclaim such ideas in the GOP then. Extreme ideas have been carefully mainstreamed, each wave worst than the one before, while the accountants and lobbyists made regressive taxation an actual fact.
A young Herbert Hoover once declared, "If you haven't made a million dollars by the time you're 30, you're not much of a man." He got elected president despite that insult to the integrity and industry of the vast majority of Americans, only to preside over a much greater and more lethal insult.
Have we been regressed back to that point again?
It seems we will keep regressing back even further, until we can ask what Lincoln asked. Can a house stand half slave and half free? Half devoted to their local plantation oligarchs and ready to kill for the privilege of being second from the top in a caste system, and half ready to fight for the last shreds of their rational self-interest?
Mr. Murray,
This is what Romney said, and you damn well know it:
"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
He said we're bad Americans, and bad people. He said that he will not be our President. He said that we're lazy welfare ni**ers. As if it weren't obvious to his followers that the "47 percent" includes almost all black and brown people, and oh, just that % of whites who don't act white enough.
It's as simple as that. Why should I vote for someone who openly declares himself my enemy?
Answer that. There is no other issue that matters in an election, but you're running away from that.
Do you think I'm a lazy worthless subhuman who doesn't deserve a voice in government, Mr. Murray? Do you have the honesty that even that least-honest of all politicians, Mitt Romney has, or are you too cowardly to have to fight up front for the ever-more-unequal oligarchy that you dream of?
I think you've just described everything that has already happened. He's gambling on a higher turnout of fanatics.
Dude, the Chinese are the heirs of Mao, and they're running sweatshops to con money out of US corporations to restore their land to greatness. You really think anyone that cynical (and successful) won't try to profit from Moslems abroad while oppressing them at home?
Even the US is guilty of this. After all, who supported the Mujaheddin against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Who looked the other way while the Pakistani junta developed nuclear weapons? Who built Desert One to protect Saudi Arabia, the home of limitless financing for Wahhabi missionaries? Yet our Islamophobia never flagged where Israel was concerned.
But our corporations do not behave like our government and military, because they are fat, cowardly, and lazy and view the government as THEIR servant. Betraying America comes easily to them, but why do the hard work of betraying it in Moslem countries that DON'T have oil? Easier to rake it in by cutting deals in China.
Well, Obama didn't have the millions of dollars from American Motors either.
In fact, while once upon a time you could find liberal presidents from wealthy backgrounds like the Roosevelts and Kennedy, and conservative presidents from poor backgrounds like that bastard Nixon, it seems that the stereotypes are becoming reality, with Clinton and Obama coming from very unpromising backgrounds, and the GOP's top contenders devolving into a succession of Nth generation aristocrats - or the blatant pets of such aristocrats like the Kochs. It's not even enough to be rich; you have to be connected to many other rich people here and abroad (to Saudi Arabia by the Carlyle Group or to Israel by Adelson, for example).
This is a bad sign simply because it means the age of the public-spirited tycoon who has the connections to put together a functioning cabinet with at least the cooperation of the fatcats is coming to an end. The rich of America no longer want to compromise, negotiate, or reason. They do not want to share power; they can no longer imagine a limit on how much they deserve. They must replace Americans who feel differently with those who accept and enforce their proper place on the basis of natural, even God-made inequality.
In the Old Testament, God and his prophets repeatedly demand massacres of those who stand on land that God has designated for the Hebrews, and those who practice paganism. And where does the line "suffer not a witch to live" come from, huh?
The Ambassador's death was caused by an RPG, a Soviet weapon which countries like Gaddafy's Libya were well-supplied with. If only the US military-industrial complex still bothered to build weapons as simple, cheap and useful as the RPG!
If Israel and its US lackeys are that powerful, they would have come up with something much bigger and more specifically targeted against Iran. We haven't seen the October Surprise yet.
Jon,
Why don't you google "Lavon Affair" and find out how Israel got a bad reputation for trying to trick America into blowing up Arabs via false-flag attacks?
The original justification for extreme inequality when America was founded was that a republic could only be governed by those with the "leisure time" and proper respect for prosperity and stability. Athens and Rome were used as exemplars. That meant, obviously, slaveowners.
The question is, why are Americans falling back into acceptance of this sort of thinking, which was largely swept away by the Jacksonian Democracy era 180 years ago?
A. Modern Americans are exposed to massive, overwhelming amounts of pro-rich, pro-greed propaganda, beyond Rockefeller's and Carnegie's wildest dreams. At least until Youtube and reality TV, everyone you saw on video was either a well-paid entertainer (of one sort or another) or a criminal/victim. All commercials for private companies are selling not just the ostensible goods, but the well-being that the goods, via the wonderful corporation, provide you. How can that not warp your mind?
B. A darker interpretation: now that whites can no longer openly proclaim white supremacy, they need a surrogate virtue that stereotypically favors whites over non-whites. While the pre-New Right south was always very pro-private property, the fusion of Southern "values" with libertarian extremism across the nation appears to me to be a way of saying that whites and their values are responsible for capitalism, the most wonderful and infallible thing ever intented, ergo (insert your favorite inequality here). Practical effect: the white bigot must look to the corporate CEO as his tribal leader, the only one with the power to protect his kind against the Other.
Romney, like Reagan and the Bushes before him, tries to ride this two-headed beast, both high priest and robber baron like the patriarchs of old.
How little it takes to drive white right-wing Christians into a frenzy! A frenzy of voting for maniacs like George W. Bush. With a twitch of their fingers they can put a dangerous man's finger on the nuclear button. No Moslem has that power. So Moslems do more dramatic things, which we condemn as barbarism. The far right in America can sublimate their violent natures by simply getting the government to do the violence for them, at home and abroad. They were more honest back in the old days when they went around with hoods and ropes and carried out direct action against those they wished to forever oppress.
A union is different when it consists of our brave armed centurions who exist to defend property. Just like religious liberty is different when it doesn't wear a turban, or freedom is different when you don't have a uterus, or invasion is different when the United States of America commits it.
Romney thought the cops understood they were in the "special" caste when he was attacking unions for the workers. You know, enforcer as opposed to enforcee.
A coupe of days after 9/11/2001, I sent an e-mail to all my friends. It was about the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and how it turned Great Britain into a doomed beast. At that moment Brtiain had the choice; it could walk away from the disaster caused by its greedy corporations and growing cultural imperialism, and allow India to be a collection of sovereign states with which it traded freely, or it could militarize its lucrative business in opium and other goods by conquering these states. Up to this point, the Empire consisted of lands taken from unrecognized nations by colonists, or of profitable ports seized from local rulers while leaving them with the rest of their kingdoms, or of lands won in war from other European empires. To conquer India meant to be responsible for it, to put white people on top of a vast sea of non-white people on the assumption of inherent superiority - and thus abandoning any principle that non-white states had any rights, or that non-whites had any rights to have states.
They took the wrong course, they were poisoned by the illusion of glory and the costs of responsibility, and 90 years later they lost India anyway.
I believe I mentioned at this point that I didn't think America's vengeance empire would last anything as long as Britain's. But even I am shocked at how fast America is wrecking the bases of its power.
The theory is well-established, but ignored by mainstream media. It's called "neoclassical economics", or "bankrupt the state until it cuts all money to the poor."
Its history as an imperial conspiracy by American government and industry against progressive democracies in the 3rd World is documented in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". Her contention is that it co-developed along with controversial theories of altering human behavior that the CIA investigated for use against captives. Then Milton Friedman's gang developed it as an argument for purging the "contagion" of egalitarian social beliefs in an entire country. So it was implemented by military coups at first. Then it was imposed by the World Bank and IMF via blackmailing elected governments in the 3rd World - exactly what is being done in Greece now.
The final parts of her book involve the final solution, to impose these policies in the 1st World. A Reagan administration official admitted in his memoirs that the Reagan tax cuts were intended to cause a future fiscal crisis for which destroying social programs would be the only available solution. Exactly what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin.
So the point of the tax cut is to destroy the goverment and restore it to its 19th century role, not to make it solvent. The evil assumption lurking behind this is that when the "right" Americans regain a monopoly of power, the economy will grow again as it did back when strikers could be butchered in the streets and slaves whipped in the fields and Indians dispossessed of their lands. The far greater economic growth of the big government era after 1932 is slandered and erased because too much of it went to the "bad" Americans.
By the way, Houston is having twice as many cases of some mosquito-borne illnesses this summer as it has ever had before in its history. It was the rain, the very rain that broke the worst drought in these parts since the 1950s.
Those are the choices for warmer climates; tropic or desert.
Because, Joe, if millions will die and billions have their lives ruined due to a man-made event, that implies that man can be sued for reparations. The Right endlessly battles against the idea that externalities of normal capitalist activity cause cancer, birth defects, etc because that means lawsuits and juries of normal, non-Citizens United-bought peers. That is Bad For Business. Tort reform simply means that the damage suffered by the poor is irrelevant compared to the profits of the rich. But AGW threatens the biggest reparations demands in history, demands by countries against countries. The sort of thing people go to war over.
Therefore, science must be destroyed as an authority in the eyes of the citizens of the one country that is the most responsible for spreading mass consumption as a way of life and causing the most burning of fossil fuels.
And sometimes the Earth has a mass extinction event, in which 90% of species are wiped out. Many other warming periods might have become as bad as those events if there had just been a little more CO2 or methane in the right place. What is your plan if this is one of those times?
I think that runaway short-term thinking was built into the nature of economics.
Perhaps it is inevitable that private property becomes an end-all as there is more of it, such that chasing money and goods replaces one's value in preserving society.
Or the greater rate of cultural change caused by freedom of information increasingly makes children alien even to their own parents, who then have less of an ego-stake in their children's unrecognizable future.
Or the problem is rooted in the very act of treating economic activity as something that can be calculated, analyzed, and organized. Once you can count it, why not count it faster?
One or more of these might be true, or it might be something else, but it's pervasive. Interest in the future as a utopia worth sacrificing for, whether you will live long enough to see it or not, has truly died out for most people I know. Why should anyone sacrifice for the well-being of their grandchildren when they cannot be bothered to keep their hands off of tasty food that is killing them right now, or loans to obtain pleasure-goods?
I imagine there must have been a time when the courts of the southern American colonies, later the southern United States, were known for their objectivity and independence. After all, John Marshall was a Virginian. But would you expect that a black man could get a fair trial on any issue in a Virginia court after Virginia's ruling elites, including the judges, came to believe that slavery and white supremacy was a matter of survival for Virginia? At one time, believe it or not, the black captives taken to Virginia were merely indentured servants, bound only for a set period as was English custom. But the laws were changed because the economic system demanded it.
Of course, after the successful slave revolt in Haiti, and especially the unsucessful slave revolt by Nat Turner, things got much more unfair. What kind of objective court system would let stand a law that forbade blacks to be taught how to read?
Perhaps South Africa, as a British dominion, once had fair courts too. But it certainly didn't under apartheid. Once whites convinced themselves that their system was necessary for survival, they redefined "fairness" to fit.
The Palestinians must either be broken or eliminated for Israel to survive as it has defined itself, a state where a Jew is more of a citizen than a Christian or Moslem. Is that not the supreme law in the minds of a nation's judges?
When Nixon failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
When Bush I failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
When Bush II failed, they said it was because he wasn't a true conservative.
This is an old religious trick. If you double down on your fanaticism, God will like you again.
It's time we challenged them on the end game. Can they name one leader from American history who was conservative enough for them?
Glenn Beck denounced Teddy Roosevelt for instituting the income tax and daring argue that inequality was a threat to democracy. Since all Republican presidents since have failed to reverse his policies, they are all off the list.
Ron Paul denounced Lincoln as a tyrant and supported the South's right to secede. That disqualifies all Republican presidents period.
Jefferson Davis? He wouldn't have been conservative enough, because he didn't share Sarah Palin's New Apostolic Reformation belief in the dangers of witchcraft. He would have considered her ridiculously out of date. This also disqualifies all the Founding Fathers.
So confront Republicans. How far back do they want to go?
I agree.
So when are the democracies of Europe going to kick us out of NATO for dragging them into stupid wars and forcing our double standards onto them? When are they going to stop trying to screw each other financially and unite against our madness? When will they become the true democratic power opposing the various creeping authoritarianisms of America, Russia and China?
As Benjamin Franklin said against the threat of another hegemon, "We must all hang together, or all hang seperately."
This neo-Victorian model will not work unless you bring back most of the evils of the past. I strongly suspect that if America's workers had not been (intentionally) divided by racism in past centuries, our bosses would have faced a tougher labor movement, and our current labor practices would be much closer to western Europe. So they'll have to bring that back. Once you've done that, it's easier to make the case for enslaving foreign lands for cheap resources. So we won't be going back to isolationist 19th Century America, but to imperialist 19th Century Britain.
We'll also need to bring back severe punishments for debtors. And use convicts for really cheap labor. Right-wing operatives have already laid the groundwork for this. After that, indentured servitude will be needed for the debtors who weren't deterred by prison.
In the final stage, we will make debt inheritable again, so that most citizens will pass their serfdom on to their children. Then the pretense of capitalism will be replaced by the reality of aristocratic rule, the most durable form of oppression in human history.
It will keep getting worse as long as the bastards know we are too cowardly and covetous to risk what we have to fight them.
Since the GOP now loudly proclaims that FDR was a Marxist tyrant (with LBJ presumably being worse), and Ron Paul even calls Lincoln a tyrant, how is the GOP a solution to the problem of not getting progressive legislation passed? You're going to vote Republican over this?
Actually, I think the hypocrisy is in the Republicans continually saying they are for "less government" period, and then supporting Guantanamo, which is certainly a form of government encroachment that happens not to ever inconvenience any right-wing Christian terrorists.
Why don't they just say they're in favor of utter whorehouse license for white male Christian businessmen, and utter tyranny for anyone who wants anything different from them, because "God" or "the Invisible Hand" or some such crap prefers the former and has granted supernatural favors for such societies since 1492?
I heard they were going to create a Ronald Reagan hologram for the finale, but decided against it. I guess Eastwood was the hologram's understudy.
Then why does the Republican Congress keep increasing our military spending and cutting taxes on the rich?
A Reagan administration official admitted in his biography that Reagan intentionally cut taxes and raised the military budget hoping to cause a future fiscal crisis that would lead to the destruction of social spending. This was a manufactured crisis, 30 years in the making. They would start a war just for the opportunity to cut social spending, because they believe making life worse for their enemies will bring back the Good Old Days.
The culture wars and the class war have the same hidden premise:
White male Christian entrepreneurs are a Master Race and will save us if we give up all power to them.
The different right-wing factions simply disguise this in different terminology. You can see the power of such a simple premise; it allows the holder of these views to claim that all "good" people will be saved, while in his greedy heart he expects only people like himself to make it. It is resistant to real economic statistics, because desperate people don't ruminate over the difference in well-being of the average American before and after the 1930s. It is vague about what is being "saved", so it can mean economic, moral, military or religious salvation, and jump around when in danger of refutation.
The way to get the bastards is to force them over and over to defend the past which is their shared touchstone. Most Americans are ill-educated about how horrible life was for most of our forefathers, and how the rich could send private mercenaries, bought-out state militias, or the KKK to crush their resistance. The reason they lost that power is the rise of the very institutions that the GOP wants to eliminate.
One of the last things Hunter Thompson wrote before he died was about Karl Rove. "Of course political strategists have studied the methods of the Third Reich. They worked, for a while."
"For a while" is all the justification you need now.
From reading far-right blatherings in places like gun magazines - which are not publicized as much as the ravings of Limbaugh, et al, my conclusion is that the base believes there are a large number of Americans who are subhuman and not deserving of the vote. If they could only have their vote taken away, they could be stopped from ruining the country. But these subhumans might take up arms and the Good Americans deserve not to have their well-deserved goodies damaged in the fighting, much less risk losing. So it's noble to lie and cheat until they have accumulated a monopoly on power and then can forcibly return the Constitution to its natural, pre-1860 state. Forever.
Few of these maniacs have any outline on how the economy would work at that point. Since the further into the process you prophecy, the more of an extremist you are, the only discussion of life after this Rapture comes from folks like R. J. Rushdoony, who clearly did not give a damn if the economy was reduced back to subsistence agriculture. The corporate capitalists who have helped this movement along (by owning those gun magazines, etc) do not talk about anything except infinite growth, an ever-larger Dow Index, etc., which is absurd since growth itself destabilizes and transforms social orders. The contradiction between those who want a caste system and those who want infinite growth can't be resolved logically, as if that ever stopped them.
What home guard? Sane people vote to make things "okay" so they can return to their apolitical lives. Fanatics are at it 24/7. And to admit that our richest and our most patriotic are wrong and evil is to admit that there is something wrong with the very nature of our country, which weakens our own will to fight for it. Thus the hapless, compromising liberals who can navigate the system into office.
We were born infected.
Prosperity among the masses began to push the disease into dormancy, first in the industrialized North, then weakening the violent resistance in the South to integration.
But the rich got sick of watching us inferiors live too well, and realized they could blame the victim all the way back to levels of economic inequality last seen in the 1920s - a period which Prof. Steven Mintz called the Golden Age of American Racism.
This is logical behavior for them. A society consisting of a feudal elite and a class of henchmen presiding over misery and horror has been the normal model for humans since the invention of private property.
What makes the model fail is the success of a country devoted to something better, forcing its reactionary competitors to reform to keep up. Where is this country now when we need it so desperately?
Ironically, libertarians Ron and Rand Paul don't believe in abortion rights either. They simply want the right to be taken away by right-wing state legislatures. You know, the same ones that have always tried to take away voting rights.
But Paul Ryan is the perfect Paul for the GOP; a fanatic who consistently defines liberty only as those things white male property owners want to do, and everything else as mortal Catholic sin. We didn't need Big Government in the 13th Century; the Pope and the barons did our thinking for us.
They haven't forgotten about war. Their problem is that they make a reactionary appeal to a past when whites ruled supreme, both at home and abroad. That meant (a) no government at home to interfere with racist traditions, and (b) aggressive imperialism abroad against non-white nations lacking the technology to resist.
Well, the libertarians may pretend part (b) didn't exist, but the rednecks are still wired the same - and so are the capitalists that the Pauls tell us are the sole source of good in the world. Ron's anti-war messages are simply ignored by cognitive dissonance, like the Pope's.
It's not cheap and plentiful. Iran's oil production has peaked. It's mostly downhill from here. It's Iran's only meaningful export and the rest of the economy is in bad shape. So Iran should burn as little as possible to have more to export. Note that the Shah of Iran received a nuclear reactor from America's "Atoms for Peace" program, while he plotted to massively increase the price of oil.
Americans have a lot of misconceptions of how oil economics work. We should pray that those who have oil export as much of it as possible, yet they are rapidly increasing their own consumption.
Here is the proof that the Tea Party is being infiltrated by extremist militia/white separatist ideologues.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/4/15/133840/898
"According to Murphy and Talley, Oklahoma Tea Party leaders are so "frustrated by recent political setbacks" that they have been talking with state legislators about the possibility of creating "a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty."
Here's the key section:
"Another Tea Party leader, J.W. Berry of the Tulsa-based OKforTea, helped initiatite the discussion through his newsletter under the subject "Buy more guns, more bullets."
"It's not a far-right crazy plan or anything like that," Berry said. "This would be done with the full cooperation of the state Legislature."
Think Progress reported that Berry "has posted rants against President Obama: the `Muslim President' -- a `reincarnation of Pol Pot' who is trying imprison Americans for resisting health reform. One ominous posting from Berry says that his militia should `launch a thousand guerrilla attacks on the plans that these people have to ruin us and our country.'"
In addition, Think Progress pointed out, "Berry frequently cites conservative news outlets like CNS [formerly the Media Research Center's Conservative News Service which now calls itself the Cybercasat News Service] and notes that he draws inspiration from the white supremacist thriller "The Turner Diaries" [the William Pierce-authored novel that inspired Tim McVeigh]. Despite his extremism, Berry has met with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and other members of the Oklahoma Republican delegation, and counts them as `rock solid.'"
The Turner Diaries is a racist manifesto. Simple as that. It calls for genocide. The militia movement of the '90s also got the ball rolling on repealing the 13th Amendment, so that state legislatures would have the power to take the right to vote away from minorities.
In other words, back to 1860 and Dred Scott.
As the article points out, no one in the Tea Party movement has opposed or denounced any of this.
Nor have any denounced Todd Akin and his no-abortion-for-rape crusade. Liberty for us Real Americans, slavery for the rest of you.
When Mitt Romney is cheered by your beloved working-class conservatives for saying, NOT that Obama wasn't born in the US, but that the only reason Obama's birthplace is questioned is that black liberals like him aren't Real Americans, I see no proof that they're any different than their lynch-mob ancestors. They just want Big Government out of the way so they can restore people like me to our "proper place" at gunpoint.
Hitler built his party on the votes of the "forgotten man", with strident nostalgia for a mythical past, worship of war, and endless blaming of minorities for getting in the way of "good Germans". The rich loved his anti-Communism, and many of them were helping him (see the story of George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush and his connections with Nazi banking in the 1930s).
If you want to hide like a coward behind Godwin's Law, then how about the Nationalist Party takeover of South Africa in 1948, where the English elite was willing to allow blacks the vote, but the Afrikaner middle class rose up as one to impose apartheid? Can you tell me the difference between Tea Party conservatism and South African conservatism? Because Ronald Reagan had no problem with the latter.
Ryan is worse than a teabagger. He is a Pinochetian fascist, whose ideal government performs no function but favoring the rich and persecuting women and minorities. Which would be just like a teabagger, except that he surely understands that the teabaggers will end up in the same debt serfdom as the people they hate, instead of the old-timey racial caste system they pine for. They want a police state run by the 20% of "real Americans", he wants a corporate tyranny run by the 1%.
The point is, each contract is now interim, in effect made personally with the current prime minister and lasting only as long as he does.
American giants and their shareholders don't like to operate this way. They have only gone at half-speed in Iraq. Iran, China and perhaps Russia will go full speed and take what they can get. Iran has the most connections with the most factions in both Arab and Kurdish Iraq, so it can make the largest commitments.