Mindzle

Posts Tagged ‘democrat’

Call me a cynic, call me a conspiracy nut, just don’t call me a fool.
For some time now this wonderful nation of ours has been under attack. Our ideals, goals and history are being revised by those who believe they have the divine right to rule. They were born into wealth and see it as evolution on a social order, that money and power show superior genes. They were born to wield almighty power, and only they know right from wrong, that all of us “peasants” should gladly accept their divinations from on high. They are the moral authority; they are the authors of our destiny. They are above the law, above the constitution and beyond reproach. And they sell us this story in every media and outlet, and we buy it with enthusiasm.

Who are they? It would be simple and naive to say Republicans. As Former president George W. bush once said “This is an impressive crowd of the haves and have mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base.” At least he was honest about it. This group of elitists really is the base of the Republican Party, no matter their new-found populist mantra. But the Democratic Party is far from free of guilt. Following the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a new movement in the party began. This group of southern Democrats gained strength and momentum as Reagan began union busting.
This move by Reagan was both political and ideological in nature.

This is where I start to see the pattern. Reagan went about systematically destroying the unions for two related reasons. First the Democratic Party, his chief rivals, were heavily funded and supported by unions. Destroying the unions eliminated his opposition’s chief strength. And second, Reagan, and the Republican’s in general, were supported by corporatists that wanted unions to lose power and there-by strengthen the power at the top of their enterprises. After all unions represent democracy in the workplace, and what monarch (CEO) wants to deal with that?

In this power vacuum within the Democratic Party, caused by the fall of the unions, the new corporatist’s element gained strength. It is obvious why; to win major national and even regional elections you need money, mountains of it. The unions were smaller, less powerful and far poorer. They could no longer be relied upon to fund the party. The Blue Dog Democrats had the answer. Go to the same deep well the Republicans siphoned from. Support corporations over workers. Support the rich over the poor. Support anything that helps convince the rich, elite and powerful to fund your campaign. And boy did they.

I’ve never met a neo-liberal a.k.a. neo-conservative a.k.a. conservative who liked former president Bill Clinton. I’ve also never met an actual liberal who supported his policies. He was hated by the Neo-Conservatives because he was not a Republican. And the Republicans as a party are great at tearing down. They began his destruction in the eyes of their loyal followers even before he was elected president. And they put the petal to the metal the moment he entered the White House. They fabricated or exaggerated every possible failure or character flaw in the man. They should have loved him; he was as much a neo-conservative as Newt Gingrich. A Liberal president NEVER signs NAFTA. Even a true conservative never signs NAFTA. He continued the Reagan Tax cuts; he continued the ridiculous military spending of his Neo-Conservative predecessors. The only thing that stopped him from being openly embraced by the Neo-Cons was his party affiliation and that he didn’t openly support their social policies.

The Newt Gingrich Revolution
On the backs of trumped up scandal and outrage, the Neo-Conservatives took control of Congress in a sweeping victory. They denounced then President Clinton for being an adulterer; they denounced his Liberal agenda, and promoted populist change. Fewer taxes, smaller government, promote family values etc. And here is one of those moments when truth is spun on its head. Most of those promoting “family values” and “saving marriage” were adulterers caught in scandals beyond imagination. (Scandals)
This is the legacy of the so called “Moral Majority”. It goes to the old adage, “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” You cannot scream about illegal aliens and then hire them, you cannot fight a war on Drugs and use them (Ehem, Rush…), and you cannot condemn adultery and then have affairs. It makes a liar of you, and a fool of those that buy into your rhetoric.

This “Moral Outrage” is a screen, its cover, nothing else. As is their embracing of the Religious Fundamentalists. Organized religion has long been a tool of the powerful. Preach politics from the pulpit and use the church to promote your goals. Turn followers into evangelists, it is a very powerful tool.
If the modern Corporatists (I shy away from calling them conservatives, or Republicans as it crosses party lines) were to show their actual goals in the light of day, they would be hunted down and destroyed publicly. Their goals are as Anti-American as Stalin’s Russia. Grover Norquist put it succinctly: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” I have no problem with cutting the government in half, in many ways I support that, but that is not what he is saying, he wants to be able to drown it in a bathtub, to kill it entirely. That is anarchy, not democracy. It is the goal of the Corporatists to utterly destroy the American Republic; after all it was George W Bush who said: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I’m the dictator.”

Never forget that his is the whole goal, starve government until it can be drowned in a bathtub, so that the wealthy can influence every decision for their best interests. Thereby turning a Democracy into a corporate state. Fascism in the 21st Century.
We are already on the brink. Maybe we have already slipped into it.

It was Eisenhower who warned, during his farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.” He was Right, but we must guard against all of the industrial complexes.

Today the medical Industrial complex fights against Health Insurance for all, because it will cut into their profits. They claim that a state run program will have unfair advantages and reduce the quality of Healthcare. They claim that we will have to stand in lines to get medical treatment. (I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve been to an Emergency room I already have to wait for sometimes hours. At for profit hospitals) So how can it be that a not-for-profit system would hurt me as a consumer? I find this very confusing, if you listen to the Neo-Conservative Free Market ideologues, they state that the free market is always better for the consumer, competition keeps prices down etc. So how can a government run institution, not motivated by profit hurt the consumer? The truth is, it doesn’t, this is just the typical hysterical fear-mongering they promote to convince us to vote against our own best interests.

What we actually find, is that in a Free market eventually you always end up with monopolies controlling entire industries. A company gets an advantage, uses it to pressure competitors, gain market share, then they acquire the competitors, use the new size to pressure other competitors, and on and on, until only the one remains. Corporations have no interest in the public good; their only goal is to make a profit. It is the part of government to regulate the markets to ensure that the public is not being fed upon by predatory forces and to stop monopolies from forming in the first place.

In Health Care many people wonder why the costs have sky rocketed over the last 25 years. It doesn’t take a cryptologist to figure this one out. We deregulated the medical industry and allowed hospitals to become profit based entities. Me, personally, I do not want a hospitals decision to save a my life to depend on whether or not it positively affects the corporation’s bottom line.

It happened in banking, it happened in health Care, and it happens in every market we deregulate. Prices go up, and eventually the quality of service goes down. The Health Insurance Industry is trying to stop Healthcare for all, not because it will help American’s but because they are trying to protect their enormous profits, and overly generous Executive compensation. They know that an entity that doesn’t pay its CEO tens of millions of dollars a year has a competitive advantage. They know that an enterprise that doesn’t pay stock dividends has an advantage. Those advantages will reduce the cost of healthcare at the not-for-profit’s and cause the for profits to have to cut costs. But to do it without degrading the quality of care provided they will need to cut bonuses for executives and administrators as well as salaries and dividend payments, what do you think the likely-hood of that will be? So maybe they are right that it will cut quality at the for-profit institutions, because god forbid they cut administrative and Executive costs.

So this political battle, as with most we face, pits the Uber-Rich vested interests against those of the general American population. It is the Rich versus every one else. For the last 30 years the rich have won. Who will win this time?

This is not a Democrat versus Republican war; this is not a Liberal versus Conservative fight. This is the Rich Elite versus all of us. They control the media, the message, the government, and the economy. The economy has been taken hostage by Wall Street. The nation is being held at ransom by thieves, and criminals. There is a war on Terror, but the terrorists are not in some distant land, they are right here at home. They control the banks, they control the systems of money and they own our nation.

“During the short boom of the late 1990s, conservative analysts asserted that, yes, the gap between rich and poor was growing, but that incomes for the poor were still increasing over previous levels. Today most economists, regardless of their political persuasion, agree that the data over the last 25 to 30 years is unequivocal. The top 5% is capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class is fast disappearing.” — Project Censored.org

The numbers we now see on the distribution of wealth in this nation more match 3rd world nations than our other industrialized counterparts.

I’d like to end with this quote:
“…The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this.” – GARRISON KEILLOR