Friday, February 18, 2011

Wingnut False Equivalence In Wisconsin Will Not Stand — Wisconsin Workers Speak Out!

Dudes, you asked for it. You tried (still trying) to smear the protesters in Wisconsin. You tried calling them haters, thugs, violent rioters. You looked real hard for Hitler signs, hate signs, violence-promoting signs. You got nothin' but a couple of pictures that look suspiciously staged. The kind of thing right wing infiltrators and provocateurs like Breitbart (being sued for libel) and O'Keefe (arrested, under FBI investigation) specialize in. The truth is, teachers like the one below, are civilized people; they're just not hip to the thuggery of the right (wingnuts projecting, again — as always).


Wingnuts — Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Scarborough, Breitbart, O'Keefe, WorldNet Daily, Daily Caller, et al — you pushed and smeared and trashed and lied about us, about good, decent people once too often; we're not going to take it anymore. This is a call to action. We're fighting with everything we've got. Not with our muscle, although we've plenty of that; but with our intellect, our passion and our commitment. We will not be defeated. We have just begun to fight.

This is how it's done, wingnuts. This is how our people do it: With grace, humor, smarts, class, and imagination. All qualities the thugs on your side, and your Teabagger tools are sorely lacking in. These images represent the real face of the Wisconsin protesters:




WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY?
 
VOU  CAN HELP! GO TO WISDEMS.ORG AND CONTRIBUTE WHAT YOU CAN TO RECALL THE GOP WISCONSIN STATE LEGISLATORS.


Fascism in America: Wisconsin Governor Creates FALSE Budget Crisis To Bust Public Employee Unions

You wouldn’t know it by tapping into the wingnut media. They’re all in a coordinated frenzy of attack mode aimed at the peaceful public service employees — teachers, nurses, firefighters — calling them “violent” and “thuggish” and that imbecile Paul Ryan gleefully lying to the cameras about “riots” in Madison just “like Cairo.” Big Eddie, doing his must-see show from Madison, slammed these wingnuts with the truth:


Our triangulating President made a tepid statement — in tone — about the demonstrations with his one step forward-two steps backward MO: He said Governor WANKER’s approach “seems like more of an assault on unions” (oh really, Mr. Obama — what else could it possibly be?!?) but OTOH commiserated with the Governor about everybody making “some adjustments” to new “fiscal realities.”

What if these “fiscal realities” turned out to be a whole lotta BULLSHIT?

As TPM points out, slashing the unions’ hard-fought right to collective bargaining does NOTHING to save funds in a true austerity budget:
“The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures — service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money — rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own.”
But the state’s fiscal bureau which is its “equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office” says there’s no need for an austerity budget in Wisconsin and the state could end the year IN SURPLUS! In fact, the entire budget shortfall is contained in Gov. WANKER’s tax cuts for special interest groups which he’s trying to fund off the hides of middle class public employees, as this Op-ed in a Madison paper points out:
“In its Jan. 31 memo to legislators on the condition of the state’s budget, the Fiscal Bureau determined that the state will end the year with a balance of $121.4 million.

To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes — or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues — the “crisis” would not exist.”
What is happening in Wisconsin is a coordinated assault by the ruling corporate plutocracy, its political Republican/Tea Party arm, its propaganda arm of Fox/Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck et al, to break the labor unions in America and completely defund the Democratic Party’s last reliable source of campaign financing, without which — in this post-apocalyptic Citizens United world — it will cease to exist as an effective political party. Money, as they say, is the mother’s milk of politics. Never more so now as the Democratic Party struggles to stay competitive against the unlimited buying power of the corporation, that “person” that went on a spending spree last November, purchasing a political party, a political movement, and just about every elected official in Washington, D.C. to varying degrees, up to and including the President.

Oh, Progressives still have a pulse. We’ve got Independent Senator Bernie Sanders in Vermont and Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio (they’re going to toss the kitchen sink at Brown in the next election) and a few outnumbered Spartans in the House. And of course, Senators Durbin of Illinois, Schumer of NY, Whitehouse of RI remain reliable liberals. But the bottom line is that liberals are vastly outnumbered by corporate money and influence.


So yeah, Rachel’s partly correct when she says this is a fight for the survival of the Democratic Party. And Big Eddie too, when he says Wisconsin is “Ground Zero” for the unions’ stand against the corporations and the GO/TeaP. But more than this, no one dare mention (it is one of the unstated PROHIBITED words in the MSM) the “F” word — and I don’t mean THAT one; it’s already been appropriated by Big Ego politicians running for president.

I’m talking about FASCISM in America. Simply put, Fascism is a totalitarian (or gentler, kinder authoritarian) system of government that bases its economy on capitalism. Corporations, for example, are already structured in this way. They are not democratic institutions. At best, they are benignly authoritarian if they are small enough or have a competing representative of workers’ rights — the union — with which they must negotiate salaries, hours, working conditions, healthcare and safety, etc. At worse, and more commonly, they are totalitarian. Corporations are not democratic institutions.

They can slash jobs, close plants and move overseas where labor is cheap and slavish, fire employees almost at will, give and take away benefits including health care, which are merely an inducement for work-valued employees to remain — until they can be cast aside. Corporations are amoral. They are rapacious of people, of the environment, of entire nations sometimes. They say they’re for a laissez-faire competitive economy, but that is a useful myth. They are all about consolidating markets and eliminating their opposition in business and government — by whatever means necessary, including assassinations, or simply buying out their opposition, because everyone has a price.

There is always a tension, a competing interest that goes beyond merely the business interest — for the rest of us. That's the quality of life interest. The worker's right to a living wage, safety in the workplace, health care (still to be secured), and a comfortable retirement. The community's right to a safe environment, safe food and drinking water, clean air to breathe, and a reasonable expectation the corporation will not rip out the economic heart of the community chasing cheap jobs and ever higher profits overseas. The Commons, the community interest necessarily runs afoul of the corporate interest, which is simply to make a profit. That is why the people's democratic government regulates the coporation, just as the undemocratic, fascist corporation seeks to gut all regulatory impediments to its bottom line.

So it isn’t a big leap for the corporation to transpose its fascist culture onto our vanishing public institutions of government and the courts. They are already in control of the Supreme Court, as noted in the recent dalliances of Justices Scalia and Thomas with the Koch Brothers. For these Justices this is a slam of the system they are willfully destroying, an arrogant ‘because I can’ power-play, their version of the end zone dance. It’s not as if Scalia and Thomas would have voted any differently on corporate versus individual rights or restricting the influence of corporations in our political campaigns. The corporations always win their vote. Thomas is so seemingly disinterested he hasn’t even bothered to make an oral argument in years. His wife is gallivantin’ around with the Tea Party, in another obvious (to most of us) conflict of interest, while her husband decides cases directly impacting groups that are paying her.

Now, after this past election, the corporate plutocracy controls both chambers of Congress, the Republican governorships, and holds enough influence over the President that he must come before the Chamber of Commerce, hat in hand, as a supplicant or a beggar: “Oh please, won’t you consider investing just a little on the people? Pretty please?”

Fascism is the unspoken word. I think it will remain so because America still clings to its myths. They are the last thing to go before harsh reality hits. That’s what got Reagan, the American mythmaking cowboy, elected. And amid all of his self-evident destruction, the Reagan myth is still going strong in parts of America. Bill Moyers put it best in this piece, “America Can't Deal With Reality — We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts.” He said, “Many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign.”

By the time history — as distinct from revisionism — catches up to reality, it will have been too late. Because in the last analysis, most people just don’t want to know about it. Unless the working people of Wisconsin can raise the nation's consciousness and awaken a sleeping giant.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Suggested Miss. License Plate Honoring American Terrorist, War Criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest

In trying to wrap our minds around this story, the first obstacle to it is the realization that this is 2011 — more than one-half century after the seminal civil rights landmark court case and legislation, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lynchings and hate crimes are now against the law, and the disgrace of all-white juries acquitting murderers of civil rights workers, terrorist bombers of black churches, killers of African American men, women and children in the Deep South are no longer tolerated.

Or so we thought. The Southern disgrace of the former Confederate states' racist history is being whitewashed, literally and figuratively, by a pustular eruption of Southern pride and Civil War revisionist history groups (the "War of Northern Aggression" was all about "states' rights" and not slavery) crawling out from under their rocks, when only a few years ago they wouldn't have dared revive the open and ugly bigotry of their elders. One such group in Mississippi, Sons of the Confederacy, has proposed a state license plate "honoring" American terrorist, war criminal and ideological racist — as founder of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan — Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general, instigated and initiated war crimes that would meet the standard of death by hanging set by history's greatest war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg which tried Nazi war criminals and exacted the ultimate punishment for the atrocities they committed. Here is an excerpt from the Southern Law Poverty Center's report on the real Nathan Bedford Forrest:
Union Gen. William Sherman, no slouch himself, described him as a "devil" who should be "hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury."But there was more to Forrest than that. He was renowned for a terrifying temper that transformed him into something resembling a blood-engorged beast. He personally shot his own men if they tried to shirk a battle. He was given to duels and furious arguments, oversaw savage whippings of recalcitrant slaves, shaded the truth in his own behalf repeatedly, and once wrongly shot innocent "deserters."

The severest of the criticism of Forrest — subjects studiously avoided by today's neo-Confederate activists — centers on three indisputable facts:
  • Forrest was a Memphis slave trader who acquired fabulous wealth before the war;
  • He commanded the troops who carried out an 1864 massacre of mostly black prisoners; and
  • He led violent resistance to Reconstruction as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Obviously, the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP was deeply offended by this latest resurgence of white Southern organized bigotry, an attempt to re-mythologize their craven Civil War history, and has asked Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to stop this. It is part of a much broader pattern of historical revisionism that is right wing, racist and ideological in its aim to pollute the teaching of science and history. The confluence of these forces include Civil War revisionists and states' righters, Christian fundamentalists, nativists, and Tea Party activists.

Against this backdrop, Mississippi Governor and presidential hopeful Barbour has refused to do the right, decent and responsible thing, which is to reject attempts by one extremist organization to revive his  state's racist past:


Here is one FACTUAL historical depiction of Nathan Bedford Forrest's crimes suggested for the Mississippi license plate proposed by the Sons of the Confederacy: In this bracingly pastoral scene from Harper's Weekly issue of May 21, 1864, Forrest is pictured shooting and killing a captured free black man. Racist applicants may also choose a depiction of Forrest's slaughter of federal troops who were trying to negotiate their surrender under a white flag while Forrest illegally improved his position. Further, racist white supremacist license plate applicants have a choice of Swastika or Confederate flag to adorn their pick-up trucks, gun racks and all, with the racist hate symbol of their choice and ideological proclivity:



Back in the 60s at the height of the struggle for civil rights, one of the great troubadors of that era, Neil Young, wrote this powerful and evocative song, "Southern Man," that was meant in a sense to celebrate the shifting tide of the Deep South's heinous and despicable racist history — one that was kept alive mostly by angry, bigoted white males. I wonder how true these words ring today; or is it yet another ironic reminder that the "arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice"— yet the event horizon seems to be always just out of reach. Neil seems to be conceding as much in this 2000 CSNY version in which the last verse, "Lily Belle" ... opens the song after the chorus:


SOUTHERN MAN
By Neil Young

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Lily Belle,
your hair is golden brown
I've seen your black man
comin' round
Swear by God
I'm gonna cut him down!
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

I saw cotton
and I saw black
Tall white mansions
and little shacks.
Southern man
when will you
pay them back?
I heard screamin'
and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long?

Southern man
better keep your head
Don't forget
what your good book said
Southern change
gonna come at last
Now your crosses
are burning fast
Southern man

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Quotable: Bobby Kennedy, to President Obama And His Cruel Budget

... Because it bears repeating:

"There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly and destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor....This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men." ~ Robert F. Kennedy, speech to Cleveland City Club, April 5, 1968

Monday, February 14, 2011

President Obama's Budget From Reagan Hell

This is the budget of a DEMOCRATIC president!?!

Draconian cuts of Pell Education Grants, Food Stamps, community block grants, the environment, from our national parks to the Great Lakes reclamation project, intended to keep one of the world’s largest fresh water reservoirs viable, and perhaps most savage and shameful of all, the slashing by fifty percent of home heating assistance, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps the poor, elderly and handicapped pay their heating and cooling costs. This is a death sentence to tens of thousands of our fellow citizens on fixed incomes who cannot afford skyrocketing utility rates.

According to a report released ahead of the President’s budget by the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (NEADA), record numbers of households over the last three years have been requesting heating assistance due to the economic downturn and the rising cost of home energy. Demand for assistance is expected to reach a record 8.9 million in fiscal year 2011, even as the program is slashed. The number of households served by LIHEAP has increased from about 5.8 million in FY 2008, to 7.7 million in FY 2009, to 8.3 million in FY 2010.

HEEEEEeere's BRRRRRRRArack!!!!!
 Shame on you, President Obama, for behaving like a grotesque caricature of  Repugnant Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. The President who insistently complains about living in a surreal Washington, D.C. bubble, is behaving as if he’s succumbed to the unreality of that bubble, the abstraction of numbers on a page. You like to talk in practicalities, Mr. President? Here’s a practical consequence and expected outcome of your budgetary cruelty — your budget is a harsh example of what Bobby Kennedy called “the violence of institutions.” Mr. Obama, you’re no recognizable Democratic president; a Republican-Lite hybrid perhaps; but no Democratic president.
"According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about 650 people died of hypothermia each year between 1999 and 2002. About half of those people were over 65 years old. According to the National Institute on Aging, older people are at increased risk for hypothermia, even after exposure to a small drop in temperature, and even while indoors. The institute recommends keeping thermostats between 68 and 70 degrees. "Even temperatures that just feel chilly to younger people may be dangerous to older people," said Dr. Jack Guralnik at the National Institute on Aging."
Then again, according to your cynical political calculations, as diagnosed by a doctor-turned-political-diagnostician like Charles Krauthammer, you’re playing the Left and your liberal base against the Right, throwing up a smokescreen, just so you can keep your pledge (which should have been no pledge at all, but an ironclad article of faith) that Social Security and Medicare will not be touched — let the Republicans take that third-rail shock, if they dare. Medicaid, hey that’s poor people, right Mr. President? They have no political clout, no representation, no powerful advocacy groups. They’re just pawns, as they’ve always been, in this Reaganesque Washington parlor game of yours, sir.

Shame on you, Mr. President.

We know we’re being played, Mr. President.  But when the pushback comes from both parties:
“31 senators — including John Kerry (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) — sent OMB director Jack Lew a letter Friday challenging the cuts. On the House side, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said Obama’s budget means families will be “forced once again to decide between heating and eating.”
We also know this sledgehammer approach isn’t very effective “triangulation” let alone conduct becoming of a Democratic president.

Shame on you, Mr. President.

Meanwhile, one of every third dollar (total Defense outlays) of this budget is spent on the Pentagon war machine to perpetuate this war economy on the backs of the poor in the euphemistic line items, “discretionary non-Defense spending.” This is Orwellian perpetual war come to life. Are we really to believe that $2.5 billion can’t be found in the Pentagon’s war budget instead of condemning our elderly on fixed incomes to statistically significant deaths during heat or cold waves?

Here’s my proposal, Mr. President. Take the Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan wars off-budget. COMPLETELY OFF-BUDGET. Impose a WAR TAX on the richest one percent to pay for every last penny of our military crusades in these godforsaken countries. Let those motherfuckers on whom you lavished another round of UNSUSTAINABLE and UNJUST tax cuts pay THEIR FAIR SHARE — FOR ONCE! They’re profiting from it. They’re the war profiteers, the oil and gas tycoons, the corrupt government contract racketeers. Let these scum PAY for their damned wars.

The late, great comedian George Carlin once said:
You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there... just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.
Only now those jobs have disappeared somewhere in China, India and the ravaged Reagan-(Obama?) middle class is beginning to slide into poverty in ever-larger numbers.

Best Mubarak Toon, And Its Reference To Another Historic Resignation

... For those who weren't yet born in 1974:

  (Artist is Deering, published in the Arkansas Post-Gazette.)

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Libertarian Superman, Ron Paul, Wins CPAC Poll ... OTRA VEZ!

Confounding and frustrating some wingnuts. Paul, the Libertarian champion whose presidential aspirant highwater mark has been the CPAC poll, won easily again, beating Mitt Romney 30-23. This must add fuel to the rumor mill that dangerous Islamic radicals (CODE for gay Republican groups) have infiltrated CPAC.