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Strategic Ideas Dept: The Case for a Popular Front vs. Finance Capital

September 8th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in financial crisis, pushing obama, rightwing

The Great American Stickup:

How the Political Class Mugged America

and Handed the Money Over to Wall St.

With so much opportunity, why has Obama presided over such an economic disaster?

By Amy Goodman and Robert Scheer

Progressive America Rising via Democracy Now

September 7, 2010  

Goodman: As we continue our discussion on the state of the economy, we’re by veteran journalist and Truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer. His book is just out; it’s called The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. What is wrong with the economy today? And how did we get here?  

Scheer: Well, you know, you say a longtime journalist. I worked for the Los Angeles Times as a national reporter, and I covered these hearings in Washington when the Clinton Administration in the '90s basically fulfilled the promise of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was not able to reverse the sensible regulations of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed to prevent us from getting into another depression. And those regulations of Glass-Steagall, which Feingold was against -- was for keeping and against reversing, said that investment banks playing with supposedly rich people's money should not be allowed to merge with commercial banks that were using the deposits of people that were insured by the taxpayers and that these were different activities. And Reagan could never pull off that kind of deregulation. In fact, because of the savings and loan scandal at the end of his term, he actually had to sign off on increased financial regulation. But when Clinton came in, he brought in one of the big players on Wall Street, Robert Rubin, who has been head of Goldman Sachs, and basically turned to him and said, "You know, what do I need to do to get Wall Street on my side?" And they said, reverse what they considered to be onerous financial regulation. And Clinton delivered on that. He brought in Rubin then to be his Treasury secretary, who was followed by Lawrence Summers, who’s now the top economics adviser in the Obama White House.

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Tea Party Takeover of GOP: It’s Worse Than You Think

September 5th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, rightwing

GOP Politician Confirms

What Was Long Suspected:

Republicans Intentionally

Feed the Racism, Anger, and

Paranoia of the Far Right

By David Corn
Mother Jones Online, August 4, 2010,
via Progressive America Rising
It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.
As he tells this story, the veteran lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary runoff by Spartanburg County 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative roots, pointing to his vote for the bank bailout and against George W. Bush's surge in Iraq. Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state's 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to "turn Glenn Beck off" and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting "You lie!" at Obama during the president's State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven "demagoguery" that he believes will undermine the GOP's long-term credibility. And he's freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance. (more...)

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Proto-Fascist Update: Right Wing Using Anti-Islam Bigotry to Divide and Conquer

August 21st, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, racism, rightwing

 

Fallout of Hate Is Spreading

Across America from 9/11 Site

By Joshua Holland
Progressive America Rising via AlterNet August 21, 2010,

Scientists building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos referred to the coordinates where a test device was detonated as “point zero.” When the horror of nuclear warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term “Ground Zero” entered our lexicon. The expression has come to mean the epicenter of a catastrophic event, be it a nuclear detonation, a disease epidemic or an earthquake. It is the point from which damage spreads, whether it’s radioactive fallout or a deadly contagion.

That the site of the World Trade Center has come to be known as Ground Zero illustrates how the American public has come to fetishize the attacks of 9/11. It’s not an apt analog for the physical destruction that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center. But it is an appropriate metaphor for the virulent and socially acceptable bigotry against Muslim Americans that has radiated out from Ground Zero and spread across the United States.

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‘Cheap Labor Conservatives’ – A Proper Label for Blue Dogs, the GOP and the Tea Party

August 17th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Unemployment, elections, rightwing

Defeat the Right Wing in Three Minutes With

Truth in Labeling and the 'Cheap Labor' Frame

By Conceptual Guerilla

Have you got three minutes. Because that's all you need to learn how to defeat the Republican Right. Just read through this handy guide and you'll have everything you need to successfully debunk right-wing propaganda.

It's really that simple. First, you have to beat their ideology, which really isn't that difficult. At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots" that I call "corporate feudalism". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology. That ideology is pure hogwash, and you can prove it.

But you have to do more than defeat the ideology. You have to defeat the "drum beat". You have to defeat the "propaganda machine", that brainwashes people with their slogans and catch-phrases. You've heard those slogans."Less government", "personal responsibility" and lots of flag waving. They are "shorthand" for an entire worldview, and the right has been pounding their slogans out into the public domain for getting on forty years.

So you need a really good slogan – a "counter-slogan" really, to "deprogram" the brainwashed. You need a "magic bullet" that quickly and efficiently destroys the effectiveness of their "drum beat". You need your own "drum beat" that sums up the right's position. Only your "drum beat" exposes the ugly reality of right-wing philosophy – the reality their slogans are meant to hide. Our slogan contains the governing concept that explains the entire right-wing agenda. That's why it works. You can see it in every policy, and virtually all of Republican rhetoric. And it's so easy to remember, and captures the essence of the Republican Right so well, we can pin it on them like a "scarlet letter".

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Keeping Smoke In Your Eyes: Right Wing Using Islam To Win in 2010

August 16th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in elections, rightwing

 

Shameless Schemers Like Sarah Palin,

the Tea Partiers and Right-Wing Christians

Start a New Religious War Against Muslims

By David Rosen
Progressive America Rising via CounterPunch
Aug 15, 2010 - The building of a Muslim community center in an abandoned building two blocks from the site of New York’s former World Trade Center has become the latest controversy in America’s long fought religious wars. The construction of the center, often referred to as a mosque, has become the latest rallying issue for the Christian right, Tea Party proponents and Republican operatives in their war to impose moralistic and corporatist values on America.

It is too early to know how the Muslim center issue will be resolved, but it is clear that the rantings of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman (of the Anti-Defamation League) and others have played an important role pushing a local issue into the center-stage of national politics. Since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, Muslims in general and American Muslims in particular have been the targets of an undeclared religious war promoted by Christian fundamentalists and self-serving Republicans. For some among these religious zealots, Islam is a threat to their belief that the U.S. is a white Protestant nation. Over the last four centuries, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and many others have been targets of religious persecution, often the victims of imprisonments, hangings, lynchings and other acts of violence.

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Reagan’s Stockman: It’s Worse Than You Think, Class War Is Coming Soon

August 11th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Unemployment, financial crisis, rightwing

 

Reagan insider: 'GOP destroyed U.S. economy'

Commentary: How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts.

Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline

By Paul B. Farrell

MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse."

Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse."

Jobs recovery could take years


In the wake of Friday's disappointing jobs report, Neal Lipschutz and Phil Izzo discuss new predictions that it could be many years before the nation's unemployment rate reaches pre-recession levels.

Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats' Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider -- someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology -- says about America, helps all of us better understand how America's toxic partisan-politics "holy war" is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.

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Jobs for All Dept: Dump the GOP’s Neoliberal Kool-Aid Down the Drain

August 6th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Jobs, elections, rightwing, trade unions

First Punish The Unemployed,

Then Declare War On The Employed

By Jason Linkins

Huffington Post

August 6, 2010 - Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who've lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society -- the nation's unemployed.

Rather than extend unemployment benefits so that the millions of Americans who are out there busting their humps to find the needle-in-a-haystack that is a job of any kind, they've demanded that those benefits be offset, essentially punishing the unemployed for the deficits they giddily ran up for years.

It's been pretty embarrassing to watch, frankly. But at least no one's out there running on an actual platform of kicking those who have managed to secure employment out of work, right?

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‘Absolutely Racist’ – Exposing Fox New’s Case-Hardened Media-Lynching Politics

July 27th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

 

Fox News' Long History of Race-Baiting

Media Matters, July 27, 2010 5:34 am ET

Howard Dean and Joan Walsh recently called out Fox News, criticizing what they called its "racist" handling of the deceptively edited Shirley Sherrod video clip. Indeed, Fox News and its personalities have a long history of aggressive race-baiting and racially charged commentary.

Walsh, Dean describe Fox as "racist," highlight Sherrod, New Black Panthers coverage

Howard Dean: Fox acted "absolutely racist." In a July 25 appearance on Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told host Chris Wallace: "Let's just be blunt about this. I don't think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and you're certainly not a racist, but I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a -- they had an obligation to find out what was really in the [Sherrod] clip. They have been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this [Sherrod] business and [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor and all this other stuff."

Walsh: "It's true" that Sherrod is a victim of Fox racism. On the July 25 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, Walsh, Salon.com editor in chief, stated of Sherrod: "I'm not giving her a pass, but I think the idea that she shouldn't be able to say Fox or Breitbart is racist is preposterous. She gets to say that because it's true, and because, from her vantage point, it's especially true."

Walsh describes "Fox News's 50-state Southern strategy." In a July 25 Salon.com post, Walsh noted that Fox News is hyping "one 'scary black people' and 'Obama's a racist' story after another" and wrote: "Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state 'Southern strategy,' the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon)."

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Taking a Deeper Look at the Women in the Tea Party Orbit

July 5th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing, women

The Tea Party and

the New Right-wing

Christian Feminism

By Ruth Rosen

5 July 2010

OpenDemocracy.net

Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain’s policy of “taxation without representation.”

Many liberals and leftists dismissed the Tea Party as a temporary, knee-jerk response to the recession, high employment, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, and an African American president who had saved American capitalism by expanding the government’s subsidies to the financial, real estate, and automobile industries.  Perhaps it is a temporary political eruption, but as E.J. Dionne, columnist at The Washington Post has argued, the movement also threatens the hard-won unity of the Republicans. “The rise of the tea party movement,” he writes, “is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

Who are these angry people who express so much resentment against the government, rather than at corporations?   Since national polls dramatically contradict each other, I have concluded that the Tea Party movement has energized people across all classes.

One important difference, however, is race.  At Tea Party rallies you don’t see faces with dark complexions.  Another important distinction is that men and women are drawn to this sprawling movement for a variety of overlapping but possibly different reasons.  Both men and women seem to embrace an incoherent “ideology” which calls for freedom from government, no taxes, and an inchoate desire to “take back America,” which means restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and “safe.”

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Ayn Rand: Sociopath as Mentor to Far Right

February 26th, 2010 by admin | No Comments | Filed in racism, rightwing

Ayn Rand, Inspiration to Right-Wing,

Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killers

 

By Mark Ames

AlterNet.org

February 26, 2010

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

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