Wall Street

President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

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Resist

How do fascists get a foot in the door of your nice country? The United States of America, for example? Here is the key:

No one knows better than conservatives, in the U.S. our Republican party, how to stir up this hatred, and use it to their advantage. Our very own fascists, ready to hand over our country to wealthy, even foreign, interests for personal gain.

Everything Republicans say and do is projection and deception. Believe nothing. Trust not one of them. The only way they can win is to lie, cheat and steal.

They’ve had years to plot and plan. Decades. They tried to assassinate  FDR. They aligned themselves with Nazis in WWII. They tried to stop Medicare by calling it socialized medicine, a “Red Menace” that will destroy our country. They lied us into war after war, economic disaster after economic disaster. They have effectively neutered our media, our Fourth Estate that keeps them in check, that caught Watergate and investigated other scandals, that now focused solely on a woman’s emails instead of Russian hacking and illegal influence in our nation’s affairs.

They worked for 30 years to discredit Hillary Clinton, then deliberately sabotaged our election and her candidacy to keep her from winning the 2016 presidency.

They did this by gutting the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, engaging in voter suppression, then getting FBI director and stooge James Comey to drop a meaningless letter that inspired salacious headlines again Hillary just before election day.

And still she won the popular vote by an astonishing margin.

They have desecrated democracy in the process of picking our pockets to line their own.

Instead of  fighting racism and misogyny, they have fanned the flames of both with carefully crafted lies and propaganda designed to appeal to willfully ignorant poor white men.

And these poor white men, from the highest to the lowest, have applauded this. Along with their white women counterparts who seem to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, they are indeed poor in spirit.

These poor whites cheer on fascist looting that satisfies their yearning for certitude that they are the chosen ones, confirmation that they are the superior ones.

They are small in number, but easily provoked. Mindless. They operate on emotion. Thrive on disinformation. Easily manipulated. Attack dogs.

Now, thanks to the GOP’s dirty tricks and flying monkeys, we’ve got a president-elect who knows nothing about government. He is a malignant narcissist, a colossal buffoon, so self-absorbed nothing or no one outside himself is real or has meaning.

His electoral college votes are much smaller than President Obama’s.

But he is the perfect stooge for Republicans who have achieved a dangerous majority in Washington and are preparing to gut our social safety net and take all our money for themselves, and a useful idiot for Russians who want to dismantle NATO, peace, and democracy for world domination.

This is not a movie plot. This is really happening. To us. All of us.

This president-elect rabidly tweets his dog-whistle every morning and the poor whites fly into action on his behalf while the fascists laugh. Don’t feel sorry for them.

Resist.

Save

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Enough is enough

It’s a fact that 90 percent of Americans support gun control. The Republicans in Washington don’t want us to have gun control. The NRA pays them to block gun control, to protect the gun manufacturers and dealers instead of us.

This November, vote all the Republicans out. Vote Blue.

Save

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Life on Planet Teabag

On the possibility of the Los Angeles Times being bought by right-wing billionaires, because it’s their world, we just live in it.

This world is called Planet Teabag.

Planet Teabag is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, managed by NewsCorp and employing carefully-trained Koch zombies.

On Planet Teabag, facts = liberal media bias, while conspiracy theories, propaganda and fear-mongering = “fair and balanced.”

On Planet Teabag, Socialist, Marxist, Communist, Fascist and anti-Colonial Mau Mau all mean the exact same thing.

On Planet Teabag, “tyranny” is a fairly elected black president, equality, and non-whites voting, while “freedom” is micromanaging women’s bodies, eliminating science, and distributing guns with impunity to children, terrorists and convicted felons.

On Planet Teabag, billionaires buy newspapers to drain money from them, shut them down, and further control public news and information, thereby destroying our tradition of a free press, the cornerstone of democracy.

On Planet Teabag, Jesus wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, then gave them to St. Rupert to give to the Koch brothers to carry out.

On Planet Teabag, seniors, children, the poor and disabled must sacrifice food and shelter so billionaires can hoard more billions in offshore accounts to avoid paying 15% in federal tax.

Because on Planet Teabag, nothing is more valued and worshipped by the Koch zombies than massive amounts of money, along with the people with this money, no matter how they got it. In fact, the more devious and corrupt the better.

 

 

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The Fourth Horseman

Yes, Margaret Thatcher did achieve a level of  power not known to many women before her. This was her greatest accomplishment.

But she must have sold her soul for it, as so many men before her have done. As did her partner in crime, U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Apparently, they both took meetings with Mephistopheles, Inc., corporate genius.

Thus was born right-wing authoritarian conservatism, which has evolved in the United States into today’s tea party.

It was a dizzying whirl of privatization of public services, de-nationalization of financial entities, pre-emptive and illegal wars, tax cuts for the wealthy with tax increases on the working class to make up for some of the loss of revenue, union busting and general anti-labor policies, corporate takeover of media, exploiting workers, demonizing the poor, seniors, disabled, veterans, women and children, and generally taking us back to a feudal system run by an elite few with money and power.

And now the great experiment of corporate rule is over. It is a failure.

It was about greed, selfishness, and unchecked power.

And Thatcher did that to England, and the world.

And I wonder if she really knew the consequences, or did she say, “Damn the consequences, I’ve got what I want, screw everyone else”?

Will we ever recover from the damage the Reagan-Thatcher duo did to the world? How many millions have died, suffered, and/or lost all they had to the insatiable lust for money and power these two unleashed, an event of biblical proportions.

Someone, I don’t remember who, said Thatcher was the Fourth Horseman. That is the most apt description of her I have seen. When Death arrives, riding a pale horse, she brings the apocalypse with her.

The world we live in today was formed by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. We’ve lost our way as a country, we’ve lost sight of each other. We’re hostages to corporate greed which celebrates profits at the expense of people.

Maggie Thatcher was the first female Prime Minister of England, a very important milestone for women. Sadly, we must also remember that women have the same capacity for evil that men do.

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Obamacare Can Help

Most real conservatives left the Republican Party 20 years ago. They gradually took over the Democratic Party, and today’s centrist Dems are actually Eisenhower Republicans. Progressive Democrats are still a part of the party. There is room for both in the DNC.

What’s left in the GOP is primitive creatures dwelling in the right-wing fever swamp.

This primitive right-winger lives in a closed information system, which is impermeable to unwanted facts, evidence and information. They created an alternate reality out of ignorance, prejudices, fears and hatred, and reinforced it with rightwing blogs, newspapers, television and talk radio spreading disinformation and lies around the clock.

Never having actually read the Constitution, and with no knowledge of world history, they made up what sounded good to them, and called it, “America.” It has dinosaurs as Jesus ponies, slavery, misogyny, racism, homophobia, theocracy, biblical law, war, pestilence and famine, all based on their hatred, prejudices and fears.

And now the RW is actually shocked, shocked that the majority of Americans do not live in that same wasteland, nor believe the same lies. Well, we tried their way, and it nearly destroyed the country. Now the grownups are fixing the problem.

These poor creatures refuse to leave their bubble, blaming their massive losses on everything but their inability to face reality. It’s to be expected. The real world is just too painful for them. They would rather believe lies that fit their innate prejudices than do the work it takes to live in reality. They are lazy intellectually, spiritually and physically, they are morally bankrupt, uneducated, bullying, willfully ignorant, vindictive and vengeful. Thankfully their numbers are small, and dwindling.

Telling the same lies over and over again in the face of facts indicates mental illness. The good news is Obamacare can help them with that.

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The GOP War On Women is Real

The GOP War On Women is war, alright.

It is not only very real, but has its roots in centuries of fear and hatred of women.

In the near and middle-east, institutionalized hatred and discrimination of women appears to have begun in earnest around 500 BCE, at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian era, and kicked into high gear with the end of the last Goddess temples around 500 CE.

Early Christian men feared and despised women so much they took a powerful Goddess and reduced her to a powerless 12-year-old.virgin raped by the Angel Gabriel, and forced to give birth to a powerful male god, Jesus Christ, the son of God.

Yet, throughout the region, for thousands of years, women were Goddesses, powerful in their own right, alongside Gods. With the more primitive Indo-European invaders bringing their male gods and patriarchy to dominate, the shift began, ultimately reducing women to less threatening second-class citizens.

The world’s earliest civilized societies were ones that worshipped the Great Goddess, and as early as 25,000 BCE had already developed law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles, religion and written language. But without a written record, these were lost, claimed by later in the West by male Greeks.

These societies were Matrilinear and Matriarchal. Dismissed as Pagan today, these civilized societies were agricultural, peaceful and advanced. Archaeology has recently begun to uncover this legacy.

Today, the threat of Christian theocracy is destroying women’s hard-won rights. It’s clear that voting for the Democratic Party for every seat in every election is our only hope. For all its flaws, the Democratic Party is still the party of the people. We can make it stronger and better.

The GOP has a plan for the United States that is fascist and theocratic; third-party candidates siphon votes away from Democrats and are often placed by the Republicans to do just that.

The GOP exists purely on deception to gain wealth and power for the wealthy and powerful. If people knew what the party was really after, it would no longer exist, having been voted out across the board.

So let us do just that. Vote them out, and vote in modern civilization for all Americans. We cannot afford to return to the GOP’s Bronze Age.

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Obstruction Party, Your Table for Zero is Ready

U.S. Congressman Howard “Buck” McKeon sent out an email asking for businesses to come up ideas for creating jobs in California and the country. Here is most of it:

“For over two years now, our nation’s unemployment rate has been at or above 8%. In the 25th Congressional district, where I serve you, the unemployment rate is much higher.Everyone is aware of these statistics, and all of us know someone who is unemployed and desperately seeking employment. To make matters worse, dysfunctional leadership in our nation’s capitol and crippling budget deficits are creating an environment of uncertainty for many companies who want to hire people, but are afraid to do so.

As your Representative in Washington, I’m concerned with what we can do to create more jobs.

In order to best reflect the needs of our district, I have started a new initiative called “One More Job.” We are seeking out businesses in our community to find out what they could do to hire just one more employee. Just imagine what our community would look like if every business added just one more employee.

We need the opinions of folks on the front line, not recycled Washington talking points. What do you believe are the best ways to create jobs locally?As a former small business owner myself, I’m anxious to hear your thoughts about what policy changes will help your business, or the business where you work, thrive and be able to create jobs? What are some concrete ideas you have about how to reform the federal tax code or regulatory burdens? What change to a federal law would allow you, or your employer, to operate in a way that frees up capital to expand?

What do you believe it will it take to create one more job? Email me your ideas about how to move our economy forward. Please include your contact information, industry you work in, and which federal agency or law is negatively affecting you.Email me at McKeonJobIdeas@mail.house.gov to give me your ideas.”

Aside from the glaring problems with McKeon’s statements, including untruths about how the economy works, this looks like just another feeble attempt to disguise more deregulation and obstruction.

I used to work in economic development, and I used to freelance. So I sent him some of my ideas:

Dear Representative McKeon,

You asked what we would do to create jobs. One more job. Meaning, I am sure, President Obama’s “one job,” when you and your party said in 2008 you would dedicate the next four years making sure he is a one-term president.

You also complained about the unemployment rate, noting it is even higher in our district, but nowhere have you accepted responsibility for creating this problem with your and your party’s failed policies.

And frankly, your time for concern over creating jobs was when you and your GOP were busy destroying them.

 But you asked the question, so in this situation, it is best to first look at exactly what and who destroyed the jobs, and how:

1. Bush/GOP tax cuts.

2. Two illegal unfunded failed wars that the GOP lied the American people into, with unaccounted-for billions paid to private contractors like KBR and Blackwater, instead of funding our troops, or education, or health care. roads, transportation. Working on more poor foreign policy that focuses solely on corporate profits, currently fabricating phony reasons to going to war with Iran, and not cutting our bloated ineffectual defense budget that is the equivalent of the next 20 countries defense budget combined.

3. GOP de-regulating the financial sector, creating the mortgage-backed securities that crashed the entire world economy, and now, thanks to Koch and the Intercontinental Exchange, with lots of help from Republican Phil Gramm, hedge funds recklessly speculate on commodities like crude oil, artifically raising prices at the gas pump.

4a. Thirty years of Reaganomics, the failed GOP “Trickle-down” supply-side economic theory that panders to the very rich at the expense of 99% of Americans, AKA the Feudal System.

4b. GOP refusing to recognize and/or acknowledge our economy is actually demand-side, and they would have to then pander to the 99% instead.

5. The Grover Norquist GOP Pledge to never raise taxes on the rich.

6. Austerity measures that continue tanking our economy as part of the GOP election strategy – “Destroy the country, then blame the Democratic Party” game the party has been playing since FDR.

7. As Senator McConnell and Speaker Boehner said in 2008, the only focus the GOP has for four years is ensure Barack Obama is a one-term president.

8. GOP spending even one minute on creating illegal legislation that discriminates against, amongst other things, women’s reproductive organs and people’s sex lives, rather than the economy and jobs.

9. GOP creating laws that reward companies for sending our high-quality high-paying engineering and manufacturing jobs overseas, while creating low-wage no benefit service jobs here in America. And rewarding companies that offshore their massive cash profits so they don’t have to pay a penny of tax on them, while demonizing the poor so you can tax them instead.

10. Working on destroying our Democracy and lying about our history so you can replace it with Christian Theocracy, and then we can be the Western Taliban. Then conservatives can openly practice discrimination, hatred, racism and eugenics without legal restrictions – the main reason we don’t have single-payer health care. The silent “Let Them Die” public health policy the GOP is famous for, along with the usual keeping profits going to the private insurers, including our tax dollars, instead of our health care dollars going for treatment for patients as it would be under government-run healthcare.

11. Which explains why the GOP is using the fringe Religious Right/Tea Party to help loudly deny science, reason, logic and fact to protect corporate interests, like Big Oil continuing to profit from denials of Climate Change.

12. The GOP is the political party that thinks Starbuck’s, Donald Trump and millionaires and billionaires who live off investments are “small businesses,” and acts only for their interests, instead of acting for actual small and micro businesses that are the backbone of our economy.

13. Never mind pandering to mining interests in your own district to the detriment of your constituents, playing footsie with your corporate cronies like defense contractors and financial scammers, whom you pass on our tax dollars as corporate welfare, even lining your own pockets with our money, while saying we the people cannot have the social insurance programs we paid into all our working lives. Mainly because you can’t wait to get your hands on all our money, nothing to do with the deficit, or debt. Private interests want it, and they’ve bought you to give it to them.

14. GOP treating tax revenues like their personal piggy bank, having a party at our expense. Privatization is the main offender, costing taxpayers far more in paying profits, dividends to shareholders, bonuses and commissions to private companies that are offshored and untaxed, rather than to creating good jobs for Americans who contribute to our country and economy.

So, in summary, the best way to create jobs is to undo the massive damage the GOP has done, and that includes you, Mr. McKeon.

I am voting for Dr. Lee Rogers.

We’ve had enough of you and the damage you and your GOP have done to our district and our country, and the world.

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Occupy Wall Street

Why?

Banks Successfully Lobbied for Weaker Bailout Repayment Rules so They Could Pay Bonuses

The Poor Get Swiped by Swipe Fees, the Rich Make Bank

We Are the 99 Percent

Anonymous Occupy Wall Street Call to Action

Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights.

1 in 10 Americans live below the poverty line.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps.

There is so much more. And this is just the beginning.

Occupy Wall Street. Now.

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We’ve all been teabagged

So this is what it looks like, and feels like, when the Fascists start to take over. Is this what it looked like in the early days of Franco’s Spain? In Indonesia? Germany?

Standard Poor’s downgrade has finally revealed the GOP’s reckless, irresponsible, partisan, agenda, by putting the blame squarely on the GOP and its Tea Party policies, manufactured crisis, hostage-taking, and refusal to raise revenues in order to tank the economy and blame it on President Obama and the Democratic Party, the entire world be damned. The GOP, driven by its extreme right wing, the Tea Party, wants to create an emergency crisis and take the country over in a bloodless coup. They are nearly there.

Because this is the falsely-named Tea Party’s real face: Fascism. The Tea Party is the modern version of the John Birch Society, which was co-founded in 1958 by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch, who are the founders of today’s Tea Party. In between, we had the Moral Majority, which was neither.

Fred Koch made his fortune during the 1920s in the oil fields of Soviet Russia, working with Stalin. Koch was a product of The Gilded Age, which spawned conservative economic policies which helped create The Great Depression, which in turn would create the Democratic Party president FDR and the New Deal for the American People, not just the wealthy elites.

The wealthy elites didn’t like that then, and they don’t like it now. They’ve been trying to kill the New Deal, and LBJ’s Great Society, from the moment they were created, because they can’t stop thinking about all that delicious tax revenue paid by the middle- and lower-class Americans going to middle- and lower-class Americans for health, education, housing, roads, all the necessities of modern civilization. Elites want ALL of it for themselves, and they have managed to create their own New Gilded Age just as before, at great cost to America and the world economy.

Prescott Bush, W’s grandfather, was a Fascist. He and other wealthy elites invested in Nazi Germany and helped Hitler’s rise to power, and refused to stop until Congress passed a law against doing business with the enemy. Prescott Bush was part of a group that tried to assassinate FDR and take over the country in a Fascist coup. They are still with us, and they’ve been doing everything they can since to destroy democracy and the American Dream.

What is Fascism? In its most basic form, Fascism is an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. Generally, it is extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.

In this essay by Professor Laurence W. Britt, Fascism Anyone?, fourteen common threads link Fascist regimes in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. One is pervasive Nationalism, including flag pins and xenophobia (Freedom Fries); another is the use of scapegoats, a common enemy, to unite against (Jews, Communists, Liberals, poor, women, minorities); and tying religion and ruling elite together so when you oppose the ruling elite, you are attacking their religion (The United States was founded as a Christian Nation, National Day of Prayer). Also, fradulent elections, rampant cronyism, distain for human rights, military supremacy, rampant sexism, controlled mass media, obsession with national security, protection of corporate power, elimination of labor rights and power, supression of arts and intellectuals, and obsession with crime and punishment.

Another important essay on Fascism by Naomi Wolff touches on similar points.

Knowledge is power. Power they don’t want you to have. Be a voter, and vote Democratic Party, even if you have to drink Pepto-Bismol and wear a haz-mat suit. The right-wing knows that creating third-parties siphons votes away from Democrats, so they will try to convince you that both Dems and GOP are wrong, and to vote third party. They are lying. We have a two-party system. Voting third party creates the problems we have right now.

Don’t let the Fascists win.

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