"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."
-- George Washington
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
"Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism."
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
"
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:
" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.
"
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
"
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:
" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.
"
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Kerry 4, Bush 0
John Kerry looks like our next president. We need a man of integrity and ability. He is that man.
It was easy to see that George Bush had been heavily schooled prior to this last debate. No more rants, no more scowls (although I caught him winking and silently clowning with someone in the audience a couple of times. Boys will be boys, I guess).
I think that it was revealing when Bush blamed the failings of our healthcare system on litigation. He and his supporters want to limit our ability to achieve justice in court. This is a continuation of the Bush Administration's attack on our judicial system.
When Bush again addressed Kerry's various plans with the old "How do you intend to pay for it" attack, I couldn't help thinking of the gargantuan defecit and debt this administration has racked up, and I again noticed that feeling as though we've been robbed. This is the same feeling he evokes when he winks at some deep-pocketed cohort in the audience. It's the same feeling he evokes when he gets that look on his face that seems to say, "I stole from you and there's nothing you can do about it." Yeah, like Tony Soprano the gangster.
Healthy people will strengthen America. Kerry's "take it or leave it" health strategy is long overdue in this country.
Civil rights, equal opportunity and the preservation of personal liberties are key elements of the freedom we all hold sacred. I was left, again, with the conclusion that under George W. Bush these things are severely threatened; and that under John Kerry these defining American qualities will be better protected. The fact that Bush has not talked with the NAACP is symbolic. Bush would roll back what little progress we've made with regard to civil rights. He's already doing it through his upward redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the top 1% of incomes in the country, effectively further broadening the gap between rich and poor and weakening the middle class.
Kerry's emphasis on fiscal responsibility is a trait real republicans used to have too.
I don't like Bush's plan to let young people take their social security money and give it to private interests. That would be the end of Social Security. Carving up the government of the people and selling it off doesn't work with money or with public natural resources like parks and wildlife preserves. It is theft.
I think Bush's undoing of the assault weapons ban is a way to get more prisoners in our legal system, a way to justify the further militarization of our police; both of which will accelerate America's decline into police-statehood.
Kerry's plan to achieve a "fair playing field" in business is encouraging. There is a lot we can do to get this, and I am encouraged in what I see that John Kerry can do it. Not subsidizing job-loss (moving them overseas) is an excellent first step. A hiring credit is another excellent idea.
I think that when Bush talks of government being out of line when telling "citizens how to live their lives", he's trying to create a phantom; and he's blowing a smokescreen over the patriot act and his fundamentalist religious agenda, including his interference with stem-cell research, and his attacks on womens' choice and states' marriage rights. I agree with John Kerry that "faith must not be legislated". It's smart to keep churches of any kind out of government, and it's part of what defines America.
When George Bush described a "culture of life", I wondered how this applied to Iraq, Guantonimo Bay and Abu Graib, the increasing hate-crimes against and mass deportations of hispanics and middle-eastern Americans, when he said it.
Bush's further mentions of "Legal Reform" were extended to product liability this evening. Not just healthcare. Corporate neo-conservative special-interests have wanted this for years. Beware.
Kerry was believable again when he stressed that partisan bickering should never interfere with reason. His history of cooperation with republicans such as John McCain is proof of this.
George Bush mentioned McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), in answer to Kerry's emphasis on the need for clean elections. What he didn't mention was that he grudgingly signed that bill, almost in secret, and that he virtually disabled it in its application, in his FEC.
I think Kerry could have said more on the elections issue, especially when Bush mentioned the 2000 election debacle. Watch Ohio this time around.
It comes down to integrity and credibility. Regarding these, again, Kerry won the debate hands-down.
When John Kerry prepared to give his closing statement, I caught myself silently prompting him, "My fellow Americans"; and he started with that.
As he should.
It was easy to see that George Bush had been heavily schooled prior to this last debate. No more rants, no more scowls (although I caught him winking and silently clowning with someone in the audience a couple of times. Boys will be boys, I guess).
I think that it was revealing when Bush blamed the failings of our healthcare system on litigation. He and his supporters want to limit our ability to achieve justice in court. This is a continuation of the Bush Administration's attack on our judicial system.
When Bush again addressed Kerry's various plans with the old "How do you intend to pay for it" attack, I couldn't help thinking of the gargantuan defecit and debt this administration has racked up, and I again noticed that feeling as though we've been robbed. This is the same feeling he evokes when he winks at some deep-pocketed cohort in the audience. It's the same feeling he evokes when he gets that look on his face that seems to say, "I stole from you and there's nothing you can do about it." Yeah, like Tony Soprano the gangster.
Healthy people will strengthen America. Kerry's "take it or leave it" health strategy is long overdue in this country.
Civil rights, equal opportunity and the preservation of personal liberties are key elements of the freedom we all hold sacred. I was left, again, with the conclusion that under George W. Bush these things are severely threatened; and that under John Kerry these defining American qualities will be better protected. The fact that Bush has not talked with the NAACP is symbolic. Bush would roll back what little progress we've made with regard to civil rights. He's already doing it through his upward redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the top 1% of incomes in the country, effectively further broadening the gap between rich and poor and weakening the middle class.
Kerry's emphasis on fiscal responsibility is a trait real republicans used to have too.
I don't like Bush's plan to let young people take their social security money and give it to private interests. That would be the end of Social Security. Carving up the government of the people and selling it off doesn't work with money or with public natural resources like parks and wildlife preserves. It is theft.
I think Bush's undoing of the assault weapons ban is a way to get more prisoners in our legal system, a way to justify the further militarization of our police; both of which will accelerate America's decline into police-statehood.
Kerry's plan to achieve a "fair playing field" in business is encouraging. There is a lot we can do to get this, and I am encouraged in what I see that John Kerry can do it. Not subsidizing job-loss (moving them overseas) is an excellent first step. A hiring credit is another excellent idea.
I think that when Bush talks of government being out of line when telling "citizens how to live their lives", he's trying to create a phantom; and he's blowing a smokescreen over the patriot act and his fundamentalist religious agenda, including his interference with stem-cell research, and his attacks on womens' choice and states' marriage rights. I agree with John Kerry that "faith must not be legislated". It's smart to keep churches of any kind out of government, and it's part of what defines America.
When George Bush described a "culture of life", I wondered how this applied to Iraq, Guantonimo Bay and Abu Graib, the increasing hate-crimes against and mass deportations of hispanics and middle-eastern Americans, when he said it.
Bush's further mentions of "Legal Reform" were extended to product liability this evening. Not just healthcare. Corporate neo-conservative special-interests have wanted this for years. Beware.
Kerry was believable again when he stressed that partisan bickering should never interfere with reason. His history of cooperation with republicans such as John McCain is proof of this.
George Bush mentioned McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), in answer to Kerry's emphasis on the need for clean elections. What he didn't mention was that he grudgingly signed that bill, almost in secret, and that he virtually disabled it in its application, in his FEC.
I think Kerry could have said more on the elections issue, especially when Bush mentioned the 2000 election debacle. Watch Ohio this time around.
It comes down to integrity and credibility. Regarding these, again, Kerry won the debate hands-down.
When John Kerry prepared to give his closing statement, I caught myself silently prompting him, "My fellow Americans"; and he started with that.
As he should.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
New John Kerry Movie
We just saw "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" here in Tampa Bay (we get community radio: www.wmnf.org). I highly recommend it. Anyone who sees this will gain a fuller understanding of the humanity, capability and righteousness of John Kerry, and a glimpse of what we could lose if ignorance prevails. A very up-beat, inspiring movie with a positive message. Ebert gives it 3 out of 4 stars (this picture is from Roger Ebert's site): 
Roger Ebert's review can be read here:http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041001/REVIEWS/409300303/1023
Roger Ebert's review can be read here:http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041001/REVIEWS/409300303/1023
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Kerry 3, Bush 0
I’m a former noncommissioned officer from Tampa Bay. We get community radio. Kerry 3, Bush 0.
John Kerry deftly exposed that Bush is "ceding veto power" to an institution / "article of faith" when Bush says that "to destroy life to save life" is unethical with regard to frozen embryos, but Bush had no problem lying to the country to take us into an un-necessary, preemptive war. This outs Bush's Moral Minority membership. Read about MM's in "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis.
Bush again made divisive remarks about THE PEOPLE: one about blacks being property in the Dred Scott case. This reminded me of the first debate when he mentioned that some people are against Muslims. Some people don't bother to learn what civil rights and the constitution are about. It's easier if you have "Internets". And no, it's the Declaration if Independence, not the Constitution that says, "All men are created equal". But you have to show up for class to learn that kind of stuff.
I suspect that George Bush and his "flock" don't even know what "liberal" means. Look it up. Read what Martin Luther King had to say about liberals. I know the two "flockies" we have at work, out of fifty, don't even own computers. They don't like me to bring it up though. They don't trust "Internets" either. (Beware. This is a credible threat to sanity in this country this time. Ever see "Blue Collar TV"?).
Bush wants a runaway free-market. He wants heavy deregulation. That's how you get pollution, corruption, more poverty, crime and incarceration, and big market-corrections. Fiscal irresponsibility is how you get deficit spending greater in one term than in the rest of the entire history of the country. Oh, the deficit, bigger than 1776 to Reagan, is because a bubble popped? Big Bubble, huh? Deregulation and market fear of an upcoming warmonger radical right president causes corrections / "bubble pops". Need some gum?
Bush typically fell back on his patent strategy of lies, fear and intimidation, demonstrating his incompetence, getting upset when put on the spot. This incompetence is proof that corporate and fundamentalist lobbies with a compliant press have inflicted this current administration on us.
Fear is how corrupt national leaders take away the freedoms of the people. Like in Chili and Guatemala. And over there in Russia with Bush's buddy Putin. Patriot Act sneak and peek double-speak. Did Pinochet wear a military flight-sui-, er, uniform..?..yes, he did. You can run but you can't hide.
He gave a tax cut to his rich buddies instead of using the money on civil defense.
I think George wants to be a general now, even though he shirked his duty as a pilot, losing his flight status in a cushy rich-kid guard slot and wasting the flight training we paid for, in favor of youthful indiscretion when he was young. Meanwhile, John Kerry served honorably and then had the additional courage and righteousness to speak out against an unjust war as a civilian, after learning first hand how wrong it was.
Kerry looked like the next president. Kerry should BE the next president. Bush looked and acted like a kid who had been caught doing something wrong. That's because he is a kid who has been caught doing something wrong, stubborn in the face of reason. Well, he did one thing right. He quit drinking and drugs apparently. I can find you thirty guys in a meeting down the street with more clean time than he has. And they didn't have to join a "flock" to do it.
When an incompetent boss keeps messing up and "owning up to it", I know he's going to get canned soon.
Take somebody to the polls. Don't let up! Think of your kids!
And wash that "tort-reform" out of your mouths, please, both of you.. no oppression, thank you. Good judges and a better court-to-case ratio. Not tort-reform.
John Kerry deftly exposed that Bush is "ceding veto power" to an institution / "article of faith" when Bush says that "to destroy life to save life" is unethical with regard to frozen embryos, but Bush had no problem lying to the country to take us into an un-necessary, preemptive war. This outs Bush's Moral Minority membership. Read about MM's in "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis.
Bush again made divisive remarks about THE PEOPLE: one about blacks being property in the Dred Scott case. This reminded me of the first debate when he mentioned that some people are against Muslims. Some people don't bother to learn what civil rights and the constitution are about. It's easier if you have "Internets". And no, it's the Declaration if Independence, not the Constitution that says, "All men are created equal". But you have to show up for class to learn that kind of stuff.
I suspect that George Bush and his "flock" don't even know what "liberal" means. Look it up. Read what Martin Luther King had to say about liberals. I know the two "flockies" we have at work, out of fifty, don't even own computers. They don't like me to bring it up though. They don't trust "Internets" either. (Beware. This is a credible threat to sanity in this country this time. Ever see "Blue Collar TV"?).
Bush wants a runaway free-market. He wants heavy deregulation. That's how you get pollution, corruption, more poverty, crime and incarceration, and big market-corrections. Fiscal irresponsibility is how you get deficit spending greater in one term than in the rest of the entire history of the country. Oh, the deficit, bigger than 1776 to Reagan, is because a bubble popped? Big Bubble, huh? Deregulation and market fear of an upcoming warmonger radical right president causes corrections / "bubble pops". Need some gum?
Bush typically fell back on his patent strategy of lies, fear and intimidation, demonstrating his incompetence, getting upset when put on the spot. This incompetence is proof that corporate and fundamentalist lobbies with a compliant press have inflicted this current administration on us.
Fear is how corrupt national leaders take away the freedoms of the people. Like in Chili and Guatemala. And over there in Russia with Bush's buddy Putin. Patriot Act sneak and peek double-speak. Did Pinochet wear a military flight-sui-, er, uniform..?..yes, he did. You can run but you can't hide.
He gave a tax cut to his rich buddies instead of using the money on civil defense.
I think George wants to be a general now, even though he shirked his duty as a pilot, losing his flight status in a cushy rich-kid guard slot and wasting the flight training we paid for, in favor of youthful indiscretion when he was young. Meanwhile, John Kerry served honorably and then had the additional courage and righteousness to speak out against an unjust war as a civilian, after learning first hand how wrong it was.
Kerry looked like the next president. Kerry should BE the next president. Bush looked and acted like a kid who had been caught doing something wrong. That's because he is a kid who has been caught doing something wrong, stubborn in the face of reason. Well, he did one thing right. He quit drinking and drugs apparently. I can find you thirty guys in a meeting down the street with more clean time than he has. And they didn't have to join a "flock" to do it.
When an incompetent boss keeps messing up and "owning up to it", I know he's going to get canned soon.
Take somebody to the polls. Don't let up! Think of your kids!
And wash that "tort-reform" out of your mouths, please, both of you.. no oppression, thank you. Good judges and a better court-to-case ratio. Not tort-reform.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Kerry 2, Bush 0
Again, I sincerely hope a lot of people saw this vice-presidential debate. www.cspan.org will keep playing it for anyone who missed it.
Edwards was direct, consise and clear.
Cheney was cynical, impatient, negative and in total denial. He acted outraged or insulted whenever he was faced with something he knew he couldn't dispute, like the fact that Americans are carrying 90% of the weight in the "coalition" of occupation in Iraq. He carried all the earmarks of one who is used to managing through intimidation instead of reason. He has contributed in large measure to the ugly face-mask America has been forced to wear, in the name of greed.
Notice how Cheney avoided the Halliburton issue Twice. And the way he dodged the Tora Bora failure, in which we could have gotten Bin Laden had not he, Bush and Rumsfeld been so eager to leave there and go after the oil and "better targets" in Iraq instead. Instead of hardening our domestic defenses and seeking out the real threats overseas, Bush and Cheney have created a new menace altogether in Iraq. And killed over a thousand of our sons and daughters in the process.
And No talk whatsoever about Caspian Oil pipelines or Unocal or THREATS, just before 9/11. He said the halliburton issue was a smokescreen. Where there's smoke there's fire. I encourage everyone to enquire further. Bush and Cheney didn't even WANT a 9/11 commission looking into what happened. We should all wonder, WHY?!
Like Kerry, Edwards is working to bring out the truth. They will bring some desperately needed credibility, humanity and good sense back into our government. In the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, bless him.
And remember equal rights? Yeah.. Remember that?
Iraq was not the terrorists' home. Bush and Cheney have turned it into one. For Oil; and they won't even say it.
Cheney and Bush are unashamedly lying to you. To me. If we let them get away with this, we are doomed to Cheney's "extraordinary measures" (I almost fell out of my chair when he said that) in the form of military aggression and domestic paramilitary policing that is Un-American. Like a company that makes deals with the enemy. Like Halliburton. Like Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Not in our name. Kerry '04. For your freedom. For America.
If you accept their lies they will enslave you. Do you see now what might ensue if Cheney ever became president?
Talk to others. Change somebody's mind. Take them to the polls. We can fix this. This may well be the most important election in our lifetimes.
Edwards was direct, consise and clear.
Cheney was cynical, impatient, negative and in total denial. He acted outraged or insulted whenever he was faced with something he knew he couldn't dispute, like the fact that Americans are carrying 90% of the weight in the "coalition" of occupation in Iraq. He carried all the earmarks of one who is used to managing through intimidation instead of reason. He has contributed in large measure to the ugly face-mask America has been forced to wear, in the name of greed.
Notice how Cheney avoided the Halliburton issue Twice. And the way he dodged the Tora Bora failure, in which we could have gotten Bin Laden had not he, Bush and Rumsfeld been so eager to leave there and go after the oil and "better targets" in Iraq instead. Instead of hardening our domestic defenses and seeking out the real threats overseas, Bush and Cheney have created a new menace altogether in Iraq. And killed over a thousand of our sons and daughters in the process.
And No talk whatsoever about Caspian Oil pipelines or Unocal or THREATS, just before 9/11. He said the halliburton issue was a smokescreen. Where there's smoke there's fire. I encourage everyone to enquire further. Bush and Cheney didn't even WANT a 9/11 commission looking into what happened. We should all wonder, WHY?!
Like Kerry, Edwards is working to bring out the truth. They will bring some desperately needed credibility, humanity and good sense back into our government. In the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, bless him.
And remember equal rights? Yeah.. Remember that?
Iraq was not the terrorists' home. Bush and Cheney have turned it into one. For Oil; and they won't even say it.
Cheney and Bush are unashamedly lying to you. To me. If we let them get away with this, we are doomed to Cheney's "extraordinary measures" (I almost fell out of my chair when he said that) in the form of military aggression and domestic paramilitary policing that is Un-American. Like a company that makes deals with the enemy. Like Halliburton. Like Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Not in our name. Kerry '04. For your freedom. For America.
If you accept their lies they will enslave you. Do you see now what might ensue if Cheney ever became president?
Talk to others. Change somebody's mind. Take them to the polls. We can fix this. This may well be the most important election in our lifetimes.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Kerry 1, Bush 0
Kerry won this round. I hope a lot of people saw this. I think it's pretty obvious.
I think Bush's lack of thoughtfulness regarding the questions was an insult to all of us.
Bush did not do his homework.
George Bush is out of touch ... when he talks about using missile defense to protect us from things like suitcase bombs.
And promising no draft? That way the rich kids don't have to go.
He's just plain stubborn. He kicked a hornet's nest in the Middle East.
Now we have hope for a rescue from this campaign of fear, This fundamentalist madness.
Notice how the crowd cheered for John and Teresa at the end. It's gonna be a relief to have a decent leader again. Somebody with some ability.
I think Bush's lack of thoughtfulness regarding the questions was an insult to all of us.
Bush did not do his homework.
George Bush is out of touch ... when he talks about using missile defense to protect us from things like suitcase bombs.
And promising no draft? That way the rich kids don't have to go.
He's just plain stubborn. He kicked a hornet's nest in the Middle East.
Now we have hope for a rescue from this campaign of fear, This fundamentalist madness.
Notice how the crowd cheered for John and Teresa at the end. It's gonna be a relief to have a decent leader again. Somebody with some ability.
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