You Play, You Pay

I Can Find Treasure For You Too

I am surprised and appalled at the media pundits who are blaming African Americans for the passing of Proposition 8.  I simply cannot believe some of the crap that I am reading.  It seems to me that all the blame for 8’s success is being laid at the feet of the African American voter and nobody is blaming the Mormon Church.   The Mormon Church joined with the Catholics and the Pentecostals in a Commandment-breaking smear campaign that was all lies, half-truths and fear-mongering.  The Proposition 8 initiative was a symptom of some very sick minds who were acting out their own sexual paranoia.   I think the funniest accusation was the one that stated all churches would be required to perform Gay weddings. That sounds like the block-busting ruse of the Seventies. Home owners were afraid that if one Black family moved into the neighborhood more Black families would move into the neighborhood and property values would drop. Are Mormons afraid that if one Gay couple gets married in their church, more Gay couples would get married in their Church, and the Book of Mormon would lose it’s value? What makes these jackasses think that a Gay couple would want to be married in a Mormon church?   Besides, the law allows for ministers to refuse to perform a marriage for any reason.  The sickest accusation was the forced sex ed for kindergarteners. What kind of demented minds think up this crap?

Speaking of crap, that leads us right back to accusing African Americans of 8’s so-called victory.  I think that shows a tremendous amount of cowardice on the parts of the so-called liberal pundits.   The Mormons are more than just a church, they are a major economic force with financial and voting interests in newspapers, radio, and television.  If a reporter messes with the Mormons he risks his job.   The Mormons are not above blacklisting reporters and commentators who stand up to them.  So it is simply easier and safer to pick on African Americans, who are still relatively disenfranchised in this society. Also remember that we now have an African American president-elect.   I would not put it past the Mormon Church to start a divide and conquer campaign over the gay marriage issue.   It would certainly fit into the Mormon racist agenda to have the left in a race battle over Proposition 8, instead of concentrating on the actual malefactors in this debacle.

Mormons were not the only ones behind the campaign of lies for Proposition 8.   The Catholics and the Pentecostals joined in with the Mormons in breaking the Commandment against bearing false witness.  There is some comfort in the thought that these hypocrites are going to hell for pushing 8 through.   After all the lies that were spread by these churches, it’s a wonder that their angry and jealous God hadn’t destroyed Rome and Salt Lake City like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah.   It’s almost heartening to see two churches like the Mormon and the Catholic getting along so well.  Both Churches have accused each other of heresy, apostasy, and halitosis for decades, but they managed to close ranks and behave like long lost brothers when it comes to denying a minority their civil rights.  Then the Pentecostals come along and join with the Catholics and the Mormons just as if all three have gotten along for years.  It seems that religious differences takes a back seat to the true purpose of the Christianoid Churches, which is to maintain their political power at any cost.

The doughty followers of Joseph Smith have been the backbone of the religious movement to send America back to the 19^th Century.   Pat Robertson and the Catholic Church would have not been able to do the social damage they have accomplished if they did not have the Mormon financial empire behind them.  Mormons have spent billions of dollars in campaigns against women’s rights, teaching science in the classrooms, and most recently in pushing through Proposition 8 in California.  The Mormons spent over 20 million dollars in influencing an election in California, and they blatantly broke election laws to do it.   They organized phone banks in Utah and Nevada and sent bulk mail from Salt Lake City to push through a Proposition in California. That is as illegal as registering dead people to vote.   Most aggravating of all, some of our religious initiative money went to fund this, and the Mormon Church still enjoys federal and state tax-free status.

Needless to say, interfering in the electoral process is a direct violation of the current tax codes.   Jerry Falwell and his Old Time Gospel Hour lost their tax free status for pulling the same dirty tricks that the Mormons pulled during the 8 campaign.   So why do the Mormons still enjoy their tax free status?   For that matter, why do the Catholics or the Pentecostals?   It seems to me that if Churches want to participate in the electoral process and impose their degraded superstitions on the rest of us, then they should be required to pay taxes just like everybody else.   They play, they pay.   I think that’s only fair.

But God Loves These Losers

What’s In A Name?

Who Wants A Playwright Named Snakesfear?

God knows that I am no fan of Obama.   In my personal opinion, Barack Obama is simply another sleazy Chicago Machine politician, and his presidency is going to be as big a disaster for the country as eight long years of Baby-Doc Bush.  This has everything to do with his policies and nothing to do with his funny name.   When you stop and think about it, Obama’s name is common in Kenya.  Here in the United States there is still an element that considers funny names to be frightening.  Traditional British names such as Bush or Clinton are still considered to be “American” names.   Once Irish names, like Reagan were considered to be foreign names. People forget that back in 1960 John F. Kennedy’s name was as scary as Barack Hussein Obama.

Kennedy was an Irish Catholic.   Back in 1960 that was as scary as being a Muslim.  There was a strong anti-Catholic element within the Democratic Party who opposed his nomination because they did not want the Pope ruling America through our president.   Former President Harry S. Truman made a better assessment of a Kennedy presidency when he quipped “I’m not afraid of the Pope; I’m afraid of the Pop”.   Truman was referring to the fact that Kennedy’s father was part of the very financial industry that is ruining this country today.

An honest assessment of the Kennedy presidency may never be written. He became a 20^th Century martyr. Possibly because he was Catholic, and that revolting closet case, J. Edgar Hoover, was determined to hide his homosexuality by oppressing all minorities. We will not impartially study the Bay of Pigs outside of Kennedy’s Martyrdom, nor will we honestly asses his part in the Vietnam war.   Conservatives certainly did blame Kennedy’s reluctant support of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to the fact of Kennedy being part of a religious minority. The fact was that Kennedy had no choice in the face of a massive uprising of oppressed citizens. v Nixon would have done the same had he been president.

Giving the devil his due, Richard M. Nixon was the last president to campaign on the issues.   Kennedy avoided the issues entirely and answered with slogans and vague promises for a bright future.  I do think that Kennedy was the better president for the times.  Regardless of his motivation, Kennedy did the right thing when he supported civil rights.  At the same time he supported big business’s priorities in technological and industrial advancement.  Despite that there were still conservatives who claimed that Kennedy won because he was better looking than Nixon.   I even had some teachers who credited Kennedy’s success to women’s suffrage.

Today we are looking at a revival of the original Kennedy campaign.  We have a dark-skinned candidate with an African name, and we have idiots claiming that he is a Muslim.   He is being linked to black radicals and to washed up, wannabe terrorists from the Sixties.   Those who claim that he’s a Muslim forget that he used to go to a Christian church whose pastor told an uncomfortable truth, that racism is alive and well in the United States today. This is proved by the fact that Obama’s name and skin color are issues.   If the Republicans were really serious about winning this election, they could do it on race alone.

The fact is that the Republicans don’t want the election.   The next twenty years are going to be spent trying to get America out of the hole that the Neocons dropped us into.   It would be more profitable for the Neocons to step aside and to blame the Democrats for all the misery we are going to be seeing for the next two decades.  This has been the Republican strategy since Carter was president.  The Neocon strategy has been to own both parties.  Bill Clinton was just as much a Neocon as Ronald Reagan.   Look at the way Clinton tore the social safety net to pieces and set things up for Baby-Doc Bush to take over. Bush would have had a hard time if Clinton hadn’t paved the way by signing NAFTA and McCain’s financial reform bills.

The fact that Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church and associated with Sixties radicals is the only hope I have for the next four years.   When you look at Obama’s actual policies, they are almost identical to McCain’s.   Obama has maintained the illusion of being a liberal by abstaining from voting on key bills and laws.   Obama’s health care reform is worse than McCain’s.   McCain is pretty much going to leave things as they are, while Obama is giving a massive cash giveaway to the health corporations.   Obama is even going to expand Faith-Based Initiatives.   I have absolutely no hope that Obama is going to end the wars.  The differences between McCain and Obama are purely cosmetic.  Yet there are those who insist on making race the issue.

We Are As America As Corporate Welfare

9. Corporate Power is Protected

It's All His Fault, Folks

This is where it all sums up.  The entire purpose of the Libertarian movement is to protect corporate power.  Both inhuman and inhumane, corporations already rule this country with an iron hand.  Rather than depend on one single political movement as Henry Ford and Prescott Bush did with the Nazi Party, the American-based corporations had three waves of Fascism.  First was the Republican party as represented by Barry Goldwater.  Then came the religious right.  About the same time that the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell was rising to the top of the septic tank, Karl Hess was founding his “New Left”.  The term was co-opted from the free speech and civil rights groups of the Sixties.  The only thing it has in common with the SDS and the Black Panthers is the name.  Hess’s “New Left” was only Goldwater conservatism dressed up in a hippie wig.

Barry Goldwater was the darling of the pro-Vietnam war faction of the United States.  As the governor of Arizona, he joined with Georgia governor Lester Maddox and Alabama governor George Wallace as champions of the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation.  The difference is that Goldwater was smarter than Maddox and Wallace and avoided racism in his rhetoric.  Goldwater’s entire rationalization against civil rights was based on the Federalist Papers.  That was the birth of the Libertarian movement.

The corporations had been taking a real beating since the FDR administration.  There were federal watchdog agencies seeing to it that they conducted themselves in an ethical manner.  There was no more selling on the margin for the stock brokerages, and the media could no longer pull con jobs on the public as Randolph Hearst so enjoyed doing.  Legally protected collective bargaining assured even the humblest American his share of the American dream. Jim Crow guaranteed that corporations would have an excess labor pool which kept wages low and profits high.  Civil rights destroyed that excess labor pool and removed wages from supply and demand.  Wages would be set through collective bargaining instead.

The corporations had a brilliant friend in Goldwater’s scriptwriter, Karl Hess.  He was a public relations expert who accurately predicted the rising popularity of Anarchy on the left.  I suspect it was because he worked for the Black Panthers after he left the Goldwater camp.  Hess came up with a “national anarchy” which was simply fascism with a new rhetoric.  It was a rhetoric based on the Federalist Papers where the listeners were encouraged to identify with the Founders of the United States.  It equated American freedom with free market capitalism.  It rewrote history to forget that President Jackson had to bust the monopolies in order to preserve freedom.  Hess promoted the myth of government spending as a means of preserving corporate profits and reducing the citizen’s ability to enforce corporate responsibility.

Human rights were reduced to the right to starve under a free market regime.  Under Hess’s New Left, families and churches were responsible for the poor.  Apparently Hess’s time with the Black Panthers failed to teach him that poor people generally have poor families, and anybody who walks through a major city will see how well the churches take care of the poor.  Hess also promoted the Protestant Work Ethic and blamed the poor for America’s failure to maintain a minimal standard of living.

The most surprising thing is that nobody equated Karl Hess’s New Left with the rhetoric Ronald Reagan used when he took the White House and handed the nation over to the multinational corporations.  The rhetoric was the same.  Simply put, both Reagan and the New Left claimed that we had no responsibility for the state of our nation and our economy.  We were supposed to let the mysterious force known as The Market Place take care of everything.  This is the same as the Christianoids saying “let go and let God”.

The New Left has grown into the Libertarian Party, but remains true to its roots in Goldwater Conservatism. The Libertarian solution to everything is to ignore our responsibilities to our nation and our fellow citizens and let the corporations do anything they want without limit.  Why they do this is found in the rhetoric that Libertarians use. We will look at this in tomorrow’s post.

Your Employer Will Become Your Health Agent

An American Bed Time Story

The Recession Killed all the Libertarians, and We Lived Happilly Ever After

Once upon a time in a place called the United States, there was a little boy named Tommy who never did anything his mommy and daddy told him to do. His mommy would tell him to clean his room and he would say “no”. His daddy would ask him to take out the garbage, and Tommy would say “no”. Tommy’s mommy and daddy thought that he was so cute that Tommy’s mommy would clean his room for him and his daddy would take out the garbage himself. As Tommy got older, he said no more often. His mommy would say, “don’t run with scissors, you’ll fall and hurt yourself”.

Tommy would reply, “you’re not the boss of me”, and he would run and hurt himself, and then go crying to his mommy. Tommy’s mommy was so upset that her little angel hurt himself that she put a band-aid on the boo-boo and kissed it to make it all better.

Sometimes Tommy’s daddy would say, “I’ll give you ten dollars if you help wash the car tomorrow”.

Then Tommy would say, “could I have the ten dollars now so I can go to the movies with Karl and Ron?”

“Sure, Son,” said Tommy’s daddy as he took out his wallet.

The next day, Tommy’s dad washed the car all by himself while Tommy stayed in his room watching TV. Tommy was just so cute and his mommy and daddy loved him so much that there were no consequences. They let their little angel do anything he wanted to do.

Tommy was bigger and stronger than the other kids in the school yard. His daddy was rich and influential so the teachers let Tommy get away with anything he wanted to do. Tommy would beat up some nameless black kid and steal his lunch money, and then tell the principal that the black kid hit him first. Tommy was white, so the principal punished the black kid for losing his lunch money. If Tommy felt like it, he would beat up some nameless little girl and laugh when the little girl got blamed for it. Tommy had a gang of little boys who thought it was really cool that Tommy could beat up anybody he wanted to and get away with it. So they helped him and got away with it too. The principal said that Tommy was a real leader. His teachers gave him good marks because they liked him better than the black kid and everyone knew little girls shouldn’t get better marks than little boys.

Tommy went to an Ivy League college because his daddy gave generously to the alumni association. So Tommy took the place of a Hispanic student who got better grades. Tommy spent his college years partying, but got passing marks because he was a legacy. All of Tommy’s professors knew he was a dunderhead, but the administrators loved him because they could look forward to big donations. When Tommy graduated he went straight into a job with one of his father’s friends.

Tommy did not see where he had to do anything he did not want to do. Tommy’s grade school friends felt the same way. The nameless black kid was not strong enough to keep Tommy from taking his lunch money, so why should Tommy vote in favor of civil rights? If women were not strong enough to defend themselves, why should the government have laws defending them? If Tommy wanted to discriminate against a minority, what business did the government have to tell him he couldn’t? If minorities could not find employment, why should Tommy’s tax money go to a social safety net? It was not Tommy’s fault that the nameless black kid’s dad didn’t have the same connections as his father. Tommy felt the same way about National Health and Social Security. What right did the government have interfering in his health care? What right did the government have taking money out of his pocket to be invested in a Social Security account?

So the day came when Tommy’s doctor had bad news. Tommy had cancer. Tommy wasn’t really worried because he had a job with health benefits. Then Tommy discovered that his health benefits did not cover all of his doctor’s visits. So Tommy had to reach into his savings to pay for his doctor’s visits. Then Tommy discovered that his HMO only paid a percentage of his chemotherapy and Tommy had to pay for the rest out of his pocket. Soon Tommy’s HMO decided that it was too expensive to treat Tommy’s cancer and refused to pay for any of Tommy’s treatments. So Tommy had to hire a lawyer to sue his HMO. That ate up more of Tommy’s savings and Tommy had to reach into his mutual funds and his IRA.

Next Tommy’s employers decided that they wanted a younger worker they could pay less. So Tommy got fired. Tommy did not have enough savings left to pay for his medical care and provide for his family. So Tommy turned to his old grade school gang who ignored him because Tommy should have planned his life better. Tommy then applied for government assistance and was refused because Tommy’s wife made too much money. All was not lost, because Tommy owned his own home. A friendly neighborhood sub-prime lender sold Tommy a high interest adjustable rate mortgage. Tommy’s wife did not make enough money to cover the rising mortgage payments, food and Tommy’s medical expenses. After the mortgage meltdown, Tommy and his family had their home foreclosed on.

Poor Tommy, he started out as mommy and daddy’s little angel who could do no wrong and ended up sick, poor and indigent because there was no social safety net to catch him when he got sick. He died indigent and in agony from poorly treated cancer. The moral of this story is that parents should not let their children grow up to be Libertarians.

Two Guys Dumb Enough to be Left Holding the Bag

Why People Become Libertarians

Who Would Possibly Take This Character Seriously?

I think that everybody goes through a Libertarian phase while growing up. This phase tends to begin during college and lasts all the way up to the point where the you actually have to live in the real world, make a real living, and realize that the world around you doesn’t really give a damn. Libertarianism lasts until you have two kids, rent or a mortgage, and your job has been outsourced to Timbuktu. That social safety net starts looking pretty damned good when you have to explain to your landlord why the rent will be late, or your sitting by the phone afraid it is going to be the bank asking about your mortgage payments. To give another example, when Mr. or Ms. Libertarian comes down with cancer and cannot cough up the co-payments for the treatments and feed the kids, then suddenly it looks like the government just might be able to do something better than the private sector after all.

From my limited experience, internet companies tend to be Libertarian. This really makes sense to me. If I were the CEO of an internet company I would certainly foster a Libertarian corporate culture. Could Yahoo have supported their Chinese overlords in the suppression of human rights if Yahoo programmers and technical people had a union that could strike in support of human rights? Would Google be able to discriminate against older workers if there was a union to file a discrimination suit? Now that the major internet companies are outsourcing their jobs to Israel, it’s too late to unionize. All they can do is sit in their foreclosed houses and wait for the sheriff to turn them out in the street. Maybe if they pray in front of a picture of Ron Paul, the great god Market Place will readjust the economy in their favor.

Another thing I have noticed about Libertarians is that they entirely miss the correlation of cause and effect. They remind me of my oldest boy when he was three years old. We would tell him not to touch the stove and he would touch the stove as soon as our backs were turned and then get angry at us because he got burned. Five minutes later he would be trying to touch the stove again to see if it would burn him again. Our oldest grew out of that phase, but I have met Libertarians in their 60s who are still don’t believe that a hot stove will burn them every time they touch it. I am still waiting for them to make the basic correlation between the rise in the cost of food and the persecution of undocumented workers. On the subject of undocumented workers, I cannot believe that a group of people who are so paranoid about “big government” can support a fence across Mexico. I cannot believe that a group of people who are so adamant about the sanctity of property rights would support a wall that illegally cuts through Apache-owned lands, and which disrupts and destroys the Apache’s livelihood. The United States and Homeland Security have no right to build anything across the Apache Reservation. I suppose that sacred property rights only apply to White Anglo Protestants. I can’t wait until the Libertarians figure out that governments only build fences to keep their own citizens in. I can’t wait until the penny drops on that one. I will laugh myself into a hernia when the border guards turn their guns on U.S citizens for trying to follow their outsourced jobs into Mexico. You will be able to tell which U.S citizens are Libertarian, because they will be the ones who charge at the armed guards a second time.

It also never ceases to amaze me the other basic results of cause and effect that Libertarians simply don’t get. In one breath they will berate the FCC and then kvetch about Fox News. I understand that many of them are simply to young to understand that the FCC had prevented obscenities like Fox News before Reagan deregulated it, but I simply cannot believe they have not made the correlation between corporate crime and deregulation. They keep insisting that corporate crime and the Media can be controlled through some mysterious, unseen omniscient force called The Market Place with the same vehemence a Christianoid argues about The Rapture and with just as little evidence.

As a salesman and former Public Relations worker, I often wonder what attracts otherwise intelligent people to a political cause that accomplishes the opposite of their stated goals. Libertarians claim to be in favor of liberty (hence the name) yet their entire philosophy guarantees the opposite. They reject unions and labor laws and then they blame “big government “when they are illegally fired and there is no union to protect them. They claim that business laws and regulations are a waste of tax payer’s money and a threat to their liberty, and they don’t seem to notice that it’s not their mortgage broker who is losing his house. Government deregulation has successfully disempowered everybody and has made us all subject to the whims and fancies of the corporation without any legal recourse, and yet Libertarians continue to place the blame government for their problems and see the solution as continuing to surrender more of their legal rights to the very corporations that are screwing them.

Of course a big part of it is that Libertarians identify with those whom they see as having power. This is the same social force that inspires Bill Cosby to blame his fellow African-Americans for the very bigotry that oppresses them and which made a flaming queen like J. Edgar Hoover to hide in the closet and oppress his fellow homosexuals. It is the basic psychology of the schoolyard; if you stand behind the bully, defend the bully, and do what the bully tells you, and bully those you see as weaker than you, the bully won’t pick on you. This is why Libertarians who claim to support the separation of church and state support a flaming Christianoid like Ron Paul. As Libertarians surrender all their power to the employers and live in constant fear of outsourcing, workplace discrimination and, illegal termination, they pass on their fear and frustration by supporting Ron Paul. Ron Paul would allow discrimination against women by removing the federal protections for abortion. Ron Paul would remove the federal civil rights laws which would allow corporations and the southern states to continue and increase their discrimination against minorities. Libertarians have already supported Bush, Clinton and the rest of the neocons in taking away the social safety net, but Ron Paul would take away what few shreds were left. Ron Paul would end the drug war, the Libertarian would argue. If American society was a schoolyard, Ron Paul would be the bully who beats up the little girl, the black kid, the poor kid, and the disabled kid for their lunch money, and ending the drug war could be seen as Paul giving his schoolyard cronies a nickel of it.

In my opinion, this is why so many internet Libertarians are also trolls. Rather than empower themselves through unionization, political unity against corporate abuse in the economy and the workplace, and aiding others to empower themselves through an intelligent and compassionate social safety net, they take out their abuse on others. Then, when they discover that their victims also have power and legal protections, they cry and scream like elementary schoolers being sent to the principals office. They cry censorship and constitutional violation with the same immaturity as a little kid screaming obscenities in the classroom to see what the teacher would do. I suspect that most Libertarians have deep seated boundary issues, and that would certainly fit into my school bully analogy. Ultimately I think that is the true appeal of the Libertarian party. It appeals to the inner child who still thinks that he can have ice cream for dinner every night when he grows up. Libertarian propaganda stresses the concept that nobody has the right to say no to you no matter how badly your actions inflict the rights of others, and ignores our responsibilities to our fellow person, our children, our grandchildren, our nation, and the world.

So is it any wonder that a rapture believing Christianoid like Ron Paul would become the candidate of choice for internet trolls?