My income comes from three sources, Social Security, State Retirement
and the Department of Education. The source of my income has no
bearing on the fact that I am very pro social security, strongly in
favor of our state retirement program, and an advocate of the US
Department of Education.
Yes siree, if any of them did anything suspect I would be among the
first to call for an investigation, and if they were found to be
guilty, I'd advocate appropriate penalties, after all appeals were
exhausted.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/15/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> ________________________________________
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN
> Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
>
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> [50]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14sym
> [17]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15sym
> [18]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16sym
> [19]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17sym
> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12anc
> [38]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13anc
> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17anc
> [45]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18anc
> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
>
> The Clintons' $93 Million Romance With Wall Street
> By Richard Behan [1] / AlterNet [2]
> March 11, 2016
> For 24 years Bill and Hillary Clinton have courted Wall Street money with
> notable success. During that time the New York banks contributed:
> . $11.17 million to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992.
> . $28.37 million for his re-election in 1996.
> . $2.13 million to Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign in 2002.
> . $6.02 million for her re-election in 2006.
> . $14.61 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008.
> . $21.42 million to her 2016 campaign.
> The total here is $83.72 million for the six campaigns,i [3] ii [4]
> disbursed from 11 banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Barclay's, JP Morgan Chase, CIBC,
> Credit
> Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley.iii [5] iv [6]
> Then there were the speeches. Sixteen days after leaving the White House in
> 2001, Mr. Clinton delivered a speech to Morgan Stanley, for which he was
> paid $125,000. That was the first of many speeches to the New York banks.
> Over the next 14 years, Mr. Clinton's Wall Street speaking engagements
> earned him a total of $5,910,000:v [7]
> . $1,550,000 from Goldman Sachs.
> . $1,690,000 from UBS.
> . $1,075,000 from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
> . $770,000 from Deutsche Bank.
> . $700,000 from Citigroup
> After she resigned as Secretary of State in 2012, Hillary Clinton took to
> the lecture circuit as well. Some of her income has come to light during
> the
> current presidential campaign, like the $675,000 she was paid for three
> speeches to Goldman Sachs. That disclosure, however, belittles her
> financial
> achievement and the scope of her audiences. She also addressed the Bank of
> America/Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Ameriprise,
> Apollo Management Holdings, CIBC, Fidelity Investments, and Golden Tree
> Asset Management, earning another $2,265,000.vi [8]
> No other political couple in modern history has enjoyed so much money
> flowing to them from Wall Street for such a long time-$92.57 million over a
> quarter century.
> During a CNN forum on February 3, Anderson Cooper wondered if Goldman
> Sachs'
> $675,000 might impact her prospective presidential decisions. Defending her
> integrity with undisguised indignation, she described her independence from
> the banks:
> Anybody who knows me, who thinks that they can influence me, name anything
> they've influenced me on. Just name one thing. I'm out here every day
> saying
> I'm going to shut them down, I'm going after them. I'm going to jail them
> if
> they should be jailed. I'm going to break them up.vii [9]
> Her campaign website confirms her fierce determination to oversee the banks
> and hold them strictly to account. "Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> the website claims, outlining her program for "Wall Street Reform":
> . Veto Republican efforts to repeal or weaken Dodd-Frank
> . Tackle dangerous risks in the big banks and elsewhere in the
> financial system.
> . Hold both individuals and corporations accountable when they break
> the law.viii [10]
> $675,000 might be insufficient to elicit Ms. Clinton's sympathetic ear, but
> a quarter century of accepting tens of millions of dollars is not so easily
> dismissed. It might have some impact on the Clintons' sense of gratitude
> and
> certainly on their social, cultural and political environments.
> Over that period of time, while one or the other held public office almost
> continuously, the couple accumulated a net worth of $125 million.ix [11] x
> [12] Measured by family wealth, this inserted the couple into the top 1% of
> American families by a factor of 16 ($7.88 million is the threshold).
> In New York, their home upon leaving the White House, the Clintons moved
> easily among other multimillionaires, the celebrated, wealthy, and
> accomplished people of the city, such as Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin and
> Henry Paulson, CEOs of the benefactor Wall Street banks. The couple could
> scarcely avoid adopting the mindset and political perspectives of the
> people
> who now constituted their peer group.
> Breaking up banks, jailing the lawless executives, forcing Wall Street to
> work for Main Street: Hillary Clinton's stern proclamations of impartial
> law
> enforcement and strict regulation are difficult to take seriously.
> Wall Street doesn't. One bank executive assured his clients, "We continue
> to
> believe Clinton would be one of the better candidates for financial firms."
> He was quoted in a CNN Money article, "Wall Street Isn't Worried about
> Hillary Clinton's Plan," which stated,
> Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plan to curb the worst of Wall Street's
> excesses. The reaction from the banking community was a shrug.xi [13]
> There is good reason for the banks' sanguine view. Over the 24 years of the
> romance, the Clintons first reoriented their political party, gave it a new
> name, the New Democratic Party, and put it at Wall Street's service. Then
> they engineered financial opportunities for the New York banks of immense
> value, running into the hundreds of billions. And through the years as
> president, senator and secretary of state, the Clintons supported Wall
> Street's interests at every necessary turn.
> In the early 1990s, chairing the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill
> Clinton
> ushered in the centrist, triangulating New Democratic Party, explicitly to
> be more business-friendly and to attract the financial support of corporate
> America. Wall Street supported his 1992 campaign handsomely, and Bill
> Clinton became the first president under the new banner, with Hillary
> Clinton at his side.
> When he appointed Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as Secretary of the
> Treasury
> Department, Clinton established a precedent. For the next 24 years, every
> administration would find Wall Street executives to serve in the position.
> But the working families of America and the African-American and Hispanic
> communities-the party's historic constituencies-were betrayed and
> abandoned,
> deprived of effective representation in Washington. The Clintons' political
> campaigns over the next decades became monumental hypocrisies, Bill donning
> sunglasses to play his saxophone for Arsenio Hall, Hillary visiting black
> churches to hug the parishioners. They speak warmly to the traditional
> constituencies with carefully scripted political rhetoric, currying their
> favor, depending on them for electoral victory, but effectively obscuring
> the truth of their betrayal.
> On taking office Mr. Clinton announced, "The era of big government is
> over."
> On that cue he co-opted two issues long used by Republicans to mask their
> party's racism: "welfare" and "crime." To address the issues, two laws were
> passed in Clinton's first term that savaged the betrayed constituencies.
> The first was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
> Reconciliation Act, which fulfilled Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we
> know it." Since the end of the Clinton administration, poverty in the U.S.
> has nearly doubled: "...the number of Americans living in high-poverty
> areas
> rose to 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000, with African
> Americans and Latinos driving most of the gains."xii [14]
> To show how tough on crime he could be, Clinton next guided the Violent
> Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 through Congress. A flurry of
> prison construction quickly followed, an industry of private for-profit
> prisons took hold and flourished, and a skyrocketing population mostly of
> young black males soon filled them, most frequently charged with nonviolent
> drug offenses.
> Sixteen years later, the effects of the law were described by Michelle
> Alexander in her searing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
> Age of Colorblindness. Alexander well understands how the Clintons and
> their
> creation, the New Democratic Party, left working families and communities
> of
> color without a political voice. Her latest work is an article, "Black
> Lives
> Shattered," in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The Nation, in which she details
> how the two Clinton laws have devastated African-American families and sent
> millions to prison. In the article's caption, she asks, "The Clinton's
> legacy has been the impoverishment of black America-so why are we still
> voting for them?"
> From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and
> Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America. Hillary Clinton now
> apologizes for the laws, suggesting they are no longer quite so
> appropriate.
> But she has not, cannot and will not mention two other laws passed at the
> bidding of President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. These laws
> enriched the Wall Street banks by hundreds of billions of dollars, but they
> too devastated working families, African Americans and Latinos.
> The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, repealing
> the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. Now it was legal once more for
> financial institutions to mix commercial and investment banking. Goldman
> Sachs et al. could now use depositor's funds, insured by the Federal
> Deposit
> Insurance Corporation, to buy up "subprime" mortgages, the high-interest
> debt obligations of typically low-income, black and Latino families.
> The next law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Now Goldman Sachs
> et al. could transform packages of those subprime mortgages into
> complicated
> derivatives called mortgage-backed-obligations, have them fraudulently
> rated
> as AAA investments, and sell them around the world, without limit,
> restriction or regulation, at immense profit.
> For eight years the bubble inflated, and then it collapsed in the last year
> of George Bush's administration. Real estate values plummeted. The stock
> market was hammered. So was the U.S. economy. And so tragically were many
> low-income, African American and Latino families. $13 trillion in household
> wealth vaporized. Nine million workers lost their jobs. Five million
> families were evicted from their homes.xiii [15]
> This is what the Clinton administration, and the New Democratic Party, had
> wrought. The banks were caught with hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed
> derivatives still in the pipeline, the market values dropping like stones.
> Wall Street's prospective losses were horrific; bankruptcies loomed. But
> George Bush's Treasury Secretary was the obligatory Wall Streeter: Hank
> Paulson, recently CEO of Goldman Sachs. In a heartbeat, Paulson rammed
> through Congress the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It was
> known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and it handed Paulson $700
> billion of taxpayers' money to buy the near-worthless securities from the
> banks.
> Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. senator from New York, voted for the bill,
> telling a New York radio station the next day, "I think the banks of New
> York...are probably the biggest winners in this."xiv [16]
> Paulson started buying, typically paying the banks half again the market
> value of the "troubled assets."xv [17] But a presidential campaign was
> underway, and soon he would have to stop.
> Barack Obama, overcoming Hillary Clinton in the primaries, was elected as
> the second president from the New Democratic Party. Obama's campaign
> contributions from Wall Street:
> . Goldman Sachs: $1,034,615
> . JP Morgan Chase: $847,855
> . Citigroup: $755,057
> . Morgan Stanley: $528,182
> The total is $3.7 million.xvi [18] (Hillary Clinton's campaign, apparently
> thought more likely to succeed, was supported with $14.6 million from the
> banks.xvii [19])
> President Obama's choice of Wall Street bankers to head his Treasury
> Department was Timothy Geithner, lately the president of the Federal
> Reserve
> Bank of New York. Geithner wasted no time in resuming the troubled asset
> purchases, and his execution of the program was no less profitable for the
> banks than Paulson's.xviii [20]
> Wall Street's grip on the New Democratic Party, however, and its influence
> in the Obama administration, appeared in the Department of Justice as well.
> Eric Holder joined the administration from the law firm of Covington
> Burling, which represents in Washington most of the Wall Street banks.
> Charged with prosecuting their criminal behavior, Holder found the banks
> "too big to fail." Instead of criminal indictments and lawsuits, Holder
> negotiated with each of the banks a financial penalty to be paid from
> corporate funds. No corporate executives were jailed, no personal fines
> levied, no records of criminal conduct filed, no salaries reduced, no
> bonuses denied.
> Today the Wall Street banks are larger and more powerful than ever, and
> Holder has returned to Covington Burling. President Obama-of the New
> Democratic Party-has provided no similar relief to the working families and
> communities of color. Their struggles continue, the crime and welfare laws
> have not been repealed, and the title of a recent study tells the tragic
> truth: "During Obama's Presidency, Wealth Inequality has Increased and
> Poverty Levels are Higher."xix [21]
> i [22]"Two Clintons. 41 years. $3 Billion," Washington Post, November 19,
> 2015
> ii [23]"Occupy Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches," Huffpost Politics,
> February 28, 2016
> iii [24]"Hillary Clinton. Top 20 Contributors, 1999-2002,"
> http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid [25].
> iv [26]"Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush Still Favorites of Wall Street Banks,"
> Huffpost Politics, October 22, 2015
> v [27]"$153 Million in Bill and Hillary Speaking Fees, Documented," Robert
> Yoon, CNN, Updated February 6, 2016.
> vi [28]"Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks That Most of
> Us Earn in a Lifetime,"
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/ [29]
> vii [30]"Clinton Defends Wall Street Speeches at CNN Town Hall," Time,
> February 4, 2016
> viii [31]From Hillary Clinton's campaign website, under "Wall Street
> Reform," http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> ix [33]"Hillary Clinton net worth: $45 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> x [35]"Bill Clinton net worth: $80 Million,"
> http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ [34]
> xi [36]"Wall Street Isn't Worried about Hillary Clinton's Plan," CNN Money,
> October 8, 2015.
> xii [37]"Poverty Has Nearly Doubled Since 2000 in America," International
> Business Times, August 9, 2015
> xiii [38]"Wall Street Reform: Wall Street must work for Main Street,"
> http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street [32]
> xiv [39]"Hillary Clinton's Tough Talk on Wall Street,"
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton [40]..
> xv [41]"Troubled Asset Relief Program," Wikipedia
> xvi [42]"Barack Obama. Top Contributors, 2008 Cycle,"
> http;//www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid= [43]...
> xvii [44]Washington Post, "Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion"
> xviii [45]See Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main
> Street While Rescuing Wall Street, by Neil Barofsky, passim.
> xix
> [46]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-i
> nequality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/ [47]
> Richard Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at
> rwbehan(at)comcast.net [48].
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [49]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[50]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-93-million-romance-wall-stree
> t
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-behan
> [2] http://alternet.org
> [3] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1sym
> [4] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2sym
> [5] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3sym
> [6] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4sym
> [7] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5sym
> [8] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6sym
> [9] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7sym
> [10] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8sym
> [11] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9sym
> [12]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10sym
> [13]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11sym
> [14]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12sym
> [15]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13sym
> [16]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14sym
> [17]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15sym
> [18]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16sym
> [19]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17sym
> [20]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18sym
> [21]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19sym
> [22] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote1anc
> [23] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote2anc
> [24] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote3anc
> [25] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php/type==C&cid
> [26] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote4anc
> [27] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote5anc
> [28] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote6anc
> [29]
> https://theintercept.com/2016/01/08/hillary-clinton-earned-more-from-12-spee
> ches-to-big-banks-than-most-americans-earn-in-their-lifetime/
> [30] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote7anc
> [31] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote8anc
> [32] http://hillaryclinton.com/issues/wall-street
> [33] https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote9anc
> [34] http://www.celebritynetworth.com/
> [35]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote10anc
> [36]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote11anc
> [37]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote12anc
> [38]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote13anc
> [39]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote14anc
> [40] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/hillary-clinton
> [41]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote15anc
> [42]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote16anc
> [43] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php/cid=
> [44]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote17anc
> [45]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote18anc
> [46]
> https://mail.google.com/mail/u/4/#-2077643131_1335065318_sdendnote19anc
> [47]
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/during-obamas-presidency-wealth-inequ
> ality-has-increased-and-poverty-levels-are-higher/
> [48] http://comcast.net/
> [49] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Clintons' $93
> Million Romance With Wall Street
> [50] http://www.alternet.org/
> [51] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Monday, March 14, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers
A monument should be erected to McGraw-Hill, honoring them as the
national example of Yellow Bellied, chicken-livered destroyers of
history.
Anyone reading this article should be warned that this is an example
of how untrustworthy our record of history is. The strong write the
history. The victors change the events to suit their own plans.
There is no way that we would recognize the world of one thousand
years ago, much less the world of Jesus Christ. McGraw-Hill's
cowardly removal of their history book should be a reminder that each
of us can make up our own version of history, and it will be as valid
as that of our current Empire.
Just look at the example set forth by Donald Trump.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/12/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Here is more detail on this story from The Electronic Intufada.
>
> McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers
> Rania Khalek Lobby Watch 11 March 2016
>
> An image published by Elder of Ziyon from the textbook Global Politics, as
> part of the anti-Palestinian blogger's successful campaign to pressure
> McGraw Hill over maps depicting land loss in Palestine.
> The publisher McGraw-Hill Education is destroying all copies of a political
> science textbook after receiving complaints from hardline supporters of
> Israel that it features a series of "anti-Israel" maps.
> The college textbook, titled Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, was
> published in 2012. But it wasn't until early this month that the maps
> generated criticism from a pro-Israel blogger known as Elder of Ziyon.
> Within a week of the initial outcry, McGraw-Hill began destroying all
> copies
> of the book, scrubbed the book from its website, promised to reimburse
> anyone who bought the book and apologized to the offended right-wing bigots
> behind the manufactured controversy.
> According to the publisher's summary, the book fosters "critical thinking
> and theory" about global events and "offers students a number of lenses
> through which to view the world around them."
> The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show
> Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated
> the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic
> Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been
> reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West
> Bank and a sliver of Gaza.
> The caption reads, "A mix of diplomatic and military actions and expanded
> Jewish settlements since the founding of modern Israel has led to a gradual
> decline in Palestinian-held territory - which explains why the territory
> remains one of the central sticking points in the long-standing
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The image is sourced to the Middle East
> Political Research Center.
> Fear of maps
> Such maps present an enormous threat to Zionist ideologues because they
> have
> the ability to cut through Israeli propaganda that portrays Palestinian
> anger and violence as rooted in religious intolerance and irrational hatred
> rather than a natural reaction to Israel's colonial expansionism, land
> theft
> and ethnic cleansing, all of which continue today.
> That is why any time an iteration of these maps breaks into the mainstream,
> Israel's advocates rush to censor it.
> Just last year, when MSNBC aired a similar series of maps to demonstrate
> the
> dramatic theft of Palestinian land since Israel's foundation, pro-Israel
> groups pressured the cable news outlet to retract the segment.
> MSNBC eventually capitulated, calling the maps "not factually accurate."
> The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently
> anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.
> Elder of Ziyon's blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged
> supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps,
> denying, against all available evidence, that Palestinians were ever
> forcibly expelled from their homes in pre-planned acts of dispossession.
> Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel
> and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.
> TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting
> and supplying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists
> and
> policy makers.
> TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry
> and
> is headed by Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby
> group AIPAC.
> Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against
> bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.
> Independent review?
> The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and
> brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately
> suspending sales of the textbook pending a review.
> Elder of Ziyon celebrated and took credit for the outcome, noting that "the
> book is being or has been used in courses at Northwestern Oklahoma State
> University, University of Indianapolis, Western Illinois University, George
> Washington University School of Business and Marshall University."
> Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies
> of
> the book.
> "The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards,"
> McGraw-Hill spokesperson Catherine Mathis told Inside Higher Ed, adding,
> "We
> have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All
> existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment
> to anyone who returns the book."
> Inspired by anti-Muslim hate group leaders like Robert Spencer, Elder of
> Ziyon is dedicated to demonizing Palestinians and Muslims, and even argued
> that the paranoid manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik is "not all crazy
> sounding - it is scary how sane much of the document seems to be."
> "Some of [Breivik's] political analysis is actually on target," Elder of
> Ziyon stated after Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway, supposedly in an
> attempt to rescue Europe from what he viewed as the dark forces of Islam
> and
> Marxism.
> Breivik drew inspiration for his violent ideology from the US Islamophobia
> industry of which Elder of Ziyon is a part.
> Elder of Ziyon conceals his real identity, even when speaking in public.
> The textbook's authors - Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler -
> did
> not respond to requests for comment.
> Asked who carried out the review of the book, Mathis told The Electronic
> Intifada that it "was conducted by independent academics who determined
> that
> the maps were not accurate."
> Mathis did not respond to a follow-up query seeking more details about who
> carried out the review and how they reached such a conclusion.
> As for who pressured McGraw-Hill about the maps, Mathis would only say, "We
> heard about this from multiple sources."
> Given the highly politicized nature of all discussion related to Palestine
> in the United States, the definition of who is an "independent academic"
> would vary widely depending on the perspective of who is making the
> assessment. And if the "experts" are indeed independent, they should be
> willing to provide an explanation of how and why they deemed the maps to be
> inaccurate.
> The only way that McGraw-Hill's credibility can be assessed is with some
> transparency about the groups or "experts" who made this recommendation.
> Otherwise, we are left to assume that McGraw-Hill is effectively burning
> books to placate the censorship demands of right-wing anti-Palestinian
> bigots.
> Tags
> .
> Jump to navigation
> https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=3728
> https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=3728Get
> Updates
> /
> The Electronic Intifada
> You are here
> //blog/blog/lobby-watch
> McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers
> Rania Khalek Lobby Watch 11 March 2016
> &
> An image published by Elder of Ziyon from the textbook Global Politics, as
> part of the anti-Palestinian blogger's successful campaign to pressure
> McGraw Hill over maps depicting land loss in Palestine.
> The publisher McGraw-Hill Education is destroying all copies of a political
> science textbook after receiving complaints from hardline supporters of
> Israel that it features a series of "anti-Israel" maps.
> The college textbook, titled Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, was
> published in 2012. But it wasn't until early this month that the maps
> generated criticism from a pro-Israel blogger known as Elder of Ziyon.
> Within a week of the initial outcry, McGraw-Hill began destroying all
> copies
> of the book, scrubbed the book from its website, promised to reimburse
> anyone who bought the book and apologized to the offended right-wing bigots
> behind the manufactured controversy.
> According to the publisher's summary, the book fosters "critical thinking
> and theory" about global events and "offers students a number of lenses
> through which to view the world around them."
> The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show
> Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated
> the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic
> Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been
> reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West
> Bank and a sliver of Gaza.
> The caption reads, "A mix of diplomatic and military actions and expanded
> Jewish settlements since the founding of modern Israel has led to a gradual
> decline in Palestinian-held territory - which explains why the territory
> remains one of the central sticking points in the long-standing
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The image is sourced to the Middle East
> Political Research Center.
> Fear of maps
> Such maps present an enormous threat to Zionist ideologues because they
> have
> the ability to cut through Israeli propaganda that portrays Palestinian
> anger and violence as rooted in religious intolerance and irrational hatred
> rather than a natural reaction to Israel's colonial expansionism, land
> theft
> and ethnic cleansing, all of which continue today.
> That is why any time an iteration of these maps breaks into the mainstream,
> Israel's advocates rush to censor it.
> Just last year, when MSNBC aired a similar series of maps to demonstrate
> the
> dramatic theft of Palestinian land since Israel's foundation, pro-Israel
> groups pressured the cable news outlet to retract the segment.
> MSNBC eventually capitulated, calling the maps "not factually accurate."
> The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently
> anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.
> Elder of Ziyon's blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged
> supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps,
> denying, against all available evidence, that Palestinians were ever
> forcibly expelled from their homes in pre-planned acts of dispossession.
> Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel
> and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.
> TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting
> and supplying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists
> and
> policy makers.
> TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry
> and
> is headed by Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby
> group AIPAC.
> Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against
> bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.
> Independent review?
> The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and
> brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately
> suspending sales of the textbook pending a review.
> Elder of Ziyon celebrated and took credit for the outcome, noting that "the
> book is being or has been used in courses at Northwestern Oklahoma State
> University, University of Indianapolis, Western Illinois University, George
> Washington University School of Business and Marshall University."
> Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies
> of
> the book.
> "The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards,"
> McGraw-Hill spokesperson Catherine Mathis told Inside Higher Ed, adding,
> "We
> have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All
> existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment
> to anyone who returns the book."
> Inspired by anti-Muslim hate group leaders like Robert Spencer, Elder of
> Ziyon is dedicated to demonizing Palestinians and Muslims, and even argued
> that the paranoid manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik is "not all crazy
> sounding - it is scary how sane much of the document seems to be."
> "Some of [Breivik's] political analysis is actually on target," Elder of
> Ziyon stated after Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway, supposedly in an
> attempt to rescue Europe from what he viewed as the dark forces of Islam
> and
> Marxism.
> Breivik drew inspiration for his violent ideology from the US Islamophobia
> industry of which Elder of Ziyon is a part.
> Elder of Ziyon conceals his real identity, even when speaking in public.
> The textbook's authors - Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler -
> did
> not respond to requests for comment.
> Asked who carried out the review of the book, Mathis told The Electronic
> Intifada that it "was conducted by independent academics who determined
> that
> the maps were not accurate."
> Mathis did not respond to a follow-up query seeking more details about who
> carried out the review and how they reached such a conclusion.
> As for who pressured McGraw-Hill about the maps, Mathis would only say, "We
> heard about this from multiple sources."
> Given the highly politicized nature of all discussion related to Palestine
> in the United States, the definition of who is an "independent academic"
> would vary widely depending on the perspective of who is making the
> assessment. And if the "experts" are indeed independent, they should be
> willing to provide an explanation of how and why they deemed the maps to be
> inaccurate.
> The only way that McGraw-Hill's credibility can be assessed is with some
> transparency about the groups or "experts" who made this recommendation.
> Otherwise, we are left to assume that McGraw-Hill is effectively burning
> books to placate the censorship demands of right-wing anti-Palestinian
> bigots.
>
>
>
national example of Yellow Bellied, chicken-livered destroyers of
history.
Anyone reading this article should be warned that this is an example
of how untrustworthy our record of history is. The strong write the
history. The victors change the events to suit their own plans.
There is no way that we would recognize the world of one thousand
years ago, much less the world of Jesus Christ. McGraw-Hill's
cowardly removal of their history book should be a reminder that each
of us can make up our own version of history, and it will be as valid
as that of our current Empire.
Just look at the example set forth by Donald Trump.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/12/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Here is more detail on this story from The Electronic Intufada.
>
> McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers
> Rania Khalek Lobby Watch 11 March 2016
>
> An image published by Elder of Ziyon from the textbook Global Politics, as
> part of the anti-Palestinian blogger's successful campaign to pressure
> McGraw Hill over maps depicting land loss in Palestine.
> The publisher McGraw-Hill Education is destroying all copies of a political
> science textbook after receiving complaints from hardline supporters of
> Israel that it features a series of "anti-Israel" maps.
> The college textbook, titled Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, was
> published in 2012. But it wasn't until early this month that the maps
> generated criticism from a pro-Israel blogger known as Elder of Ziyon.
> Within a week of the initial outcry, McGraw-Hill began destroying all
> copies
> of the book, scrubbed the book from its website, promised to reimburse
> anyone who bought the book and apologized to the offended right-wing bigots
> behind the manufactured controversy.
> According to the publisher's summary, the book fosters "critical thinking
> and theory" about global events and "offers students a number of lenses
> through which to view the world around them."
> The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show
> Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated
> the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic
> Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been
> reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West
> Bank and a sliver of Gaza.
> The caption reads, "A mix of diplomatic and military actions and expanded
> Jewish settlements since the founding of modern Israel has led to a gradual
> decline in Palestinian-held territory - which explains why the territory
> remains one of the central sticking points in the long-standing
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The image is sourced to the Middle East
> Political Research Center.
> Fear of maps
> Such maps present an enormous threat to Zionist ideologues because they
> have
> the ability to cut through Israeli propaganda that portrays Palestinian
> anger and violence as rooted in religious intolerance and irrational hatred
> rather than a natural reaction to Israel's colonial expansionism, land
> theft
> and ethnic cleansing, all of which continue today.
> That is why any time an iteration of these maps breaks into the mainstream,
> Israel's advocates rush to censor it.
> Just last year, when MSNBC aired a similar series of maps to demonstrate
> the
> dramatic theft of Palestinian land since Israel's foundation, pro-Israel
> groups pressured the cable news outlet to retract the segment.
> MSNBC eventually capitulated, calling the maps "not factually accurate."
> The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently
> anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.
> Elder of Ziyon's blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged
> supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps,
> denying, against all available evidence, that Palestinians were ever
> forcibly expelled from their homes in pre-planned acts of dispossession.
> Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel
> and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.
> TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting
> and supplying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists
> and
> policy makers.
> TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry
> and
> is headed by Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby
> group AIPAC.
> Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against
> bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.
> Independent review?
> The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and
> brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately
> suspending sales of the textbook pending a review.
> Elder of Ziyon celebrated and took credit for the outcome, noting that "the
> book is being or has been used in courses at Northwestern Oklahoma State
> University, University of Indianapolis, Western Illinois University, George
> Washington University School of Business and Marshall University."
> Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies
> of
> the book.
> "The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards,"
> McGraw-Hill spokesperson Catherine Mathis told Inside Higher Ed, adding,
> "We
> have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All
> existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment
> to anyone who returns the book."
> Inspired by anti-Muslim hate group leaders like Robert Spencer, Elder of
> Ziyon is dedicated to demonizing Palestinians and Muslims, and even argued
> that the paranoid manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik is "not all crazy
> sounding - it is scary how sane much of the document seems to be."
> "Some of [Breivik's] political analysis is actually on target," Elder of
> Ziyon stated after Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway, supposedly in an
> attempt to rescue Europe from what he viewed as the dark forces of Islam
> and
> Marxism.
> Breivik drew inspiration for his violent ideology from the US Islamophobia
> industry of which Elder of Ziyon is a part.
> Elder of Ziyon conceals his real identity, even when speaking in public.
> The textbook's authors - Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler -
> did
> not respond to requests for comment.
> Asked who carried out the review of the book, Mathis told The Electronic
> Intifada that it "was conducted by independent academics who determined
> that
> the maps were not accurate."
> Mathis did not respond to a follow-up query seeking more details about who
> carried out the review and how they reached such a conclusion.
> As for who pressured McGraw-Hill about the maps, Mathis would only say, "We
> heard about this from multiple sources."
> Given the highly politicized nature of all discussion related to Palestine
> in the United States, the definition of who is an "independent academic"
> would vary widely depending on the perspective of who is making the
> assessment. And if the "experts" are indeed independent, they should be
> willing to provide an explanation of how and why they deemed the maps to be
> inaccurate.
> The only way that McGraw-Hill's credibility can be assessed is with some
> transparency about the groups or "experts" who made this recommendation.
> Otherwise, we are left to assume that McGraw-Hill is effectively burning
> books to placate the censorship demands of right-wing anti-Palestinian
> bigots.
> Tags
> .
> Jump to navigation
> https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=3728
> https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=3728Get
> Updates
> /
> The Electronic Intifada
> You are here
> //blog/blog/lobby-watch
> McGraw-Hill destroys textbook to placate pro-Israel bloggers
> Rania Khalek Lobby Watch 11 March 2016
> &
> An image published by Elder of Ziyon from the textbook Global Politics, as
> part of the anti-Palestinian blogger's successful campaign to pressure
> McGraw Hill over maps depicting land loss in Palestine.
> The publisher McGraw-Hill Education is destroying all copies of a political
> science textbook after receiving complaints from hardline supporters of
> Israel that it features a series of "anti-Israel" maps.
> The college textbook, titled Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, was
> published in 2012. But it wasn't until early this month that the maps
> generated criticism from a pro-Israel blogger known as Elder of Ziyon.
> Within a week of the initial outcry, McGraw-Hill began destroying all
> copies
> of the book, scrubbed the book from its website, promised to reimburse
> anyone who bought the book and apologized to the offended right-wing bigots
> behind the manufactured controversy.
> According to the publisher's summary, the book fosters "critical thinking
> and theory" about global events and "offers students a number of lenses
> through which to view the world around them."
> The maps, which appear in chronological succession on page 123, show
> Palestinian land loss from 1946, one year before Zionist militias initiated
> the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from historic
> Palestine, to the year 2000, by which point Palestinian land had been
> reduced to a handful of tiny non-contiguous enclaves in the occupied West
> Bank and a sliver of Gaza.
> The caption reads, "A mix of diplomatic and military actions and expanded
> Jewish settlements since the founding of modern Israel has led to a gradual
> decline in Palestinian-held territory - which explains why the territory
> remains one of the central sticking points in the long-standing
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The image is sourced to the Middle East
> Political Research Center.
> Fear of maps
> Such maps present an enormous threat to Zionist ideologues because they
> have
> the ability to cut through Israeli propaganda that portrays Palestinian
> anger and violence as rooted in religious intolerance and irrational hatred
> rather than a natural reaction to Israel's colonial expansionism, land
> theft
> and ethnic cleansing, all of which continue today.
> That is why any time an iteration of these maps breaks into the mainstream,
> Israel's advocates rush to censor it.
> Just last year, when MSNBC aired a similar series of maps to demonstrate
> the
> dramatic theft of Palestinian land since Israel's foundation, pro-Israel
> groups pressured the cable news outlet to retract the segment.
> MSNBC eventually capitulated, calling the maps "not factually accurate."
> The first criticisms of the textbook came from the virulently
> anti-Palestinian and pro-settlement blogger Elder of Ziyon.
> Elder of Ziyon's blog post on the textbook, published on 1 March, urged
> supporters of Israel to flood McGraw-Hill with emails against the maps,
> denying, against all available evidence, that Palestinians were ever
> forcibly expelled from their homes in pre-planned acts of dispossession.
> Within hours, the post was republished by The Tower, a self-styled Israel
> and Middle East-focused magazine and website run by The Israel Project.
> TIP is a right-wing pro-Israel lobbying outfit that specializes in crafting
> and supplying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim propaganda to journalists
> and
> policy makers.
> TIP receives funding from major bankrollers of the Islamophobia industry
> and
> is headed by Josh Block, former spokesperson for the powerful Israel lobby
> group AIPAC.
> Block gained notoriety for secretly coordinating a smear campaign against
> bloggers who were writing critically about Israeli government policy.
> Independent review?
> The Blaze, another right-wing media outlet, soon picked up the story and
> brought it to the attention of McGraw-Hill, which responded by immediately
> suspending sales of the textbook pending a review.
> Elder of Ziyon celebrated and took credit for the outcome, noting that "the
> book is being or has been used in courses at Northwestern Oklahoma State
> University, University of Indianapolis, Western Illinois University, George
> Washington University School of Business and Marshall University."
> Less than a week later, McGraw-Hill announced it would destroy all copies
> of
> the book.
> "The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards,"
> McGraw-Hill spokesperson Catherine Mathis told Inside Higher Ed, adding,
> "We
> have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All
> existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment
> to anyone who returns the book."
> Inspired by anti-Muslim hate group leaders like Robert Spencer, Elder of
> Ziyon is dedicated to demonizing Palestinians and Muslims, and even argued
> that the paranoid manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik is "not all crazy
> sounding - it is scary how sane much of the document seems to be."
> "Some of [Breivik's] political analysis is actually on target," Elder of
> Ziyon stated after Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway, supposedly in an
> attempt to rescue Europe from what he viewed as the dark forces of Islam
> and
> Marxism.
> Breivik drew inspiration for his violent ideology from the US Islamophobia
> industry of which Elder of Ziyon is a part.
> Elder of Ziyon conceals his real identity, even when speaking in public.
> The textbook's authors - Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler -
> did
> not respond to requests for comment.
> Asked who carried out the review of the book, Mathis told The Electronic
> Intifada that it "was conducted by independent academics who determined
> that
> the maps were not accurate."
> Mathis did not respond to a follow-up query seeking more details about who
> carried out the review and how they reached such a conclusion.
> As for who pressured McGraw-Hill about the maps, Mathis would only say, "We
> heard about this from multiple sources."
> Given the highly politicized nature of all discussion related to Palestine
> in the United States, the definition of who is an "independent academic"
> would vary widely depending on the perspective of who is making the
> assessment. And if the "experts" are indeed independent, they should be
> willing to provide an explanation of how and why they deemed the maps to be
> inaccurate.
> The only way that McGraw-Hill's credibility can be assessed is with some
> transparency about the groups or "experts" who made this recommendation.
> Otherwise, we are left to assume that McGraw-Hill is effectively burning
> books to placate the censorship demands of right-wing anti-Palestinian
> bigots.
>
>
>
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] House socialists and field socialists
Bruce Lesnick and Malcolm X lay it out clearly. Whether we are
talking about the House Socialist and the Field Socialist, or the
House Nigga or the Field Nigga, we are talking about people who are
controlled by their Master.
In our day we have the same problem. The Working Class has divided
itself into Working, Middle and Upper Middle Class. But all are still
under the control of the Ruling Class. For many years the Working
Class believed that if it worked hard and played by the Ruling Class'
rules, it would one day enjoy the same life style as its Master. Some
of the Working Class began to dress and talk like their Masters. Many
of these self anointed Middle Class folk adopted the contempt for the
Blue Collar Workers. This Middle Class became the First Defense of
the Ruling Class, destroying labor unions, supporting world conquest,
making profit their bottom line. The Ruling Class used the Middle
Class and the White Racists as wedges, driving people apart.
Despite his apparent sympathies, Bernie Sanders cannot "fix" a
government that is broken. Broken, that is, as far as the Working
Class is concerned. Change is coming, but not in an orderly well
planned method. The Ruling Class will never allow that. Since they
are on top and believe they are their due to their superior abilities,
they will never compromise. Most likely, America as we know it, or
America as we dream of it becoming, will never happen. We could well
become another Libya or Egypt.
In deed, the base problem, along with Capitalism, is this old thinking
of dividing the world up into nations. Corporations are busy
attempting to change that concept, but that will not be to the
advantage of the Working Class. We need to organize world-wide and
build a People's Government, where the bottom line is People, not
profit.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/6/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://socialistaction.org/house-socialists-and-field-socialists/
>
>
> House socialists and field socialists
>
> Published March 5, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
> Dec. 2015 Democrats
>
> By BRUCE LESNICK
>
> I wholeheartedly support the populist programs that Bernie Sanders
> advocates—from single-payer health care, to free college tuition, to
> taxing the rich and more. But borrowing from Malcolm X [see excerpt
> below], Bernie is a house socialist and I'm a field socialist.
>
> Bernie doesn't want to replace or overthrow capitalism. Like all house
> socialists, he thinks capitalism can be fixed or tamed with reforms. By
> contrast, we field socialists understand that the essence of
> capitalism—private ownership of major industry, resources, banks, and
> the exploitation of labor by appropriating surplus value (profit)—is
> antithetical to democracy.
>
> In fact, for all of Bernie's talk about "democratic socialism," he and
> other house socialists turn a blind eye to the lack of economic
> democracy that is the very hallmark of the capitalist system. Because
> Bernie is in favor of tweaking capitalism but opposed to dismantling it,
> he ignores the systemic lack of democracy in the workplace and the
> economy—the very aspects that most affects people's lives.
>
> Bernie rightly denounces the unequal distribution of wealth, where the
> top 1% owns more than the rest combined. But like all house socialists,
> Bernie fails to identify important institutions as being controlled by
> and serving the interests of the 1%. Congress, the Democratic and
> Republican parties, the national media, the police and the military are
> all captives of the 1%.
>
> In a class-divided society, all important institutions are wielded as
> tools of the dominant class. Field socialists understand that these
> institutions answer only to the needs of the 1%, even though much effort
> is made by official propagandists to convince us that they serve us all.
> Bernie and other house socialists aid the 1% in the criminal charade of
> pretending that government institutions, the police and the military
> exist and operate independent of the class divisions in our society.
>
> This is why it's no surprise that Bernie and other like-minded house
> socialists are military hawks. They see the U.S. army as "our" army
> rather than a weapon of the 1%. This is why Bernie has voted for nearly
> every war appropriations bill. This is why Bernie supports drones and
> U.S. military involvement in the Middle East; why he supported military
> action in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.
>
> This is why Bernie supported sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that
> caused the deaths of more than half a million children and he supported
> U.S. military action in Kosovo in 1999. This is why Bernie refuses to
> denounce the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine but supports
> billions in military aid for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other brutal U.S.
> client states that serve to extend the reach and protect the interests
> of the 1% overseas.
>
> Field socialists oppose imperial war-making, understanding that the
> individuals and institutions of the 1% that exploit us here at home
> cannot be trusted to defend our interests abroad. In contrast to the
> hawkish house socialists, field socialists demand: "All US Troops Out
> Now!" "Dismantle All US Military Bases Abroad!" "Not One Bomb, Not One
> Bullet for the Wars of the One Percent!" "Money for Jobs, Not for War!"
> (For a complete field socialist election platform, see here.)
>
> Because house socialists like Bernie limit their critique to reforms of
> the existing system, they are unable to propose concrete, workable
> solutions for the big problems we face. Take climate change, for
> example. Sure, house socialists say we must do more. But they emphasize
> tweaking economic incentives in the hope of persuading energy monopolies
> to change their behavior.
>
> House socialists support keeping the energy industry in the hands of
> private, profit-mad corporations. But gentle persuasion hasn't changed
> corporate behavior up to now and we shouldn't expect it to succeed in
> the future. As long as there are profits to be made by disregarding
> rules and incentives, corporations will do so. No incentives and no
> amount of persuasion can induce a leopard to change its spots; you have
> to replace the leopard. (For a field socialist analysis of climate
> change and the energy monopolies, see here.)
>
> Few Americans realize that there are different kinds of socialists.
> Since house socialists are less of a threat to the powers-that-be, they
> tend to get a wider hearing than field socialists. In many European
> countries, house socialist parties have mass followings. House
> socialists have served as prime ministers in France, Sweden, Portugal,
> Norway, Luxemburg and elsewhere. Yet, capitalism hums merrily along in
> Europe as in most of the rest of the world. If electing house socialists
> to high office made a crucial difference to addressing global injustice,
> climate change or endless war, we would have seen it by now.
>
> Unfortunately, there's no field socialist to vote for in the upcoming
> presidential election. Nor do we in the U.S. yet have a mass labor
> party—rooted in the working class and linked to militant, fighting trade
> unions—which could serve as a real alternative to the parties of the 1%.
> Given this void, it's not surprising that those fed up with the status
> quo might put their hopes in Bernie Sanders, a house socialist seeking
> to be the leader of a big-business party. But beware: while a vote for
> the house socialist candidate of a capitalist party might make some
> people feel good, no one should expect it to change much.
>
> *****
>
> Malcolm X on "The House Negro and the Field Negro"
>
> Below is an excerpt from Malcolm X's presentation on "The Race Problem."
> The talk was given on Jan. 23, 1963, to the African Students Association
> and NAACP campus chapter, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
>
> So, you have two types of Negro. The old type and the new type. Most of
> you know the old type. When you read about him in history during slavery
> he was called "Uncle Tom." He was the house Negro. And during slavery
> you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro.
>
> The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his
> master. He wore his master's second-hand clothes. He ate food that his
> master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house—probably in
> the basement or the attic—but he still lived in the master's house.
>
> So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified
> himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his
> master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "Yes, we
> have plenty of good food." "We" have plenty of good food. When the
> master said that "we have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes,
> we have a fine home here." When the master would be sick, the house
> Negro identified himself so much with his master he'd say, "What's the
> matter boss, we sick?" His master's pain was his pain. And it hurt him
> more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the
> house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put
> the master's house out than the master himself would.
>
> But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in
> the minority. The masses—the field Negroes were the masses. They were in
> the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die.
> [Laughter.] If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come
> along and fan the breeze.
>
> If someone came to the house Negro and said, "Let's go, let's separate,"
> naturally that Uncle Tom would say, "Go where? What could I do without
> boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?"
> That's the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said,
> "Let's go, let's separate," he wouldn't even ask you where or how. He'd
> say, "Yes, let's go." And that one ended right there.
>
> So now you have a twentieth-century-type of house Negro. A
> twentieth-century Uncle Tom. He's just as much an Uncle Tom today as
> Uncle Tom was 100 and 200 years ago. Only he's a modern Uncle Tom. That
> Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wears a
> top hat. He's sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the same
> phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you do.
> He speaks with the same accents, same diction.
>
> And when you say, "your army," he says, "our army." He hasn't got
> anybody to defend him, but anytime you say "we" he says "we." "Our
> president," "our government," "our Senate," "our congressmen," "our this
> and our that." And he hasn't even got a seat in that "our" even at the
> end of the line. So this is the twentieth-century Negro. Whenever you
> say "you," the personal pronoun in the singular or in the plural, he
> uses it right along with you. When you say you're in trouble, he says,
> "Yes, we're in trouble."
>
> But there's another kind of Black man on the scene. If you say you're in
> trouble, he says, "Yes, you're in trouble." [Laughter.] He doesn't
> identify himself with your plight whatsoever.
>
>
>
>
>
> Share this:
>
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> February 17, 2016
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> In "Elections"
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>
> In "Elections"
>
>
> Remembering Eugene V. Debs
>
> September 17, 2015
>
> In "Labor"
>
>
>
> Posted in Black Liberation, Elections, Marxist Theory & History. |
> Tagged Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Malcolm, socialism.
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talking about the House Socialist and the Field Socialist, or the
House Nigga or the Field Nigga, we are talking about people who are
controlled by their Master.
In our day we have the same problem. The Working Class has divided
itself into Working, Middle and Upper Middle Class. But all are still
under the control of the Ruling Class. For many years the Working
Class believed that if it worked hard and played by the Ruling Class'
rules, it would one day enjoy the same life style as its Master. Some
of the Working Class began to dress and talk like their Masters. Many
of these self anointed Middle Class folk adopted the contempt for the
Blue Collar Workers. This Middle Class became the First Defense of
the Ruling Class, destroying labor unions, supporting world conquest,
making profit their bottom line. The Ruling Class used the Middle
Class and the White Racists as wedges, driving people apart.
Despite his apparent sympathies, Bernie Sanders cannot "fix" a
government that is broken. Broken, that is, as far as the Working
Class is concerned. Change is coming, but not in an orderly well
planned method. The Ruling Class will never allow that. Since they
are on top and believe they are their due to their superior abilities,
they will never compromise. Most likely, America as we know it, or
America as we dream of it becoming, will never happen. We could well
become another Libya or Egypt.
In deed, the base problem, along with Capitalism, is this old thinking
of dividing the world up into nations. Corporations are busy
attempting to change that concept, but that will not be to the
advantage of the Working Class. We need to organize world-wide and
build a People's Government, where the bottom line is People, not
profit.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/6/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://socialistaction.org/house-socialists-and-field-socialists/
>
>
> House socialists and field socialists
>
> Published March 5, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
> Dec. 2015 Democrats
>
> By BRUCE LESNICK
>
> I wholeheartedly support the populist programs that Bernie Sanders
> advocates—from single-payer health care, to free college tuition, to
> taxing the rich and more. But borrowing from Malcolm X [see excerpt
> below], Bernie is a house socialist and I'm a field socialist.
>
> Bernie doesn't want to replace or overthrow capitalism. Like all house
> socialists, he thinks capitalism can be fixed or tamed with reforms. By
> contrast, we field socialists understand that the essence of
> capitalism—private ownership of major industry, resources, banks, and
> the exploitation of labor by appropriating surplus value (profit)—is
> antithetical to democracy.
>
> In fact, for all of Bernie's talk about "democratic socialism," he and
> other house socialists turn a blind eye to the lack of economic
> democracy that is the very hallmark of the capitalist system. Because
> Bernie is in favor of tweaking capitalism but opposed to dismantling it,
> he ignores the systemic lack of democracy in the workplace and the
> economy—the very aspects that most affects people's lives.
>
> Bernie rightly denounces the unequal distribution of wealth, where the
> top 1% owns more than the rest combined. But like all house socialists,
> Bernie fails to identify important institutions as being controlled by
> and serving the interests of the 1%. Congress, the Democratic and
> Republican parties, the national media, the police and the military are
> all captives of the 1%.
>
> In a class-divided society, all important institutions are wielded as
> tools of the dominant class. Field socialists understand that these
> institutions answer only to the needs of the 1%, even though much effort
> is made by official propagandists to convince us that they serve us all.
> Bernie and other house socialists aid the 1% in the criminal charade of
> pretending that government institutions, the police and the military
> exist and operate independent of the class divisions in our society.
>
> This is why it's no surprise that Bernie and other like-minded house
> socialists are military hawks. They see the U.S. army as "our" army
> rather than a weapon of the 1%. This is why Bernie has voted for nearly
> every war appropriations bill. This is why Bernie supports drones and
> U.S. military involvement in the Middle East; why he supported military
> action in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.
>
> This is why Bernie supported sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that
> caused the deaths of more than half a million children and he supported
> U.S. military action in Kosovo in 1999. This is why Bernie refuses to
> denounce the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine but supports
> billions in military aid for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other brutal U.S.
> client states that serve to extend the reach and protect the interests
> of the 1% overseas.
>
> Field socialists oppose imperial war-making, understanding that the
> individuals and institutions of the 1% that exploit us here at home
> cannot be trusted to defend our interests abroad. In contrast to the
> hawkish house socialists, field socialists demand: "All US Troops Out
> Now!" "Dismantle All US Military Bases Abroad!" "Not One Bomb, Not One
> Bullet for the Wars of the One Percent!" "Money for Jobs, Not for War!"
> (For a complete field socialist election platform, see here.)
>
> Because house socialists like Bernie limit their critique to reforms of
> the existing system, they are unable to propose concrete, workable
> solutions for the big problems we face. Take climate change, for
> example. Sure, house socialists say we must do more. But they emphasize
> tweaking economic incentives in the hope of persuading energy monopolies
> to change their behavior.
>
> House socialists support keeping the energy industry in the hands of
> private, profit-mad corporations. But gentle persuasion hasn't changed
> corporate behavior up to now and we shouldn't expect it to succeed in
> the future. As long as there are profits to be made by disregarding
> rules and incentives, corporations will do so. No incentives and no
> amount of persuasion can induce a leopard to change its spots; you have
> to replace the leopard. (For a field socialist analysis of climate
> change and the energy monopolies, see here.)
>
> Few Americans realize that there are different kinds of socialists.
> Since house socialists are less of a threat to the powers-that-be, they
> tend to get a wider hearing than field socialists. In many European
> countries, house socialist parties have mass followings. House
> socialists have served as prime ministers in France, Sweden, Portugal,
> Norway, Luxemburg and elsewhere. Yet, capitalism hums merrily along in
> Europe as in most of the rest of the world. If electing house socialists
> to high office made a crucial difference to addressing global injustice,
> climate change or endless war, we would have seen it by now.
>
> Unfortunately, there's no field socialist to vote for in the upcoming
> presidential election. Nor do we in the U.S. yet have a mass labor
> party—rooted in the working class and linked to militant, fighting trade
> unions—which could serve as a real alternative to the parties of the 1%.
> Given this void, it's not surprising that those fed up with the status
> quo might put their hopes in Bernie Sanders, a house socialist seeking
> to be the leader of a big-business party. But beware: while a vote for
> the house socialist candidate of a capitalist party might make some
> people feel good, no one should expect it to change much.
>
> *****
>
> Malcolm X on "The House Negro and the Field Negro"
>
> Below is an excerpt from Malcolm X's presentation on "The Race Problem."
> The talk was given on Jan. 23, 1963, to the African Students Association
> and NAACP campus chapter, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
>
> So, you have two types of Negro. The old type and the new type. Most of
> you know the old type. When you read about him in history during slavery
> he was called "Uncle Tom." He was the house Negro. And during slavery
> you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro.
>
> The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his
> master. He wore his master's second-hand clothes. He ate food that his
> master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house—probably in
> the basement or the attic—but he still lived in the master's house.
>
> So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified
> himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his
> master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "Yes, we
> have plenty of good food." "We" have plenty of good food. When the
> master said that "we have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes,
> we have a fine home here." When the master would be sick, the house
> Negro identified himself so much with his master he'd say, "What's the
> matter boss, we sick?" His master's pain was his pain. And it hurt him
> more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the
> house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put
> the master's house out than the master himself would.
>
> But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in
> the minority. The masses—the field Negroes were the masses. They were in
> the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die.
> [Laughter.] If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come
> along and fan the breeze.
>
> If someone came to the house Negro and said, "Let's go, let's separate,"
> naturally that Uncle Tom would say, "Go where? What could I do without
> boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?"
> That's the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said,
> "Let's go, let's separate," he wouldn't even ask you where or how. He'd
> say, "Yes, let's go." And that one ended right there.
>
> So now you have a twentieth-century-type of house Negro. A
> twentieth-century Uncle Tom. He's just as much an Uncle Tom today as
> Uncle Tom was 100 and 200 years ago. Only he's a modern Uncle Tom. That
> Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wears a
> top hat. He's sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the same
> phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you do.
> He speaks with the same accents, same diction.
>
> And when you say, "your army," he says, "our army." He hasn't got
> anybody to defend him, but anytime you say "we" he says "we." "Our
> president," "our government," "our Senate," "our congressmen," "our this
> and our that." And he hasn't even got a seat in that "our" even at the
> end of the line. So this is the twentieth-century Negro. Whenever you
> say "you," the personal pronoun in the singular or in the plural, he
> uses it right along with you. When you say you're in trouble, he says,
> "Yes, we're in trouble."
>
> But there's another kind of Black man on the scene. If you say you're in
> trouble, he says, "Yes, you're in trouble." [Laughter.] He doesn't
> identify himself with your plight whatsoever.
>
>
>
>
>
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Saturday, March 5, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] US capitalist ‘justice’ …some facts
A clear indication of just who this government is in business to
protect. Prisons, public and the growing number of private prisons,
are just one tool designed to keep control over the Working Class. We
hear of raids in the wee hours of the night, rousting men and women
and even little children out of their beds, rounding up some suspects
to keep the jails filled, but never do we hear of a raid in the wee
hours of the night to round up corrupt bankers who have been
responsible for so much of our nation's misery.
Whenever I hear folks talking about violations of the Law, I remind
myself that the Law they are referring to is that Law established to
protect the Ruling Class. That Law violates my rights on a daily
basis. But it is seldom applied to the wealthy corporate thieves.
Yet, these thieves are responsible for more misery and death than are
all of the Working Class prisoners in today's Forced Work Houses.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/5/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2016/8010/801062.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 80/No. 10 March 14, 2016
>
>
>
> US capitalist 'justice' …some facts
>
>
> World's jailer-in-chief
> • World's highest incarceration rate: US has 4.4% of world population
> but 22% of world's prisoners.
> • Some 7 million people (1 in 35 adults) are today in federal or state
> prison, local jails, or on parole or probation. • 5 percent of adult
> males and 17 percent of adult males who are Black are or have been
> behind bars.
>
> 'Plea bargains' and the right to a trial
> • 97% of federal and 94% of state convictions in criminal cases result
> from the accused pleading guilty to charges horse traded by prosecutors
> and defendants' lawyers.
> • In federal cases in 2003, defendants insisting on their right to a
> trial got sentences averaging nearly three times longer than those
> taking a "plea bargain" (12.5 years vs. 4.5 years).
>
> Life sentences, death row, and the 'hole'
> • More than 10 percent of US prisoners are serving life sentences,
> nearly a third life without parole.
> • Some 1 in 20 state and federal inmates are in the "hole," solitary
> confinement, or other punishment cells (2005).
> • 2,984 people are on death row (2015).
>
> Class, race, and incarceration
> • The vast majority of those behind bars are from the working class.
> Some 40% are Black.
> • 1 in 10 men in their 30s who are Black is in jail or prison any given
> day.
>
>
> From The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class
>
>
>
> Related articles:
> Class struggle in US and the Cuban Revolution today are focus of new
> books on the Cuban Five
> 'A powerful indictment of capitalism: how prisons grind up human beings,
> serve rulers' class interests'
> Students in Matanzas, Cuba, eager to learn about class politics in US
>
>
>
> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>
>
>
protect. Prisons, public and the growing number of private prisons,
are just one tool designed to keep control over the Working Class. We
hear of raids in the wee hours of the night, rousting men and women
and even little children out of their beds, rounding up some suspects
to keep the jails filled, but never do we hear of a raid in the wee
hours of the night to round up corrupt bankers who have been
responsible for so much of our nation's misery.
Whenever I hear folks talking about violations of the Law, I remind
myself that the Law they are referring to is that Law established to
protect the Ruling Class. That Law violates my rights on a daily
basis. But it is seldom applied to the wealthy corporate thieves.
Yet, these thieves are responsible for more misery and death than are
all of the Working Class prisoners in today's Forced Work Houses.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/5/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2016/8010/801062.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 80/No. 10 March 14, 2016
>
>
>
> US capitalist 'justice' …some facts
>
>
> World's jailer-in-chief
> • World's highest incarceration rate: US has 4.4% of world population
> but 22% of world's prisoners.
> • Some 7 million people (1 in 35 adults) are today in federal or state
> prison, local jails, or on parole or probation. • 5 percent of adult
> males and 17 percent of adult males who are Black are or have been
> behind bars.
>
> 'Plea bargains' and the right to a trial
> • 97% of federal and 94% of state convictions in criminal cases result
> from the accused pleading guilty to charges horse traded by prosecutors
> and defendants' lawyers.
> • In federal cases in 2003, defendants insisting on their right to a
> trial got sentences averaging nearly three times longer than those
> taking a "plea bargain" (12.5 years vs. 4.5 years).
>
> Life sentences, death row, and the 'hole'
> • More than 10 percent of US prisoners are serving life sentences,
> nearly a third life without parole.
> • Some 1 in 20 state and federal inmates are in the "hole," solitary
> confinement, or other punishment cells (2005).
> • 2,984 people are on death row (2015).
>
> Class, race, and incarceration
> • The vast majority of those behind bars are from the working class.
> Some 40% are Black.
> • 1 in 10 men in their 30s who are Black is in jail or prison any given
> day.
>
>
> From The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class
>
>
>
> Related articles:
> Class struggle in US and the Cuban Revolution today are focus of new
> books on the Cuban Five
> 'A powerful indictment of capitalism: how prisons grind up human beings,
> serve rulers' class interests'
> Students in Matanzas, Cuba, eager to learn about class politics in US
>
>
>
> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>
>
>
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Re: [blind-democracy] Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
I can always count on Matt Taiddi being a serious minded entertainer.
While I truly enjoyed this article, I totally disagree with Mister
Taiddi's claim that George Bush the Lessor, was the actual beginning
of the end. No, I don't put Donald Trump's name up for that grand
award, either. The fact is, we've had a pretty fair share of Flat
Headers in the Oval Office since early in our Exceptional History as
the True Democracy of the People. Still, we once seemed to learn from
our errors in judgement, and from time to time we actually sent some
pretty decent men to the White House.
But that cannot happen any longer. Not since our Controllers, the
Ruling Class, figured out how to control the mass media and use it,
along with mass advertising, to their advantage. By conditioning the
minds of Working Class Americans to long for all of the symbols that
seemed to indicate owning a piece of the Great American Dream, a job;
a home; a family. And a flat screen TV. Things have replaced ideas.
Like the pretty shiny beads and bobbles our Fore Fathers dangled
before the eyes of the Natives, we give up our principles and grab for
the Fool's Gold, thinking, as we've been conditioned to believe, that
this ownership means we have arrived as full Americans. We no longer
care about the well being of our fellow citizens. If we succeed it is
because we have outwitted all of the fools around us. If we fail it
is because the Fools around us ganged up, forming Unions or becoming
Socialists.
We no longer have the ability to use long term thinking and planning.
Like a Sit Com, our problems are solved at the end of the half hour,
including commercials.
No, George Bush the Lessor did not begin this slide down the razor
blade of life. He, like Donald Trump are products of the very system
that evolved in order to keep the Ruling Class in power. Well my dear
Ruling Class, you created them and you are stuck with them.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Donald Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush
> was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's
> nightmare possible."
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
>
>
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
>
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
>
> To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/revenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w
> -bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r
> evenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w-bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
> o hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
While I truly enjoyed this article, I totally disagree with Mister
Taiddi's claim that George Bush the Lessor, was the actual beginning
of the end. No, I don't put Donald Trump's name up for that grand
award, either. The fact is, we've had a pretty fair share of Flat
Headers in the Oval Office since early in our Exceptional History as
the True Democracy of the People. Still, we once seemed to learn from
our errors in judgement, and from time to time we actually sent some
pretty decent men to the White House.
But that cannot happen any longer. Not since our Controllers, the
Ruling Class, figured out how to control the mass media and use it,
along with mass advertising, to their advantage. By conditioning the
minds of Working Class Americans to long for all of the symbols that
seemed to indicate owning a piece of the Great American Dream, a job;
a home; a family. And a flat screen TV. Things have replaced ideas.
Like the pretty shiny beads and bobbles our Fore Fathers dangled
before the eyes of the Natives, we give up our principles and grab for
the Fool's Gold, thinking, as we've been conditioned to believe, that
this ownership means we have arrived as full Americans. We no longer
care about the well being of our fellow citizens. If we succeed it is
because we have outwitted all of the fools around us. If we fail it
is because the Fools around us ganged up, forming Unions or becoming
Socialists.
We no longer have the ability to use long term thinking and planning.
Like a Sit Com, our problems are solved at the end of the half hour,
including commercials.
No, George Bush the Lessor did not begin this slide down the razor
blade of life. He, like Donald Trump are products of the very system
that evolved in order to keep the Ruling Class in power. Well my dear
Ruling Class, you created them and you are stuck with them.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Donald Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush
> was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's
> nightmare possible."
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
>
>
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
>
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
>
> To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/revenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w
> -bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r
> evenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w-bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
> o hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
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