Monthly Archives: April 2010

Voter Suppression in Arizona

Republicans know that minorities and immigrants vote for Democrats. This is the whole purpose behind the Arizona racial profiling. It’s the same type of tactic Bush used in Florida to win there. It’s an effective tactic. Republicans don’t care about democracy or rather they only care about democracy for white people.

US Politicians For Sale?

This is why Washington politics is corrupt and why it will forever remain corrupt.

Also, understand that even Ron Paul who complains about Washington himself is a Washington politician who accepts corporate money and who accepts earmarks for his state. If Ron Paul left politics, I’m sure he could find a lobbyist job.

No one, not even Ron Paul, gets into Washington and stays there without playing the game. All politicians are corrupt. Some politicians may be less corrupt, but still all are corrupt. No real libertarian or real liberal will ever be elected as president. Corporations own the government and we are all indentured servants of our capitalist overlords.

Politicians don’t represent the voter. Politicians work for corporations. The corruption in Washington politics is merely a symptom of the disease that is capitalism. The tiny fraction of a percentage of the world’s population who are the powerful elite own almost all the wealth, almost all the land, almost all the media, almost all the corporations.

We live in a Banana Republic. Politics is just the theatre that capitalists put on to keep the masses distracted, to keep the poor working class from revolting. Bread and Circus. Enjoy the show!

Liberal Trust vs Conservative Mistrust

The other day, I came across data that showed a difference between Republicans and Democrats (Republicans Support Big Government… just as long as Republicans are in power). Republicans support big government when there is a Republican president, but they fight, fear-monger, criticize and obstruct what they label as big government when a Democrat is president. Democrats, however, show more even support for big government no matter which party is in power. For example, almost the same number of Democrats support Obama as supported Reagan. This explains the point (which I think Cenk Uygur made) that bipartisanship is usually Democrats agreeing with Republicans but rarely the other way around.

There is a fundamental difference in worldview. This probably relates as well to my argument that liberals are less dogmatic in their ideology (Liberal Pragmatism, Conservative Dogmatism). Conservatives seem more likely to see themselves as principled and so more willing to stand by their principles no matter what. It’s not that liberals aren’t principled, but a major liberal value is trying to understand the views of others and working towards a middle ground of agreement or at least acceptance. Liberals aren’t against big business in the same way or to the same degree as conservatives are against big government. Instead, liberals think capitalism and democracy need to work together without either being subsumed to the other.

Obviously, this leads to a different view of the Federal government. Conservatives tend to reminisce about early America that was built on small farming communities that were largely independent of the Federal government (out of necessity since the early pioneer farmers were more isolated). Conservatives only like government when it serves their own ideology and purposes, but they overall mistrust the government. I think conservatives base their mistrust on the fact that the Federal government grew larger as industrialization grew (big government and big business inevitably grew simultaneously). The modern industrialized world is more complex, but conservatives wish the world was simpler like in the pre-industrial age. At the same time, the early industrialists developed a new conservative movement supported by the growing affluent ownership class. So, conservatives simultaneously support big business and criticize big government even though both were inevitable results of industrialized capitalism.

The liberal worldview developed out of the small town democratic values as they were translated into the scenario of the big city. Industrialization initially led to big business and big government being aligned against the working class. In the working class, there were conservatives who wanted a return to an agricultural-based democracy and there were liberals who wanted to empower the working class through organized protests and the forming of unions, but both conservative and liberal working class were aligned against big government and big business. At that time, the political split was more of a class war.

The unions did manage to win in certain ways, but the liberal vision of the working class was integrated into the Federal government. Eventually, the Democrats became the party for unions and for the poor. This altered the dynamic causing the class wars to be less clear, especially as class has been mixed up with race and culture. The Democratic party has done some good things for the working class and so that is why the poor working class is loyal to the Democrats to this very day. The vision of Democrats is that the average person can actually be served by his representatives in Washington. The vision of liberalism is that democracy is strong and not easily destroyed.

Conservatives are less confident. They see democracy as constantly threatened and that is why they are much more partisan in their support of big government. It’s also why conservatives support big military despite claiming to be against big government. Conservatives live in fear of democracy being destroyed. Enemies are everywhere. The enemy threatens both from outside (Russia, Islamic terrorists) and from within (Communist witchhunts, social programs, gun rights). Conservatives don’t trust any governments. They only trust our own state government to the extent it might protect us from foreign state governments, but idealy they’d love to live in a world where state governments didn’t exist at all or else had very little power which means they wish they lived in early America.

My above commentary was inspired by this comment:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/09/i-was-wrong-about-5000-year-le_comments.html

John-in-Exile wrote:

It is fascinating to me to have “The Naked Communist” resurface, even as a second work of fiction by a newly rediscovered author. When I was in high school (1960 to 1963) I listened to a series of radio lectures by (apparently) W. Cleon Skousen which culminated in a pitch for his book, The Naked Communist, which was going to expose the evil plans of the terrifying international communist conspiracy. I bought the book and read it and found myself nagged by one question that stayed with me for years. The core presumption of Soviet communism was that people would work hard for the well-being of the state, even with no personal payoff. That always seemed unlikely to me–in fact so unlikely that I always believed that Soviet communism was destined to fall of its own weight. The communist conspiracies were inconsequential because the system was certain to fail. I was then struck by the odd perception that the people most paranoid about the rise of this doomed ideology were the conservatives who should have been the most confident of the ultimate success of the American economic experiment. They were instead the least confident and the most fearful of being overwhelmed by the Soviet system.

When communism fell at last I was not surprised because it seemed to me always destined to fall. Why was my liberal mind more confident of our system than the conservatives that constantly pronounced us doomed to fall to the evil Soviets?

Remembering Reagan’s Legacy

I’ve never understood why so many Republicans admire Ronald Reagan. I guess he was likeable in some basic way. In certain ways, he was actually liberal compared to what we hear now from some rightwing pundits, but he certainly was no liberal. He even campaigned on racial fears (“welfare queens” and Willie Horton ads) and by doing so made racial fears a mainstay of Republican politics.

I saw a documentary of his life a few years ago. What I got from it was that Reagan was no genius and he had been played like a puppet by his various advisors. I think Reagan meant well, but he seemed out of touch and his policies have been proven failures.

Still, Republicans go on defending him. I do give credit to the Libertarians in that many of them rightly criticize Reagan’s administration. What is absolutely clear is that Reagan was a social conservative but not a fiscal conservative. George W. Bush was simply the inevitable conclusion of what Reagan started.

Leftofawesome — June 06, 2009 — Part two of me explaining why Reagan was an awful and overrated president.

Ludwig von Mises Institute on Reagan’s big government economics: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.as…

Stop the Drug War on His Drug Policy: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-o…

Noam Chomsky on Reagan: http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/7/…

Robert Parry on Reagan: http://www.alternet.org/story/140438/…

Christopher Hitchens on Reagan: http://www.slate.com/id/2101842/

Middle Class vs Working Class

I’ve noticed something strange about how politicians and pundits use ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’. I don’t hear the working class referred to much in the media, especially not by conservatives. Being working class has become considered a bad thing. Everyone wants to be middle class.

What bothers me about this is that the middle class is shrinking even as the poor increasingly become the target of those on the right. For instance, the Tea Party protesters are mostly older whites of the upper middle class and above (i.e., not the average American). These old white conservatives grew up during a time when there was much more opportunity of upward mobility. But since the beginning of Reaganomics, the wealth disparity has been increasing and so the numbers of the poor have been increasing.

One recent survey showed that most white Tea Party supporters don’t believe minorities are intelligent, hardworking or trustworthy. This is a new class war. As the middle class shrinks, the upper middle class sides with the rich and sees the poor as the enemy.

I don’t know if this will start to reverse again, but I don’t think these affluent conservatives want it to reverse because it was conservative policies that were a major contributing factor towards this concentration of power and wealth. Of course, they’d love to blame it on the liberals (such as how Hannity tried to interpret the documentary Generation Zero). The problem isn’t the evil government and even the Tea Party supporters don’t actually blame the government. Most of them are on Medicare and of course they support Medicare even though it’s one of the biggest government expenditures. Studies show that conservatives love big government when Republicans are in power. Even Tea Party protesters fondly remember George W. Bush and yet offer little support to Ron Paul who is a real small government fiscal conservative.

What the Tea Party protesters don’t want is a government headed by a Democrat president. The reason they give is ‘socialism’ which is simply a codeword for helping the poor and needy. It’s class war, pure and simple. It was funny when Glenn Beck came to realize the working class was the socialist enemy while listening carefully for the first time Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. Interestingly, the only voice the working class has in the mainstream right now is Michael Moore who is a radical leftwing social justice Christian (or ‘commie’ for short).

It’s very odd because the Republican party used to side with the working class (the Reagan campaign even tried to usurp Bruce Springsteen’s message despite Springsteen himself being an ardent liberal). However, now that the working class has become a part of the growing poor, the affluent conservatives are trying to distance themselves from the working class even as they try to portray the Tea Party as working class populism. This means the real working class doesn’t have any direct political voice… which might be why, despite the conservative propaganda, the poorest of the working class tends to vote Democrat. So, the Tea Party is pretending to be working class which it isn’t while simultaneously pretending not to be Republican which it is.

I wish there was a real working class populist movement that would shake up politics. Even real libertarians can’t get a movement started without it being taken over by Republican operatives.

The worst part is that the mainstream media (especially Fox News) creates such a distorted picture of reality that the average person has a hard time telling which way is up. The poorest of the poor who lean towards Democrat are also the demographic that feels the most disenfranchised from the whole process and so rarely votes. For this reason, it’s in the interest of affluent conservatives to keep the poor disenfranchised. I saw a news report recently which was about a corporate memo stating in blatant terms that democracy of civic participation wasn’t beneficial to their profits. When Wall Street gives billions of dollars to all politicians on both sides, how can there be even the slightest hope for a real democracy that represents the average person much less those below the average.

The Tea Party protests the loudest, but it’s not the Tea Party supporters who have been hit the worse by the economic downturn. The hardest hit are the minorities, the poor, and the blue collar workers. Once upon a time, the working class fought hard to have a collective say in our society. It was from the battles with the wealthy elite that workers unions formed, but the conservative movement fought back and destroyed the power unions used to hold. Conservatives have the audacity to blame unions for helping to destroy the economy when it’s blue collar workers who are the ones who have lost their jobs more than anyone. Their jobs got sent overseas. but somehow the poor working class trying to feed their families is seen as the enemy of the affluent rightwingers.

I just don’t get it. The world would be a better place if the upper middle class whites combined their forces with the poor instead of sucking up to the wealthy elite hoping to get some scraps from the table. Since the middle class is shrinking and the economy is so uncertain, wouldn’t it make sense to make nice with the poor. Many poor working class people once thought of themselves as middle class as well, but times have changed. I remember hearing an interview of a woman who recently became unemployed. She said that she always thought the unemployed were just lazy, but she admitted that she had failed to understand how hard it can be when your job is taken away.

It’s a sad state of affairs. The poor are blamed for being poor. The unemployed are blamed for being unemployed. But oddly the conservatives blame all of the problems of Wall Street on the government which means blaming it on Obama and the Democrats. Why is it in the conservative mind everyone is to blame for their own misfortune accept wealthy capitalists? Why does the Tea Party criticize everyone from ‘socialists’ to immigrants and yet they’ve never protested Wall Street? Why?

 – – –

Note (5/27/10) – I just wanted to add one further observation that fits in with the concluding paragraph.

Why does a so-called “Libertarian” such as Rand Paul immediately defend BP even thought the irresponsible actions of BP will destroy many small businesses? I understand that Rand Paul is a rich white doctor and so doesn’t necessarily have much in common with the working class that comprise many family-owned fishing businesses, but I don’t understand why he would jump so quickly to defend BP when the average American has a very negative view of such mega-corporations.

Even though Libertarians like to portray themselves as representing the average American, it is obvious that many (most?) Libertarians and Libertarian think tanks don’t represent the average American. Certainly, Rupert Murdoch who is a self-identified Libertarian doesn’t represent the average American or average anything else for that matter. When push comes to shove, the Libertarians will side with big business… because often they own or work for big business.