Why I Am Anti-Republican

"What did Liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party?

I'll tell you what they did.  

Liberals got women the right to vote.

Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.

Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly

people out of poverty.

Liberals ended segregation.

Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act,

the Voting Rights Act.

Liberals created Medicare.

Liberals passed the Clean Air Act.

the Clean Water Act.

What did Conservatives do?

They opposed them on every one of those things.

Every One!

So when you hurl that label at my feet,

"Liberal," as if it were something to be ashamed of,

something dirty, something to run away from,

it won't work, because I will pick up that label

and I will wear it as a badge of honor."

Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr.

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In other words, Liberals tend to be decent people.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are most frequently survivors of parental abuse, usually both physical and emotional abuse.  By abuse I mean anything from physical brutality to emotional abandonment, to alcoholism, to addiction of any kind.

Bad treatment creates good authoritarians.

And Conservatives are authoritarian or they are nothing.  The abused children inevitably will say "My parents were wonderful people.  And they treated me better than I deserved."

But their attachment to the status quo tells what actually happened.  Severe paternal abuse, most often a combination of physical and mental and emotional abuse produces the best Marines, for example.  Marines are brutalized/brutalizing units who are good for nothing but following orders and killing an enemy who is not their enemy, but the enemy of a bunch of greedy, old men whom these young men/units will never know.  Sounds like robots to me.

Back to the abusive father, and sometimes the mother, as well; how they will inevitably explain that he or she was just trying to teach his son how to be a real man in a harsh world.  And with those words, the speaker has pronounced his own guilt.  They are his confession that he, too, was severely punished by his father.  This horrific kind of abusive parenting is all too common and has produced a kind of citizenry that we cannot afford to have in this country.

Brutalized/brutalizing.

Now let's take a look at a teen handicapped girl horse whipped by her father.  This is very graphic and hard to watch, even as the father's language becomes more sadistic and sexual. I counted nine uses of the word fuck. I wonder what was on his mind. And like the true sadist, he ends up saying, "You caused this!"

An act of brutality that not even a hardened criminal would contemplate.  And she did it.

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One is not surprised that this is representative of the sort of thing which passes for decent behavior in respectable families in Texas. The man is a judge. A "pillar" of the community. An arbiter of local morality and morés. One who has vowed to dispense justice.

One hopes that he has been relieved of his duties concerning his work in Child Protective Services. But a quick read of this article in the Huff Post tells a different story.  Fascinating how the Roman Catholic Church, and I am not a big fan of the Roman Church, (my Jesuit Brother, excepted) is under such terrible fire with lawyers demanding obscene amounts of money, in the multi-millions, in recompense for things that happened to young men 20 years ago; but for this handicapped young woman, the statute of limitations has run out.

The father, one Judge William Adams had the effrontery to publish a statement of his version. Quelle surprise!  It was his daughter's fault.  All of it.

Right, Billy Boy. You just stick to that story.  

It is with horror, but again, no real surprise, that the police spokesman reported that no action will be taken against the judge.

Apparently, handicapped teenage girls who are brutalized by their perverted fathers, and mind-slave mothers, just don't count as much as boys.  I may be wrong, but it looks to me to have something to do with lawyers having their eyes on the rich bags of money in the congregations of Catholic Church goers.  But justice, hmm...well, some lawyers will tell you of the pro bono work they do.  They just don't seem to do it anywhere near me.

That is capitalism for you.

And Law and Order Conservatism. ■

Still Don't Believe You're Being Controlled?

or those who've heard about subliminal advertising on TV, but couldn't quite put their finger on where and how it is embedded, here is a helpful video from Alex Jones.  There is much to be said about this deliberate manipulation of our subconscious minds.  And none of it is good.  As much as consumer protection agencies may try to stop this mind-theft, rape, really, on the part of advertising agencies, and corporations, there is little to nothing to be done to stop it.  The probability, nay, the certainty, of vast profit is too great.  From beer, to vacations, to movies, you don't know it but when you shop you are just a zombie fulfilling the commands of advertisers. And they love it when you say that it doesn't work on you.  That response is simply proof of their success.

From embedded linguistic cues which are picked up by the subconscious mind but unregistered by the conscious mind to scenes of rampant sexuality, again, subliminal advertising works on your psyche in hitherto unimaginable ways.  But they will modify your responses to otherwise ordinary products, so that after some nightly television viewing you will probably suddenly find yourself in a convenience store or supermarket picking up a particular bottle of beer; and though the thought will not appear as a conscious thought you will find yourself reaching for a bottle of not only sexy and attractive but truly manly, and it will be so subtle yet powerful, that you won't stop to question why a product is so attractive to you.

And don't think that commerce is the only area of control.  Government too, offers its own mode of mass mind control.  You can see that in this video as well.  So that if you watch television on the networks and other channels you are just a puppet to be controlled by people you will never meet.  All of them interested only in one thing: controlling your behavior without you knowing it, and in fact, in ways that you are contrary to your well being.  They make a lot of money doing it and you lose a lot of your money by viewing it.■

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Against Empire, Against American Slavery

do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism".  -Paul Robeson

". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions.  The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds.  Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. " Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery.

"If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity": Daniel Webster

Compassion and Conservatism

Let's start by laying down the first axiom:  Not only do Compassion and Conservatism not fit together in the same sentence, but not even the same paragraph.  See the video for a perfect example of how Tea Baggers see the world.  Then see the next video for how dogs have traveled so far up the path of evolution that they are more compassionate than any conservative you care to mention.

What started me on this subject is an article in today's newspaper, reporting that in lab experiments, rats showed more compassion than most humans.

Rats!

Researchers restrained one rat and nearby they place some chocolate which rats love.  What they observed was incredibly surprising.  The rats ignored the chocolate in favor of rescuing their compatriot rat.  Only after they had freed the constrained rat did they turn to the chocolate and then seemed to offer it to the newly freed rat.

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Saving The Planet

eems to me that if we acknowledge that global warming is real, and will destroy civilization unless we stop the pollution, and then we actually throw out the economic and political theories which seek to justify the domination and destruction of the earth for profit, and we we begin to value, instead, the path of sustainability, and it turns out down the road, that the situation is nowhere near as bad as it seems, we shall have lost nothing. Rather we shall have avoided a perilous path and set about implementing a sustainable future.

If, on the other hand, we acknowledge that we ourselves have already done irreparable harm to the planet, and then we actually take the necessary steps toward sanity and do something about it, something positive--- to halt and even perhaps reverse the damage already done; and it turns out to be true that the situation is exactly as the community of respected scientists have said, or even worse than anybody suspects, at least we shall have stopped the process of the annihilation of all life on earth. In the process we shall have found a measure of wisdom and begun the long labor of redeeming ourselves, by working out a plan of sustainability and adhering to it. And the planet will continue indefinitely; again we'll have lost nothing and gained the world for ourselves and our children, and our children's children.

If we wait and continue as we have been, whether through apathy, or emotional and psychological paralysis, indulging, as we have been, the decadence of corporations and and their profitable strategies of failure; not to mention the banks, and we continue not to hold them accountable for the fact that their every negative action impacts our lives, negatively; as well as the lives of our children and generations to come, not to mention the welfare of the planet.

Let's cut out the paralyzing courtesies and the adherence to "the rules."

If the phantoms of the one percent insist on wrecking it all, for their narcissistic, fetishistic, fanatical pleasures, then we are compelled to take harsh measures. If the driver is drunk do we let him drive in heavy traffic at night? I hope not. We either leave him by the side of the road or we die having allowed the drunk to kill us. So how long will we allow the drunks to drive:

Destroy all institutions which seek to gratify every consumerist whim.

Absolutely prevent in any way possible the conservative wealthy from calling the shots, i.e. remove their ability to preserve the status quo.

If we don't take drastic measures now, we shall have failed and all the institutions of wisdom, such as the university, and any and all religions shall have failed and humanity will simply die out rather sooner than expected.

And make no mistake: the next few generations will feel the full brunt of the destruction caused by the grandiose CEO's, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the latter two of which are nothing more than tools of capitalistic exploitation not only of smaller emerging nations, but equally important --- of the earth's natural resources; and let us not forget the infamous contributions of the gods of Classical Liberalism, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, all and any other gurus of the Free Market.  I have lived long enough to have learned to hate end-game decadent capitalism, corporate capitalism really;  and to have seen it's devastating effects on the environment.  See the videos here of John Perkins.  

The choices are simple. 

Wake up or die!

But I could be wrong.■

Congress Secretly Invalidates the US Constitution?

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udge Andrew Napolitano in a recent broadcast asked a series of What if  questions without once answering them.  The most chilling part of his rant is that even as he asks "What if..." it becomes very clear that what he is asking about has already come to pass.

Napolitano is a voice of Fox News.  Perhaps their best voice.

As a radical Liberal I have never substantially disagreed with anything I have heard from Napolitano.  He really is a guardian of Liberty.  And deserves to be listened to and heard by us all.■ 

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Vagaries of Capitalism

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hinking about the Dem's TV ad which does its best to shoot down Mitt Romney as an inconsistent flip flopping idiot with his defense of TARP brings me to this observation about the entire enterprise of the hideously corrupt Capitalism we now see before us.  So yes, if you happen to be an executive at Goldman Sachs you are, in the words of Ayn Rand, your goddess of wisdom, a corrupt mediocrity.

My first thought is that in order for this bloated form of Capitalism to go at all, huge amounts of money must be given by Congress to the largest corporations.  What Mother Jones calls the Hog Trough.  And these constant infusions of cash must be increasingly larger and more frequent.  So the last time it was $700-800 billion, not counting the 7.77 Trillion which the Federal Reserve gave out under the table.  Whatever outcry of Tea Partiers there was at $700 billion --- now imagine the pissing and moaning at the news that the total sum was unimaginably bigger.  So now those institutions have more or less repaid the loans, but what about the next crisis.  And be not fooled.

• There will be another crisis.
• Immanently.
• Much bigger and more terrible than the last one.

What capitalists need to do is actually read Karl Marx and see how Marx called the shots.  How he predicted with every little twist and turn of Capitalism. And Marx was writing back in the mid-19th Century.  His predictions are almost eery in their accuracy.  Capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries will inevitably fail and fail with increasing frequency.  And Marx was not even talking about the effects of the overweening greed of capitalists, which now we can see so plainly. Banks which once offered cheap dinner plates and watches if you would just please open an account with them have now changed their tune to

"GIVE ME YOUR MONEY!  PUNK!"

And they are now in the business of real estate and have made it their business to evict each and every person from their home and they don't seem to care whether they do this legally or ill.  In fact it seems that several attorneys general will be taking several banks to court now.

But they can't stop what the banks have done with their appalling policies of fraudulent foreclosures.  The problem is that the banks understand --- as the American public does not--- that money is about to have considerably less buying power than it does now, which is a way of saying that it will soon be worthless as the Deutshmark was in the 30s in Germany.

Lotte Lenya told the story of how she was once paid one million marks for her performance.  She said she wanted to keep the check as a reminder of how she was worth so much.

So given that the dollar is about to collapse through the floor, banksters are trading worthless dollars for houses.  Houses are always going to be worth something. So what if the real estate bubble has burst sinking prices and value below the horizon, so that many homes are now, as is said, underwater.  The banks simply warehouse the properties until the prices of real estate come back and then they sell them for the inflated value.

Just doing business.

heh heh...

It would be nice to think that this corruption is limited to capitalism.  But it isn't.  The fault is in the human beings who work it.  Any and all systems are inherently good in the beginning and bad toward the end.  Until, like capitalism, it has become so intolerably corrupt that it either collapses of its own weight or something like the 99% Occupy Movement arises.  Socialism and Communism are as vulnerable to mediocrity and Oligarchical class-ism as capitalism.


As I recall that was the favorite explanation of the Mafia whenever they whacked somebody.  Nothin' personal youse understand.  Just doin' business.  Meanwhile your favorite uncle lies at the bottom of the Hudson River wearing cement shoes.

So the banks are the new Mafia.

Just doing business.


As Gautama Buddha said, the key is moderation in all things.  Given the current condition of human kind, and the fact that greed and gluttony really are deadly sins, no system is going to come along and solve all our problems.  So the answer to it all, as far as I can tell, is a matter, finally, of human decency.■

   

The Trouble with A Randian's

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As far as I can tell the people who are so moved by Atlas Shrugged that they want to be an Ayn Rand follower, are missing several very important points.

• They are not John Galt and never will be.
• They are not Ayn Rand  and never will be.
• Ayn Rand would most likely call them to their faces, "corrupt mediocrities."
• Ayn Rand may have despised the negative aspects of collectivism but she was also an authoritarian and insisted that everyone believe as she believed.
• Her followers are just that, Followers; 
• Ayn Rand hated people who followed other people.

Ayn Rand's Followers are authoritarian Followers.  That quality of being a Follower is easy to identify.  They brook no criticism of their chosen deity, or totalitarian dictator, seeing no difference between the two.  At the slightest hint of disagreement an authoritarian follower goes into attack mode with the ferocity of a Pitt Bull.

On Killing Occupy Wall Street

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lease raise your hand if you didn't know that the 1% percent was and is conspiring against the Wall Street Occupiers.  And it's not a clean straight forward sort of conspiring either.  Nothing like offering to come forward, get together and talk.  No, this is cloak and dagger bigtime treacherous strategy from the deep of the heart, for lack of a better word, of  the GOP.  Needless to say it's designed to kill.

And to lie.

And to kill careers.

And to lie.

And lie...

The idea is to kill not only the movement, but, Hey! Who knows? A few human bodies might turn up floating face down on the cold waters of the Potomac. Yes, the party of NO, has a long history of somehow, very conveniently not being around when an airplane crashes and a witness who was about to spill certain beans to Congress happens to be in it  and, --- surprise --- he dies.  Oh. dear.

Quite a lot of that sort of thing went on under Bush-Cheney-Rove.  You didn't really think that JFK Jr. was the kind of pilot who would go and bungle so badly he'd  crash his plane with his celebrity girlfriend beside him did you?  That actually had earmarks of a Mafia/CIA operation.

Oh dear.

Then there was the matter of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone's death just before the election. Oops!

Oh dear, indeed.  Click here if you think I indulge in too much paranoia.

There several other notable crashes with similar earmarks that were mentioned in Republican owned media and then it all disappeared. And for some reason, one's grip on reality was called into question if one mentioned it. Here is one more significant and unsolved plane crash which killed Bush White house IT Guru, Mike Connell.  OK, planes do crash all the time.  But rarely does the universe time it so that it coincides with these circumstances: He knew a lot about what was going on in side the Oval Office, did not approve of it, and was on his way to tell Congress what he knew.  What all of this amounts to, for me, is that the 1% are killers; and if you get in their way you'll be offed in a twinkling.

So now the strategy elucidating at least one of the 1%'s probably many strategies, has been leaked by former aides of  Republican House Speaker, John Boehner.  And one very good outcome is that now we know where at least some of it is coming from.  And where it is going.

Right here is a big difference between the 1% and the OWS:

• OWS is way out front. 
• No hidden agendas 
• Populist
• Patriotic without being nauseating.  
• Peaceful.
• Lovers of Truth.

If we happen to think of it, you'll know about it right away.  Compare that to the Republican style.

• Dark, craven, memos delivered mouth to ear; whispers, footfalls and lurking around corners of the halls of Congress.  
• The GOP hatches plans just like slithering cobra moms leaving their newborns to fend for themselves.
• Elitist
• Unpatriotic, but gives lip service when backed into a corner.
• No respect for the US Constitution.  Regards the US Constitution as a dishrag to be pulled into any shape they want.
• Republicans love lies and hate truth.  They believe their wealth can create any reality they want.

•  •  •

So the other shoe has dropped, as it were, and we have the satisfaction of a response, albeit an illegitimate one.  At the same time it tells us that the other side is every bit as engaged as we thought.  The silence now is broken in more ways than one.  The Washington, DC lobbyists and PR firms have been working late guttering not only the candles but their minds as well in the right wing's fevered attempt to nullify the good effects of Occupy Wall Street for the American People, and the bad effects for the GOP; and therefore, the crafty, champagne sipping 1%.  Its funny to read their descriptions of the OWS people: not only are they unwashed, but also, gasp, they use drugs; not only medicinally, but also recreationally.

Oh dear.

Wasn't it George W Bush who was famous among his friends and family for filling his nostrils til they bled snorting excellent blow? AKA cocaine.

The video below reports on merely one of the many likely strategies likely to be floating around National Republican Commitee Headquarters. (whenever I think of RNCH, I have to smile remembering when Ken Melman, the head of the whole shebang, turned out to be gay, and also, he wanted to be forgiven by his gay peers.)  

Here is a word of wisdom to all the people who have told me  that to rail against the government was at worst psychotic, and at its best, useless, because the government is us.  Well, that may once have been the reality of government in days of yore, but now, it seems that the government is not only not us, but, really, not even a friend. The federal government, it turns out wants --- if not to destroy us, the 99%, at least it is dedicated to the proposition of keeping us asleep --- snoozing in our chains.  How is that different from the movie, The Matrix?

Answer: it isn't...■    

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Brutality of Oakland Cops

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here will be REPRISALS.  Eventually this crisis will sort itself out and the most belligerent and egregious of the cops everywhere in America, not to mention the mayors who who conspired to use brutality against peacefully assembled citizens, will find themselves no longer in power.  Kaput!

Out of work.

But they may very well find themselves in serious trouble.  

• And the reprisals will come from us 
• and they will be just.  
• Unlike the Power Elite we will abide by justice.

We will win back America and return it to being a nation of law.  This will happen or we will fail as a nation.  Simple as that.

Obama could have prevented this.  All he had to do was bring a sense to his administration that he would support America after the horrible blot on the pages of history as a result of the eight years of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

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It's Morally Indefensible And They Know It

They’re not John Galt, not Steve Jobs, and not helping.

Suspicions of Conspiracy Validated

    

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o what we suspected all along, namely, that there's a strong conspiratorial aspect to the nationwide police crackdown on the Occupy movement, is true.  It turns out that 18 cities nationwide were in on the secret.  The police were told by the very top dogs that if they wanted to receive some large cash federal grants they would turn the protesters out of the parks; and feel very free to use unrestrained violence.  Just don't use real bullets.  Other than that, do your worst.

Several big question arise:

• In which agency, and in whose fevered little right-wing brain did the vile, albeit well coordinated conspiracy originate?
• Why were the mayors so easily led into being puppet operatives for federal agencies their hearts had to tell them were criminally motivated?  Why so apparently eager to violate the US Constitution with treasonous action?
• Why were the rank and file police officers, themselves, so agreeable to be exploited as the tools of repression?  Traitorous, downright anti-American  action does not necessarily go with the territory as far as fulfilling one's duties as a cop.  
• What are we going to do about it? 

And that is the $64 billion dollar question.  Finding out who had the motivation to suppress the first stirrings of dissent among the American people, who have just rolled over and over as the 1% has robbed them of their wealth, the social position in the Middle Class, and their homes, and finally their jobs.  

And now they are saying ouch!

And somebody up there in 1% land is such a control freak--- added to all the other neuroses, starting with narcissism--- which are so eminently visible in the most wealthy and most powerful, that they must have it silenced immediately and for all time.  

My own inclination is to want to look very closely at the International Banksters, perhaps the Rothschilds; but even as I write this it becomes apparent that Goldman- Sachs also fits the profile. ■

NYPD Destroys Occupy the Future

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ow I wish that people would stop saying ridiculous trash such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already accomplished its goals.  That is just plain wrong.  It has allowed itself to be pushed around and made an absolute patsy.  It has now failed miserably.  The one overarching goal was simply to occupy and make life difficult for the 1%.  And for everyone who joyfully pays tribute to the 1%.  Falling all over themselves, to bow, indeed, to prostrate themselves, before their masters, those who adore and worship the Lords of Greed, have utterly erased their lives and their true happiness.

And for their part, the 1% has decided to reassert their absolute control over the world.  As long as Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, The Kock Brothers, Mitch McConnell,  Baron Phip de Rothschild and the rest of the sorry lot of psychopaths who are so possessed of greed that for them it feels like the normal way for a human being to be.  It is not for nothing that the Middle Age Roman Church classified Greed as a DEADLY sin.  Greed kills everything it touches--- including the soul.  The clues are all around.  Read, for example, the story of King Midas.  The story has survived because it has enough Truth in it that we must keep it as a warning.  Of course, you won't discover that your soul is missing until you die and that event may come sooner than you think.

Sorry, fat cats, but you may have those shit cakes you call wealth and treasure, but you lose your soul in the bargain.  Goethe was a genius into human nature, and when he wrote was right. and  the parable of the modern man, known as Faust.  I am not saying that you will go to Hell, but I am not saying NO, either.

Like the story of King Midas.  breathes, the world will be in peril.

Elizabeth Warren

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ust a taste of the kind of lies which Karl Rove, the Sigheil, Hitler, guy of the Republican Party, and his super mendacious, "Crossroads Foundation", delights in.  Any idiot knows there is scarcely a word of truth in this load of steaming you-know-what.  It isn't worth anybody's time to address a single word of it.  One look at Rove's horrific childhood will tell you why he is the bad seed of the far Right.

• A suicide mother, 
• a father who abandoned his family 
• and the list goes nauseatingly on.  

Those who are filled with Rove's brand of hatred will love it. Fortunately, they are few in number.◘

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False Flag Infiltrating Oakland

I would be willing to bet some serious doughnuts that the agents provocateurs in the  Occupy Oakland movement are not merely plainclothes police this time, but stooges hired by the banks.  It is so very obviously a false flag operation.  And unfortunately it was bound to happen anyway.

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Bankster Arrests:0 --- OWS arrests: 3000

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ou can argue all over the place about what the issues are; the best way to solve our economic problems; fix the infrastructure; who is right and who is wrong; and how the government ought to be run.  But if you are talking about pure logic, and reason,  from a human perspective,  and how we should operate in a compassionate way as a culture, that's where we run into big trouble.  


One needs to understand that the neo-conservatives despise the notion of The common good. Mere mention of the common good and a Republican begins to snarl, or adopt either a dismissive attitude; or else become belligerent, saying,  "What do you mean," they said, "by this thing you call common good?"  


Never mind that the concept has been around from the beginning of Western Civilization and that a single moment of reflection shows that without a strong sense of the common good we would fail, utterly, as a civilization.  Republicans are in love with Ayn Rand's fantasy novel, "Atlas shrugged".  And Ms. Rand was no lover of the common good.  The Common Good has far too many collectivist overtones for her.  And for the Republicans who, by the way, are incapable of critical thinking.  A self evident fact since if they could think they would not for another minute be Republicans in the first place.  They would find Atlas Shrugged to be the insufferable rant that it is.  And Mitch McConnell, for example, would be lost without Frank Luntz to tell him what nasty little phrase of the day, to say that will scare the most number of conservatives.  Take the phrase, "Job Killing".  That has the ring of Frank Luntz.  Another is Tax Relief.  


Pure Frankie boy. 


But the problem for Republicans is that they are far more collectivist than Progressives.  The Republican party whip has very little problem keeping his people marching, like The Borg, in lockstep.  My own dark suspicion is that because of parental abuse, physical and/or emotional, they were molded into their authoritarian mindset.  


Once one understands the profile, the rest falls into place.

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Republicans hate the Occupy Wall Street movement and its people for several reasons which they cannot and will not articulate. Most of the reasons proffered are totally bogus.  


The list of reasons is long, predictable, and trivial: 

• The protesters are dirty, unwashed.  
• They are merely envious of "successful" people like banksters and overpaid insurance execs.  
• They the protesters are nothing but hippies who sleep in tents and where exactly do such people go to the bathroom?  
• The Occupy movement in the parks is totally inconvenient for everyone.  They are messing up the parks the conservatives or real people don't ever go to, but someday they might want to, and these people making a mess of everything.
•  "And furthermore, by God, I always lived within my means.  I never had any debt.  And all these people being foreclosed on should only blame themselves."  

They, the conservatives, claim to be so rational and reasonable that their way is truly and objectively the best way: a free market unencumbered by any governmental limitations at all.



The Occupy Wall Street movement has less of a problem with that view, than that they have seen the crime and injury to the rest of us which such policy inevitably engenders.  Men, and women, obviously,  left to their own devices, without limitations, anywhere near a large pile of money, tend to gravitate to criminal behavior.  And I don't mean simply showing the underbelly of their unfettered greed.  


Research shows how otherwise upstanding people will go wrong if allowed for any length of time near a lot of money.  That answers a lot of questions about the Too Big to Fail banksters.  And the big thing we need to remember about the Big Bad Banksters is that rather than repent their crimes in a responsible way,  they seek to make their crimes into not-crimes, retroactively, by buying our Congress and our DOJ.  What they are doing, in fact, is compounding their crimes.


If you haven't read the novel or seen the movie, Lord of the Flies, you might do yourself a favor and and rent the movie; but first, read the book; get it from the public library or, at this point, buy it for a few bucks second hand.  


The story is an allegory of how humans act when the grown ups are not around.  The young boys and the book is all about a small group of boys who survive a plane crash, during a nuclear world war, and land on a small uninhabited island.  The boys revert to an uncivilized authoritarian law of the jungle mode.  Piggy, fat, weak, asthmatic, dependent on his thick lenses glasses, and very intelligent, the symbol of the intellectual, is killed by the other boys.  The voice of reason, and law and order, which Piggy represented cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian culture.  The boys situation continues to deteriorate until the grown ups show up at last to rescue them.


Do persons charged with responsibility under criminal or tort law fail to recognize the wrongfulness of their actions and beliefs because of cognitive dissonance?   Does ego bordering on hubris, work in such a way that cognitive dissonance prevents them absolutely from seeing the wrongfulness of their actions?  


The question almost answers itself.  The answer is yes.  The egoistic blindness regarding a sense of right and wrong is so strong in even the most responsible of persons that it produces a susceptibility to the spell it casts on the unconscious mindset.■         
   

"there is no turning back..." Michael Moore

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Michael Moore Speaks at Occupy Oakland, October 28, 2011 from John Hamilton on Vimeo.

Now that the power elite has seen that America is awakening.  They are now alert to this threat which the Occupy Movement represents.  Expect big trouble from the police.  Not just in Oakland.  Everywhere.  Tragic about the weather.■

More on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

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First they ignore you; 

then they ridicule you; 

then they attack with 

violence; 

Then you win.
                                     Gandhi

•

Do not doubt that a small committed group of people can change the world.  It is, in fact, the only thing that ever has changed the world.

                                                 Margaret Mead

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he Oregonian's Saturday editorial, Point Made, Occupy Portland, is a perfect example of far right fear and trembling.  No doubt police violence is on the way despite Mayor Sam Adams courageous stand against the loud and obnoxious Tea Partiers' insistence that he use force to disband the protesters' encampment.  And they want it NOW!  This tells us 2 things.

• One, Those far right wing extremists are really terrified of the Occupy movement. OWS brings the TP right to face with reality.  It threatens to tear the veil of illusion they wear over their eyes in their hatred of Truth. And... 
• Two that the Mayor is a humane, reasonable, man of honor who does not respond to the badgering of his enemies.  I watched a clip on KATU in which the reporter badgered the mayor to the point where he was disrespectful.  Adams gave him clear answers but the man refused to accept them. And kept at it.  Myself I would have clipped the asshole in the face and hope that I'd broken some bones.  But a mayor can't do that.      

Bravo, Your Honor!

Bravissimo!

Whether the far right wishes to acknowledge it or not, and one can be certain that they don't, the Oakland police department, as well as the Atlanta Police, and the Chicago police department, have lost the moral imperative.  This innocuous sounding phrase, this moral imperative, is the central foundation of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative, the ultimate morality, of any culture at any time, any where, as Kant showed in his milestone of philosophical writings, The Critique of Pure Reason, (that's the one where Kant's mentor, the professor who was overseeing the writing of his dissertation,  after 2 weeks returned his manuscript, wherein he found on page 16, a red line drawn across the page; and under that was written, "This is as far as I can read.  I think I am going insane.")

That one.

(If you have ever skimmed the pages of The Critique Of Pure Reason then you know that Kant dismantles reality, creating his own neo-linguistic argument that   existence itself  is void of  properties.  Then he puts it back together again, not merely as it is, but by creating the Categorical Imperative, as it ought to be, if we are to have a civilization at all.  Otherwise, we are back to the jungle.) 


When you have lost the moral imperative, you have lost the argument, the contest, the battle, the war; everything.  That is how Gandhi defeated the British.  The Brits finally could not bear to gaze upon their own moral failure; but finally, had to come face to face with the fact that they, the greatest rulers of the most glorious empire since Rome, were morally unfit to rule what they deemed a backward people.  At least in their eyes, India was inhabited by a people fit only to serve the Whitehall officers and their wives.

So it is with this moment in History.

The police and the oligarchs with them, have lost the moral imperative.  So it appears that the aggressors are the losers not the "unwashed" hippies.  

Even if somehow the protesters had stepped over the line of their First Amendment Rights, which guarantees the right to peaceably assemble the cops are still thugs. They used ordnance, weaponry on unarmed citizens.  That's as immoral as it gets.

Even if the protesters had stepped over the imaginary line, the police department's violent assault on unarmed citizens transformed the cops work, in a heartbeat, from being protectors of the peace--- to criminal thuggery.  No ideology on earth can support such baldfaced thuggery.  This is the law of the jungle so well beloved by the Tea Party folks.  Of course, the Mad Tea Party people, seem always to be in need of a reflection of their own hatred.  So now they have an object to hate: namely, the horribly inconvenient and "unwashed" dissidents who are peacefully gathered to inspire and encourage a change of heart, which would signal an awakening of the Wall Street banksters who have consistently stolen taxpayer money and homes from the poor and middle class.  

But this is not new.  The cops act with impunity because they know one thing:  the media, and the general public will forget it within days.  So brutality and murder is easily tolerated in America as long as the perp wears a navy blue uniform and sports a metal badge.  Don't believe me?  Take a look at the footage of police beating up the unarmed demonstrators of the 1920s and 30s.  These were people peacefully protesting the corporate bosses' actions to destroy unions.  We see the same thing in an earlier time when Women protested for the right to vote.  The media portrayed such women as immoral, subversive and traitorous.  They handcuffed and jailed the women. And worse. Some were wounded and some were killed.

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In their rebuttal to the unarmed protesters, the OWS people in NYC and across the globe (more than 2000 Occupy camps,) the far right is whining that the oligarchy is being unfairly attacked, demonized by losers who are merely envious of the oligarch's success in accumulating their riches.  Whew!  That sort of thinking, if you can call it so, is so breathtakingly simplistic, one blushes for them.  Such an argument is disingenuous; and smacks of a staggering intellectual dishonesty that begs one to wonder at the dismal level of intelligence of those who spout this sort of drivel.  It's as if they did not get it--- that the Bush administration and the eight years of Republican total control of Congress, every move of which was dictated by the corporations and banksters through their lobbyists--- removed protections designed to protect the public from unethical exploitation by corporate interests.  

The Republican Party in exercising their ideology, at last unencumbered by federal law, virtually burned the house down.  Instead of a country which moved forward as a result, we saw instead the loss of tens of millions of homes to fraudulent foreclosure,  banksters who offered triple A rated bundles of liars loans then turned around and bet on the failure of that product, and made billions as the product turned to dust in the hands of their Main Street clients; not to mention the bail out of failed corporations, with taxpayer dollars.  And last, but far from least, the trillions of dollars given as a gift to the banks in a benevolent under the table, backroom style by the Federal Reserve.  And all of this, ALL OF IT, was done on the backs of the poor.

Corporations privatizing profit and socializing losses.  Business as usual in this climate of crony capitalism has become a criminal enterprise.  Business as usual must stop. 

It is proof positive that crony capitalism does not and can not work with out regular gifts from government; i.e. Main Street.  It is a fact that the far right, those who love to quote from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, wherein he promises that the Free Market will bestow happiness on all due to the magic invisible hand which will guide all enterprise surely, that they, not a one of them, have actually read the entire work.  After describing the benefits of Free Markets, Smith then warns that it can only work when all citizens are equal.  You won't hear that phrase fall from the lips of a far right-winger.   

My fondest hope and wish is that the good folks of the Occupy Wall Street movement will not go home until at least the Banksters responsible for the mess in which America now finds itself, go to jail for a long, long, time.  

If I were less respectful of the moral imperative, and possessed of a deeply religious nature, as a result of being brought up in the Catholic Church, I would demand that such people be flayed alive and then burnt at the stake.     

Unfortunately, this police violence did not begin in a vacuum.  Violent reprisals against the OWS people began with the Federal Government.  How dare the 99% talk back to their betters?  They must be put down, contained.  And to this end the Feds offered a $15, 000 grant to police departments around the country which had but one stipulation. Disband and dismantle the movement with violence.  But some refused to play patty cake.

The District Attorney in Syracuse, NY, showed himself to be a man, or, as is said in Yiddish, a mensch.  (I had a Jewish room mate for years.  His mother was a second generation yenta. After six years I spoke Yiddish as fluently as they did.)

Back to our Syracuse DA.  Bless him!  In a stunning act of absolute integrity, he returned a $15 million dollar grant the Federal government had offered the city. It seems that, very quietly, the Feds are offering that much money in taxpayer dollars to cities where there is an Occupy movement.

There's just one little catch.

The Federal Agency which is so generously spreading this manna throughout America, stipulates that whichever city accepts the money, that city's police department must use violence to dismantle the protesters camps.

This is America today.  Right?

Right...?