Katrina vanden Heuvel – Wisconsin – its about democracy.

Certainly, as Katrina vanden Heuvel points out in this article, this revolution that is beginning in Wisconsin is not simply about wages and benefits. Rather it is about foundational democracy and whether or not we can have a real democracy in what was founded as a Plutocratic Republic – the USA – and has become a neoliberal anti-democratic republic. It will be a long fight. But if we actually want to have real democracy, it is a necessary fight. The wealth of billionaires is set against the fight. The Democratic Party leadership is, by its silence, supporting the attempts of the radical right, Libertarians and Tea Partiers and their lapdog Republican Party. to destroy any vestiges of progress towards economic democracy. The fact is that without economic democracy we will never have true political democracy.

The heart and soul of any culture or society is the control of resources and the means of production and distribution of production’s output. Unless and until we have democracy in this sphere of our lives, we will continue to behave and believe the psychotic American Dream that one can have democracy in government and totalitarianism in the work place and keep them separate from one another in our private and public lives. Yet that is what we have been told. Capitalism is nothing more or less than a totalitarian organization of production and distribution of resources. The workers at GE, Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, General Mills, Toyota etc.do not spend their working hours living in a democracy. They live in a mini totalitarian state given a corporate name. They do not get to vote on any significant aspect of their work, working conditions, distribution of the wealth that they produce. If they did, things would be very different indeed.

We are born and bred and educated to believe that you can live your life in a phony democracy, the USA, and live your life at the same time in a dictatorship – the modern corporation, and not suffer the psychological consequences. The truth is that we have become so used to this insane situation that it now passes for normality and “the way the world is”. In fact it is neither “normal” nor is it the way the world should be. And yes there is judgment in that statement. It is the sort of judgment that President John F. Kennedy embraced when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” I suggest that we need to widen the circle to embrace all of the human race. When you ask this question of the wealthy and the ownership classes, they respond in accordance with their convictions that all of the species of the entire Planet, are or should be under their control and do for them whatever is commanded and demanded.

This was never made clearer than when I worked for a asset based investment firm in San Francisco, California. We were in a meeting of all of the employees in the technical services (computer) department. The facilitator/dictator of the meeting was the Vice President of Human Resources. She was trying to convince us that a new form of “peer review” was good for us and would improve our working environment. The fact is that well into the process of the review project some employees had been left sobbing uncontrollably, some had stormed out of the sessions and everyone was very angry. The fact is that the sessions were really most similar to the “attitude adjustment camps” run by the Chinese Communists a few years before during the Cultural Revolution. As more and more employees objected to participating in these sessions, the VP became angrier and angrier. Finally she slammed both fists down on the table and said: “This is NOT A DEMOCRACY. You do not get to decide on how this is done.” It was the first time that a manager and senior officer of any corporation I’ve worked for actually admitted what anyone with a brain cell functioning knows; corporations are dictatorships not democracies.

The only effective power to address the power of the corporate dictatorship is the collective efforts of employees who will not allow corporations to continue to operate as private totalitarian states. The assault on the workers in many states by Republican  govenors and legislatures is far, far more important than many people realize because it is not about money and it is not about benefits; it is about the human rights of people to band together and to work for the common good using democratic processes. This is what the Koch brothers hate. This is what Libertarians hate. This is what the bankers hate. They cannot tolerate the winds of real democracy that have been blowing around the world and now threaten their peaceful existence. An existence aided and abetted by the opium dreams of phoney democracy.

The Betrayal of Public Workers.

The attempt by the govenor of Wisconsin to economically disenfranchise people who work for state and local governments should not be unexpected. The Republican Party along with right wing think tanks to say nothing of the ignorant astro-turf organization called the Tea Party (It should be called the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party since its partiers are at least as mad as the Hatter in Alice in Wonderland – if not more so.) have a plan that includes attacking not just those American workers represented by Public Employee Unions but all unions.

The defamation of public sector workers as the cause of the economic troubles at the state, local and even the Federal level is simply put a matter of lies. These lies are artfully packaged, and repeated constantly by all but a few of the media outlets. This form of propaganda was perfected by the spiritual progenitor of the Tea Party and Libertarians – namely by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf. He coined the phrase and the concept that if you told lies that were such colossal misrepresentations of the truth and repeated them loudly, over time people would cease to question them and accept the Big Lie as the truth.

The Republican Party, the Tea Party loonies and the Libertarians are attempting to destroy all collective bargining rights. This is part of a plan by the wealthy, the corporations and the political, social and economic right that has been plotted at least since the incredible reign of Ronald Regan, darling of stage, screen and idiots and fools of all stripes, and tool of the unscrupulous right for a couple of generations.

In no small part the machinations of the criminal enterprises, state, federal and transnational banks, bankers and the stock market ponzi scheme, are the people who have sucked the money out of the public employees retirement plans during the past 5 – 7 years. The real criminals who have stolen the money are the CEO’s of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup along with the liars and swindlers of Wall Street. The funds that they agreed to protect and enhance they have stolen though legal and illegal schemes. Now these same criminals want to blame the very people who are the victims of their unceasing economic class war and punish them by impoverishing them completely.

The real shame is that the people who should be standing with the working men and women of the USA, the Democrats, are either too stupid or too corrupt to make the stand. If the people of the USA really want change, they will have to eliminate the roots of corruption. Those roots are deeply embedded in both the Democratic and the Republican parties. Those roots of corruption extend to the Supreme Court where we have extreme right wingers and idiot mutes sitting in judgment and making decisions which they are clearly unable to do. We have a congress enthrall to the corporations and to religious thugs who work very well together since neither has any interest in human rights, justice, peace or the common good.

We need change. We need a party or parties that reflect the needs and desires of the working men and women of the USA, not the super rich, the bankers and the multi-billion dollar war machine that operates out of the Pentagon and wrecks everything in order to feed its need for blood and money. It is time for a party based on economic justice – and neither of the two dominant political parties comes even remotely close to this.

A Time for Resistance | The Nation.

“However, as the events in Cairo, and now Wisconsin, show us, this is a moment of extraordinary possibility. It is a time for global, nonviolent challenge to anti-democratic forces, wherever they may be–forces that have enriched themselves while promising stability based on coercion, suppression of rights and profound corruption.” Katrina vanden Heuvel

Perhaps the time for the awakening of the masses and particularly the youth is finally at hand. There is a revolution that is happening around the world. This revolution is an uprising of the working class against those who would destroy them and continue to take the fruits of their labor in order to build bigger mansions, larger yachts, more private airplanes and islands to protect them from the ordinary working class people; the people who by their labor create all economic value. The people of Cairo, Tunesia, Lybia, Wisconsin are not angry about politics as much as they are angry about the economic policies of the political and financial elite of their states and nations. The American people are angry. Unfortunately people like the Koch brothers, a couple of crooks and deceivers if there ever were any, have funded what amounts to a Know Nothing group that calls itself the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is an astro-turf group designed to support the very crooks and liars and thieves who have created the present economic and social distress felt around the world. People are beginning to awaken from a sleep; a sleep induced by the poisoning of the airwaves by the pundets and pruveyors of the lies of the rich and the corporations ever since the end of  WWII.

What we need is a new awakening similar to that of the 1960′s that ended the Vietnam war and, at least for a moment, put the brakes on the escalating intertwining of the military and the corporatist, anti-democratic government that now haunts the hallowed halls of freedoms foundational institutions in the name of the Security State. The paranoia generated by 9/11 has been carefully orchestrated by the liars and criminals who operate the government – the Bush/Cheney crime families are the two best examples. This paranoia has been used to establish all of the structures necessary for the completion of an anti-democratic police state. We have been lied to and we have had our Constitution shredded by people who hate democracy and yet serve at the very top levels of our own government.

It is time to change course. It is time to renew our commitment to the truth that only democracy will serve the people and provide structures to bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people. It is indeed time for the people to awake from Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin. It is indeed time for the workers of the world to unite and to realize that they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Imperial hypocrisies | SocialistWorker.org.

“The Egypt of the Separate Peace, the Egypt of tourism and joint military exercises with the United States, is also an Egypt ruled by the few for the benefit of the few. The whole system is rotten, deeply dependent on exploiting the little people, on taking bribes from the sole superpower to pursue self-defeating or greedy policies virtually no one wants or would vote for in the region.” John Cole Middle East expert

The fact is that you can take the entire paragraph and it applies to the United States of America in 2011. Here’s my version: The USA of Peace and Justice, the USA of tourism, pride and a wold-encircling military presence is also a United States of America ruled by the few for the benefit of the few. The whole system is rotten, deeply dependent on exploiting the little people, on taking bribes from the filthy rich and their corporations to pursue self-defeating and greedy policies virtually no one wants or would vote for if given the chance: they are not given the chance because those they are allowed to vote for are vetted and picked by the minions of the billionaires, the bankers and the entire crooked financial system and the people get to choose from a barrel of rotten apples.

If we take a close look at what is going on in the USA we will find a perfect example of government trying to destroy the working class. Just think Wisconsin and its Tea Bagging lunatic Govenor. Hopefully the working class and the nation’s students will find a way to work together and take the streets and shut down business as usual not only in Wisconsin but in Michigan, Ohio, California and other states. I would suggest that people get ready for the Republican and Democratic conventions coming up next year and remember Chicago in 1968. It is time to make the filthy rich to be put on notice that it isn’t only Egypt where abused people are sick and tired of being tread on by the corporations and their lap dogs in the Senate and the House.

Wisconsin Governor Uses Police State Tactics (Literally) on Democratic Senators (Updated) « naked capitalism.

Now let’s remember who got this guy elected. The Tea Party and the Reich Wing Rethuglicans of Wisconsin. If anyone wants to know what life in the USA would be like if the Rethuglican Reich ever got control of the country, here it is, the first look at the beginning of a true fascist state.

It would appear, however, that the working people of Wisconsin have figured out that the way to get rid of thugs in their state is to follow the example of Egypt and other places where thuggery is the norm for governmental operations. Take it to the streets. With any luck at all, people all over will finally wake up to the real threat that Libertarianism and Reich Wing Rethuglicans and the fellow travelers among Demothugs pose to us all – except the truly ruthless rich – of course – who always benefit from a move towards fascism.

People need to remember that to get rid of war mongers tens of thousands if not millions of people need to take to the streets and stop “business as usual”. That is how we got rid of one lying, war mongering president during the Vietnam slaughter and how the next president decided that the only way to end a war that cannot be won is to simply pack up and leave the battle field.

As long as the military-industrial complex, the war mongering Pentagon [let's play soldiers with someone elses' money and someone else's blood] we will continue to move towards a totalitarian, fascist, police state. Elections clearly no longer get the job done, because they are bought and paid for by the wealthy individuals and their corporate personnas. Corruption is now so common that even the Supreme Court is blatantly compromised by members who seem to think that the Constitution means whatever they say it means; a Supreme Court that is complicit in the theft of one election and whose members are in league with some of the most morally and ethically bankrupt organizations and individuals in the USA.

Armageddon for Home-Owners? 12 Facts That Show We’re in the Midst of the Worst Housing Collapse in US History | | AlterNet.

This article from Alter Net provides some interesting and distrubing statistics concerning the housing market, the worth of homes, and unemployment. Unfortunately it does not put the blame squarely on the three businesses directly responsible for the disaster: banks (all of them), the realestate industry, the stock market.

These three institutions have collectively and deliberately fleeced the American people of billions, nay – trillions of dollars over the last two or three decades. The first and most important fiction that they designed in order to manage grand theft on such an amazing scale was to create a myth. The myth of home ownership as the primary vehicle of the generation of personal and family wealth. In no other nation has this mythmaking venture proved so valuable to those who make money by creating debt. Yes debt! Banks do not create wealth. Banks suck wealth out of the productive economy via fees and  interest on loans made to people who are deluded by the realtor and the banker into thinking that moving into a house with a mortgage they are now “home owners”. Of course they are not “home owners”, they are debtors who will pay twice what the original value of the house was before the loan is paid off. (There are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule.) The only people who are truly home owners are those who have managed to pay off any and all indebtedness – after 25 or 30 or even more years- or are in the 1% to 3% who are able to simply write a check for any house, or anything else, they desire. Bill Gates comes to mind, or the criminal heads of such organizations as JP Morgan Chase, CITI Group, Goldman Sachs and so on.

Creating debt for the millions does create wealth for the few thousand who collect the interest on the debt. Of course the idea that this transfer of wealth from the hands of those who’s work actually does create value into the pockets of those who use debt to take the created wealth for their own is the underlying reality of the myth of “home ownership” as wealth creation.

The creation of debt is foundational to the function of modern Capitalism. Without this mechanism to extract actual value produced by the working masses, there would be no rich bankers or stock brokers. Without Capitalism there would be no use for either of these two occuptaions or mechanisms of oppression and wealth extraction. Instead mechanisms would be designed to insure that people had good housing and good, productive and socially valuable jobs and would be assured of descent housing along with health care and education.

However, as long as people are convinced that they need others, those who consider themselves smarter, and somehow qualified to rule and direct the the lives of the masses, these mechanisms will remain in place and the masses will suffer from the callous exploitation of the few as they have ever since the beginnings of “civilization”.  We need neither government nor nor a capitalist “ownership class” to direct our lives and ensure our well being. We are perfectly capable of doing without this sort of leadership just as we can do without kings, queens and nobility, we can do without capitalists and governors, presidents and legislatures disposing of our lives and our fortunes at their caprice. Without either of these pernicious institutions we would not be trying to rule the world and using violence to do so. A better world is possible. It is a world without rulers or captains of industry or any other people who manipulate and exploit us. When we come to understand this and act on these principles, we can be free, at peace and live fulfilled lives.

Backward, Christian Soldiers.

Shades of Constantine I continue to haunt us more than 1,500 years after he joined his ancestors. It was Constantine I who effectively ended what was left of the Christianity of the 1st century of the Common Era by making the Christian Church an arm of the government. He convened a council of church leaders, only a few hundred actually showed up, and gave them orders concerning the type of religion he needed to support and run an empire. He got what he wanted. Jesus offiicially was declared a god, the church a tool of empire and the empire a tool of the church for conversion of the pagans. Those who did not convert were generally immediately sent to whatever afterlife they believed in. The actual teachinges of Jesus were relegated to second or third place and the teachings of the imperalized church which placed Jesus in the realm of the gods to be worshipped rather than followed.

Today we see the continuation of this imperialization of Christianity under the guise of  “evangelizing” the military so that it can evangelize the world with gun, bomb and Bible. Many, if not most, Christians see this as a good thing. They see it as a good thing because the religion they practice has nothing to do with the Way that Jesus taught. Even to imagine that that Jewish peasant who was murdered by the Empire (Roman at that time), would bless the teachings of the the military concerning the use of deadly force to kill tens of thousands at a time is nothing short of insane. Unfortunately insane religion, particularly the trinity of evil, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all are quite comfortable with everything from murdering individuals to the mass murder of children, women and men. If one wonders where this sort of message can be found, one need look no further than the Bible and the Koran. And the Bible is perhaps the most blood thirsty of the two books.

We are at a crossroad in history. We can look to science and reason to guide us in these perilous times, or we can continue to look the the demented teachings of three religions whose origins and values date back to the stone age. One need only make a sweeping review of Jewish, Christian and Islamic cultures  and histories to understand that the way of the Evil Trinity is bloodshed and darkness across the face of the world. We can only hope that to embrace reason and science will lead us out of the darkness of demonic gods and superstition to a path of light and enlightenment, peace and prosperity.

Anyone who knows about the extreme right wing religious agenda that funds and fuels much of the idiology of the Republican Party, could have expected this attack on women and women’s rights to appear early in their legislative agenda. The source for this attack on women’s rights to control their own reproductive processes and health is based on irrational, patriarchal anti-woman theologies that infect not only Christianity but Islam and Orthodox and right wing Judaism as well. All three of what I call the Evil Trinity of Western Monotheisms have shared roots in hating women and treating them as less human and of less value than men.

The roots are deep and wide and are to be located in the scriptures that all three of these religions share – the Hebrew Bible commonly referred to as the Old Testament by Christians. In these texts women are tortured, raped, and murdered at the behest of the god of that book and other works of horror committed against women with the blessing of that god.

This is the religious base for the current attack on women’s reproductive rights being waged by Republicans in Washington. It is the same old song. An irrational, anti-scientific and anti-reason but politically powerful group of people are using the political process to impliment a religious agenda that will force the rest of us, and in particular the 51% of the population that is female, to follow rules imagined to have been demanded by a demented, murderous, land-stealing, genocidal deity from the Stone Age.

In the name of religious nonsense the Republican Party, and not a few Democrats, are willing to make the government of the USA one of the most intrusive on the planet – outside of theocratic Islamic governments. At the same time the Republican Party likes to carry the flag of less not more government. What hypocrisy!! What a bunch of charlatans. And what a disgusting bunch of frauds.

The GOP Unleashes a Horrifying Attack on Women | | AlterNet.

Income inequality is a built-in property of Capitalism. When a tiny minority of the population owns the means of production, distribution and the financial mechanisms which enable this ownership, the vast majority will always have less. This phenomenon, however, is not limited to formal Capitalism as Marx describes it. It has been a built-in property of economic, political and social relationships since the beginning of what we call civilization.

It will only change when the majority of humanity understands that a hierarchially organized power structure is not only not necessary but counter to the common good. It makes little difference how that power structure is measured, whether it is by economic activity alone (this never occurs in the real world) or by class, racial or sexual distinctions or some combination of all of them. Only an end to hierarchy and patriarchy will eventually result in real, radical, effective democracy. One of the words used to describe this sort of culture is that of anarchy. That term means “no ruler”. That is to say that no human being has power over another by any means without the consent of all concerned.

This is the only political, economic, social order that I believe in. And I believe that until and unless we embrace this value, we will constantly be at war with one another whether it is race against race, class against class, owner against worker, nation against nation, state against state, religion against religion (along with nationalism two curses on humankind responsible for more slaughter than anything else).

Given the state of the world, I’m not optimistic that we can make this happen before we actually destroy the planet in our blind belief that we can exploit one another and the planet infinitely with no catastrophic consequences.

Income inequality: It wasn’t always this way.

This is an intelligent and well reasoned arguement for not bowing before the gods of religious intolerance as they are defended by the religious progressives. I’ve come to believe that much strength that religious fanatics and fundamentalists exert in the world today are supported by the work of those who call themselves progressive religionists of many stripes. The keep tilling the ground of irrationality, superstition and ignorance in which the seeds of militant right wing lunatics, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim or some other kind, are nutured by the fertilizer of denial. Progressives deny that religion is in large part responsible for much of the suffering in our world today just as it has been since at least the dawn of statist Christianity during the reign of Constantine I.

I’m not any more willing to give religious nonsense a pass than I am to give flat earthers a chance to teach Earth Science and Astrology in schools while pretending that everyone has a right to their opinion and schools should allow all views to be discussed – seriously – as scientific possibilities.

No, Atheists Don’t Have to Show “Respect” for Religion | | AlterNet.