What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, -Martin Luther King, Jr.
I tried and tried to whittle down the post below but found too much pertinent information. But before you read on, read the paragraphs below, so you will have a greater understanding of what Martin Luther King was speaking of above. I know, I know you are tired of hearing about Bush policies but …That is the point! We should not forget the words of Martin Luther King above and short term memory loss of the US public is one of our biggest deficiencies! News Flash: There are substantial “elected” elements in this nation that not only want Obama to fail but all of government to fail! The statement below explains in part.
“All pubic traded corporations have been structured through a series of legal decisions, the are required by law to place their financial interests of their own above all competing interests!” – Documentary: The Corporation
Excuse me but “you”, your financial interests, your child’s education or in short your standard of living and your salary is exactly that to them …a “competing interest!”
Not only that their “financial interest” trumps any kind of loyalty or patriotism to ones birth country. There is no denying that IBM for example traded with the Nazi regime during WWII, made considerable profits and increased the efficiency of our sworn enemy! (bottom of page) Yet not a single CEO was hung for treason!
Not enough? …still not convnced? You have evidently “forgotten” a coup d’état to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We have historical Congressional committee records of this corporate fascist agenda to show this! (again at the bottom)
GAlaniz
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01152010/transcript1.html
BILL MOYERS: How is it that the people who are responsible for the mess that Obama inherited are getting away with demonizing him when he’s only had less than a year to clean it up. Let me show you just a sample of commentators railing against the President.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the US economy. They are purposefully doing it, I believe.
GLENN BECK: This is a well-thought out plan to collapse the economy as we know it.
JONATHAN HOENIG: The president has, I think if you listen to what he says, a hatred for capitalism. Where do jobs come from? They don’t come from the government, they come from the profit seeking self-interest,
GAlaniz (Not exactly true, it is consumers who prop up corporate America “first”, only then are jobs created).
SEAN HANNITY: It’s his stimulus. It’s his record deficit spending. He quadrupled the debt in a year. You know, how many more are the Democrats going to say, “Well, it’s George Bush’s fault”? This is Obama’s economy now.
GAlaniz (Not so fast see the graphic)
THOMAS FRANK: Well, that’s the disease of our time. You know, that sort of …”instant forgetting”.
BILL MOYERS: But what does it do to our politics when the very spokesmen for what some people have called a decade of conservative failure. I mean, remember before Obama, they turned a budget surplus into a deficit. They took us to war on fraudulent pretenses. They borrowed money to fight it. They presided over a stalemate in Afghanistan. They trashed the Constitution. They presided over the weakest economy in decades– ??
THOMAS FRANK: Not weak for everybody. ??
BILL MOYERS: No, no. ??
THOMAS FRANK: Some people did really well.
BILL MOYERS: Okay, they compiled the worst track record on jobs in decades. And they ended up with the worst stock market in decades. I mean, it was a decade of conservative failure. And yet, Obama’s their villain?
THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you’ve described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.??All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we’re forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.
BILL MOYERS: That government is a perversion. ??
THOMAS FRANK: Government is– yeah, government is a perversion. And to believe that the federal government can be operated, you know, with all of its programs, can be operated well and do things that are good for the people, is, as you say, is a perversion. ??And they look at someone like Barack Obama and it makes them seethe. Because that’s, you know, that’s what he’s trying to do. What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they’re in power deliver government failure. ??
BILL MOYERS: Not merely from incompetence, you say, but from ideology, from philosophy, from a view of the world. ??
THOMAS FRANK: And sometimes from design.
BILL MOYERS: From design? What do you mean? ??
THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don’t believe in the mission. ??And the result is that it doesn’t– they don’t enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I’m smiling, because it’s kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank. They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, “Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?” “No.” Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn’t believe in regulating Wall Street.
BILL MOYERS: So, they made the Securities and Exchange Commission a laughing stock, if you will. They really did. ??
THOMAS FRANK: Right. Well, there’s these horrible stories that came out. Once Bush was out, there was a study done of the SEC, as well. These people didn’t even have like their own functioning photocopiers, okay? So, we’re talking about the lawyers that are supposed to be protecting us from Wall Street. And they have to go stand in line at Kinko’s to do their own photocopying. And they’re going up against the best paid, you know, best educated lawyers on planet Earth, who represent the investment banks. And they’re supposed to be defending us.
THOMAS FRANK: Yeah. Well, or you know, do away with it altogether, de-fund it. Look, the beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan came to office and came to power, and you remember the kind of rhetoric that he used to use in denouncing the Federal workforce. He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.
…I found an interview with the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1928, where he said– this quote, it’s mind-boggling to me. But he really said this. “The best public servant is the worst one.” Okay? You want bad people in government. You want to deliberately staff government with second-rate people. Because if you have good people in government, government will work. And then the public will learn to trust government. And then they’ll hand over more power to it.
And you don’t want that, of course. Your Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, when I first read this, “That’s a crazy idea. I can’t believe that sentiment.” And then I found it repeated again and again and again. Throughout the long history of the conservative movement. This is something they believe very deeply.
THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way. ??
BILL MOYERS: But we saw with this collapse and this bailout, we saw the failure of that. I mean, many, many conservatives have compared– oh, they always do, compare government to criminals. All the time. ??
THOMAS FRANK: Taxation is a form of theft. It’s as bad as a mugger in the street saying, “Give me your money.” And America is pretty much unique among the nations in that our political system, half of our political system is basically dedicated to the destruction of the government from within. I don’t know any other country where that’s the case. But there’s plenty of countries where government works really, really well. I mean, even, for God’s sake, in India, you know, which we don’t think of as being an advanced industrial society, their banks didn’t all go bust in the latest downturn. Now, why is that? ??Because their equivalent of the Federal Reserve was not, you know, deregulating, stopping enforcement. They weren’t doing any of those things. They were keeping a very tight lid on it. Government can work. It works all the time.
BILL MOYERS: You wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Let me ask you to broaden that canvas and ask, with the answer to the question, what’s the matter with America that we tolerate all of this? ??
THOMAS FRANK: I think a large part of it is that– well, it’s the chronic historical forgetting, you know? We just elected Barack Obama in this– you know, he had quite a mandate. You know, biggest majority of any President since Reagan. And now a year later, and the public is already turning on him. And that’s a part of the problem. But, you know, another part of it is that the conservative argument about government and freedom is very compelling when they say that something like, you know, the national, you know, any proposal for a national health program is a violation of our freedom. Americans don’t like to hear that their freedom is being violated. That is a hot button argument. Now, the obvious– look, there’s an obvious response that Democrats could make. Which is no, this is a way of growing our freedom. This will actually expand human freedom, not limit it. They never say that. Democrats never defend the state. They never come out and say, “No, no. It’s important to have, you know, government. It’s important to have a Department of Labor. These are, you know, having government actually– a good government increases your freedom. It doesn’t ruin it.” They never fight back consistently.
BILL MOYERS: Why? ??
THOMAS FRANK: I think they’re– some of them do. You’ve got members of Congress here and there that do. But by and large, the prominent leading Democrats in our society don’t do that. Why is that? Because I think that would get them in trouble with their funders. I mean, the power of money is huge in the political system. You know, despite all the efforts that have been made over the years to get money out of politics. It’s still immensely powerful.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/03/27/print/main504730.shtml
Black and his researchers said recently discovered Nazi government documents in the U.S. National Archives and Polish eyewitness testimony link IBM’s U.S. operations directly to the operations of the Third Reich in occupied Poland.
“The word has gotten out and a lot of people still alive are supplying information that they didn’t have the context to understand before,” said Robert Wolfe, an expert on Nazi records and former chief of captured German government documents for the U.S. National Archives.
Wolfe told Reuters historians were finding new meaning in previously available papers documenting the use of IBM Hollerith computer machines to carry out the Holocaust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
The Business Plot (also the Plot Against FDR and the White House Putsch) was a reported political conspiracy in 1933 which involved wealthy businessmen plotting a coup d’état to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934 retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional committee that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a coup.[1]?
