There Really is No Such Thing as Communism, Socialism, Progressivism etc. Because....

Republicans are notorious for screaming that the Democrats are socialists and communists.   The Democrats scream that the Republicans are the capitalist Great Satan pigs who must be destroyed for the collective good of humanity.  The truth? Capitalism and free markets no longer exist in America but fascism runs wild as an insidious prosperity destroying disease.  If one truly examines all the 'ism's' that folks endlessly obsess about including communism, socialism, progressivism, fascism, state run capitalism, statism etc., they all boil down to essentially the same thing:  totalitarian control of all people and resources by a handful of ruling elites who grow filthy rich by concentrating all wealth and power.  Why worry over mere semantics when the end result is the same?

Interestingly, China is a case study in communism as well as the massive concentration of wealth and power, as documented by Bloomberg.

Mapping China’s Red Nobility 

Bloomberg News mapped the families of Communist China’s “Eight Immortals” to reveal the origins of princelings, an elite class that has been able to amass wealth and influence, and exploit opportunities unavailable to most Chinese. Bloomberg tracked 103 people – descendants including children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their respective spouses. The Immortals, now all dead, are revered in communist lore as revolutionary fighters who led China’s economic opening after Mao Zedong’s death. The identities and business dealings of these families are often cloaked in secrecy because of state censorship and complex corporate webs. To document them, Bloomberg scoured thousands of pages of corporate filings, property records, official websites and archives, and conducted dozens of interviews from China to the United States, where many were educated and have at times made their homes.

Those who cling to the warm and fuzzy notion that statism and collectivism are somehow caring, paternal and compassionate are somewhere between severely uninformed or downright stupid.  Collectivism is the most failed ideology in human history, yet folks continue to aspire to it as the noblest of ideas that will satisfy every human want if only the government had enough power.  Well, communist nations had all the power any tyrant could possible hope to achieve and their only achievement in the name of humanity was the biggest pile of dead bodies in history.   It's well documented that communism killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and mostly through starvation attributable to collectivization and central planning.  Life is always cheap and expendable when worship of the state is the only imperative as well as an exalted god that must be obeyed.

The Worker's Paradise in the communist Soviet Union and elsewhere turned out to be a big bust when the impoverished, suffering and hungry proletariat took a peek at their working class comrades in nations with respectable levels of economic freedom.  What a shock!  The working class dudes in those evil capitalist nations were enjoying prosperity and consumer goodies on a scale unheard of in the commie Workers Paradises.   In capitalist nations, the poor were joining the middle class and for the first time in human history the people rather than the ruling aristocracy were actually building wealth and power.

It was a monumental leap for humankind because wealth and power was finally being widely diffused and disbursed among the people for the first time in human history.  Effectively, free markets and property rights represented a transfer of wealth and power from the 1% to the 99%.  For clearly obvious reasons the ruling class panicked because they were no longer in control as their absolute power and privileges were acutely threatened.

Once upon a time the world was owned and controlled by kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and absolute rulers. There were the ruling elites, the upper class, the propertied class, the moneyed class, the educated class, the bureaucratic class and everybody else was a serf of sorts and expected to be compliant slaves – that’s what slaves do, they serve their masters. Such was the fate of humanity for thousands of years. The 1% and the 99% have existed for as long as humans have existed.

Then the unthinkable happened. In Europe, Western Civilization was born as folks started to clamor for political rights, property rights and natural rights. Monarchies began to topple, theocratic powers were usurped and the revolution for human liberty began. Although Europe was a bloodbath on and off for nearly a millennium, the great political theorists and intellectual challengers who conceived and fought to implement such foreign concepts as non-repressive forms of government and individual sovereignty finally succeeded. Eventually, limited personal freedoms and rights translated into much wider economic freedoms which elevated industry and trade while spawning an economically strong middle class.

Throughout the process, we all learned that the vast human potential so inherent in the minds and souls of free thinking human beings is, ultimately, the only catalyst for progress and civilization, without which there can no civilizations, at least none worth noticing or experiencing. Great societies and human liberation are soul mates.

The grand experiment worked wonders as power and wealth was shifting away from the 1% and to the 99%. Shorn of their shackles, mankind prospered for the first time in human history and at an unprecedented rate. A strong and flourishing middle class was born as free markets were delivering good and services, and prosperity for the masses (99%) was achieved. There was peace instead of war and government had limited powers.

But the 1% started screaming “holy shit, we can’t let that happen. We can’t allow the lowlife people and the unwashed masses to prosper with free markets and sound money so we will work to transfer that power back to us.”

Instead of using armies and violence to subdue the people, the ruling class hatched an extraordinarily clever ballot box scheme - democracy (unlimited majority mob rule) would be used to control and manipulate the people into peacefully transferring their power back to the ruling class by conferring voter approved legitimacy upon them.

Throughout most of human history, the people were barely tossed subsistence level crumbs while their overlords lavishly feasted on the finest of everything because they alone controlled all property, all resources and all of humanity.  Human rights, civil rights, property rights and economic liberty dramatically changed the equation.

But lo and behold, the people in America and Europe began to reject the responsibility of liberty and started voting to deliver themselves back into the bondage and shackles of the elites.  The elites of government offered them 'free everything' in exchange for relinquishing their liberty.  Of course, those promises will not be kept.  Just asked the Greeks.  But once liberty is lost and humankind is once again back in the shackles of government, the fiat central banksters and the elites, there is no saddle to mount to escape the tyranny, despotism and misery.

Yet, there are numerous folks in America and Europe who continue to vote for centralized powers, bigger government, massive taxes, income redistribution and the wholesale slaughter of civil and economic liberties. Such folks cling to a dangerous and deadly delusion.

If we think we are suffering now, we have only just begun to reap the poison harvest of a statist economy because the real misery has yet to hit us. When it does, the pinchers of the totalitarian state will really start snuffing out life ruthlessly and brutally. The totalitarian nations wallowing in Marxism/socialism/oligarchy/fascism/statism will always resort to the same tactics as Stalin and Mao who snuffed out 100,000,000 folks during the 20th century alone.

The only difference between the economies of Mao/Stalin that murdered 100 million folks and the so-called soft socialism of the West is that the former never had the luxury of a wealthy and productive economy to loot and plunder. Soon enough though, we will be fully plundered.

Meanwhile, the American people are drinking copious amounts of “Foolaid” as we cling to the delusion that government is the cornucopia of plenty. The lion’s share of the plunder generated by the governments looting machine only accrues to a few elites and insider power players because that's is precisely how statism has always worked throughout history.   The rest are lucky if they are tossed a few crumbs and those crumbs are rapidly dwindling.

My Two Cents on Benghazi

The right wing media is exploiting the Benghazi disaster as an opportunity to diss President Obama and personally blame him for the entire fiasco.  Fox News is especially all over the story.

EXCLUSIVE: CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to "stand down," according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to "stand down."

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters.

I don't doubt any of the above facts. Most news reports have pretty much included the same information. But here's the problem: the military and the CIA have a long history of hating each other. The CIA is a secretive and covert organization that pretty much operates without any scrutiny whatsoever. Moreover, the CIA literally controls the US State Department and always has. Benghazi was not the US Embassy, which is in Tripoli. The CIA is notorious for creating these consulates as bases of operation for CIA missions, missions that typically include arming and funding radicals and jihadists for the purpose of destabilization of a nation and regime change.  It's been going on at least since the days of Jimmy Carter who funded and armed the Afghan Mujuhadeen, now the Sunni Islamist Taliban, to fight the Soviets.  The CIA was a key 'on the ground' player in Afghanistan during the Cold War and is directly responsible for arming some of the most dangerous folks on the planet.

Unfortunately, the US has a very long history of being in bed with radical Sunni Wahhabist Salafist Islamists and the top of this disturbing pyramid goes straight to the House of Saud, the kingpin of Wahhabist Sunni Islamist terror.  It's no coincidence that 15 of the 19  911 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia.  The foreign policy of the US is to support, fund and arm radical Sunni jihadists and we've been doing it for a long time.  The US government and the CIA backed and supported Pakistan's nuclear arms program, along with Saudi Arabia.  Pakistan used to be a nation teeming with radical Sunni Islamists but now, courtesy of the US and it's Saudi alliance, is a nuclear armed radical Sunni Islamist nation.  It's only a matter of time before some zealot Sunni nutjob seizes control of Pakistan's nukes and starts firing away.  Moreover, Pakistan was once a benign Muslim nation until Saudi and Gulf Sunni money and madrassahs started pouring into the nation to radicalize the population.

The hardcore neocon website, familysecuritymatters.org, is accusing Obama of being an ally of Al Qaeda.

Arms Flow to Syria May Be Behind Benghazi Cover-Up

Stevens was tasked with helping to coordinate U.S. assistance to the rebels, whose top military commander, Abdelhakim Belhadj, was the leader of the Al Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). That means that Stevens was authorized by the U.S. Department of State and the Obama administration to aid and abet individuals and groups that were, at a minimum, allied ideologically with Al Qaeda, the jihadist terrorist organization that attacked the homeland on the first 9/11, the one that's not supposed to exist anymore after the killing of its leader, Osama bin Laden, on May 2, 2012.

The above assessment is erroneously ludicrous on several levels.  First, Al Qaeda isn't even an organization with the power to do anything.  Al Qaeda is, however, just one of many, many Islamist groups funded by our friends the Saudis and the CIA. Nothing, however, stops the neocons from accusing Obama of being an appeaser of radical Islamists.  In fact, it was only a few short months after 911 when President Bush entertained Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at his Crawford, TX ranch in April 2002.  Few international dignitaries got invites to the Bush ranch but the Saudis were always welcome.  The Saudi-Bush family connections date back to the days of the George Herbert Walker Bush.

If there's a concern about US presidents and government officials being all warm and cozy with 911 jihad terrorists, look no further than the Bush family affection for radical Sunni jihadists.

The Bush-Saudi Connection

The absolute favorite photo of the neocons is the photo of Obama bowing before the Saudi King according to protocol.  US presidents have bowed before many foreign leaders according to the prevailing custom.  At least Obama wasn't kissing and holding hands with King Abdullah, the King of Islamist Sunni terror.  Bush was being overtly and outwardly affectionate with King Abdullah while Obama was just being polite and respectful.  Big difference!

George Herbert Walker Bush is also a former CIA director with deep ties to the organization and its clandestine operations.  The CIA has been funneling arms and money to dissidents of all religious and political stripes for decades and such folks were probably on the CIA payroll.  This is nothing new.  Again, it's important to note that the US State Department is heavily staffed with CIA, officially, and unofficially through US Aid programs.  Even neocon Glenn Beck chirped in on the issue.

Glenn Beck Explains How Obama Used Ambassador Stevens to Funnel arms to Libya and Syria

It's probably true that Ambassador Stevens was carrying out a CIA mission under the guise of a State Department consulate but this is quite common.  Obviously, something went very wrong and what most probably went wrong is that the Islamists the CIA trusted and were doing business with turned on them when they saw an opportunity to humiliate the US by successfully attacking the Benghazi consulate.  Also, the issue of the mysterious mission of Ambassador Stevens is being raised.

How US Ambassador Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked To Jihadist Rebels In Syria 

....there was a CIA post in Benghazi , located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" ... and that its security features "were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died."

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In any case, the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.

The entire Benghazi fiasco is covered with CIA fingerprints.  But the burning question is this:  why didn't the US military come to the rescue of the CIA?

The CIA kind of functions as its own military, much to the consternation of the US military.  The CIA is also decisive and is not gnerally hampered with too much in the way of chain of command restrains.  Conversely, the US military is heavily a top down chain of command operation.  Getting somebody to make a decision can be very difficult depending the potential blowback of the situation.

The entire attack was over within a matter of hours but during the attack urgent messages were coming out of the Benghazi consulate.  The Benghazi timeline is here.  More interesting is that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta wiggled out of the situation by proclaiming that the military didn't have enough information to warrant putting forces at risk which is the equivalent of Panetta giving a birdie to the CIA.

Panetta on Benghazi attack: 'Could not put forces at risk'

The U.S. military did not get involved during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last month because officials did not have enough information about what was going on before the attack was over, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Thursday.

Where was the military and why didn't it respond to CIA calls for help?  Panetta claims the military didn't have enough time.  Another critical factor that is missing in the analysis is the location of the US military presence in Libya.  Nobody seems to know if the military was anywhere on the ground in Libya, obviously something that neither the US government or the military wanted disclosed.

What is known is that the Benghazi consulate was a CIA front engaged in weapon smuggling to Syrian Jihad rebels.  President Obama knows what the CIA does, even if he doesn't know what the CIA is actually doing because that's how the secretive and unaccountable CIA has always operated.  The CIA is one of those things that nobody in government ever wants to talk about because, well, the CIA is very dangerous, it kills folks, it arranges assassinations and exactly who it reports to isn't exactly clear although formally the CIA Director reports to the president.  It's been speculated by many CIA observers that the CIA is really nothing more than the private and personal military of the New World Order, the banksters and resource seeking corporatists.  It's also widely believe that the CIA is self-funding through the drug trade.

The CIA is the Biggest Drug Dealer on the Planet

President Kennedy said he wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.  According to James Douglass who wrote JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why it Matters, the CIA murdered JFK.  Douglass writes "We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy.  That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious.  The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it."

That the CIA is feared by the political class is an understatement.  But what makes Benghazi so intriguing is that it's increasingly more difficult to cover-up dastardly CIA deeds given the explosion of non-government controlled alternative media.   The Benghazi cover-up, bungled and clumsy as it was, was solely to protect the CIA and its mission, whatever the cost.  Ambassador Stevens and those who worked with him were not victims but were active participants in the CIA's work.  Most probably, Stevens wasn't an ambassador at all, just a CIA operative masquerading as an ambassador.  Moreover, it's probably also true that the military just didn't want to get involved, assuming it could have done something, because of its natural hostility toward the CIA.

I  believe that Obama was probably horrified by what happened in Benghazi but when your lust for power is so great that you decide to bed down with the CIA spooks and spies, anything can happen.  At the end of the day, Benghazi was just another Fast and Furious gone bad.  Republican attempts to capitalize on the Benghazi fiasco are indeed shabby and reckless.  If anything, Republicans worship the CIA and its evil and secretive missions far more than the Obama and the Democrats.

The Party of No Ideas Smacks Down the Party of Bad Ideas

Looks like Clint Eastwood's empty chair skit at the RNC Convention turned into a prophecy, at least in the context of a presidential debate performance. As a liberty activist, I happily avoided the appallingly incomprehensible contest between Statist Clown A and Statist Clown B. However, I followed Twitter because that's where the laughs were, along with the agony of some apoplectic liberals and Democrats.

Mark Hemingway@Heminator That wasn't a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car. (Hemingway was quoting the Weekly Standard).

Todd Kincannon @ToddKincannon Somebody call Todd Akin. Analyzing this debate requires a rape expert.

Bill Maher @billmaher Obama made a lot of great points tonight. Unfortunately, most of them were for Romney

Bill Maher @billmaher i must say, of all the Romneys i've seen, this Debate Romney is my favorite 

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald MSNBC tonight seems like a group therapy session for the deeply depressed and people with anger issues. It's actually disturbing to watch

Todd Kincannon @ToddKincannon Right now, David Axelrod is asking a crying Barack Obama: "Show me on the doll where the bad man touched you."

Brian Sack@brian_sack MSNBC's flag at half mast.

VANITY FAIR @VanityFair Good LORD Obama wouldn't win a student council election against a chubby nerd with that closing argument.

As if the Twitter zingers weren't bad enough, there was the epic Chris Matthews meltdown.

Chris Matthews’ Epic Meltdown Over Obama Performance: ‘What Was He Doing Tonight?’

Clearly, Romney cleaned Obama's clock and he did it without even offering any solutions to any of our immense problems.  Only in America can somebody win a debate by offering no solutions to big problems, no cuts in government spending and advocating for perpetual war!

Oh well, it's America where substance is never ever on the table because it's all about packaging, party propaganda and one liners.  Still, Obama absolutely earned the thrashing he got from the left and the right.  An Obama super PAC donor may have summed it up best.

Big Super PAC Donor on Obama: 'Looks Like He Took My Million and Spent it All on Weed'

Obama even dipped on Intrade, the online gambling site, here. Still, Obama remains comfortably ahead on Intrade with a 65.2% probability of winning to Romney's 35.1.  However, polls are tightening in the critical swing states.  The general consensus of the pollsters and pundits is that the deal that was sealed for an easy Obama re-election is presently no longer a foregone conclusion.

To what extent the race is truly competitive remains unclear and will largely depend on the result of future debates.

As for America, the American people, the economy and our future, the prognosis remains quite grim because the endless wars and big bad government will prevail regardless of who wins in November.

Meanwhile, the bread and circuses continue because America really is the incarnation of the Roman Empire.   

Why Democrats are Such Annoying Frauds

Above Image: Bodies lying on the ground after the My Lai massacre

The Democrats claim to love and value humanity, human rights and justice. While the Republican Party is currently saddled with the entirely justifiable label of 'War Party', the history of liberal/progressive/Democratic views on humanity are grotesquely contrary to its mantra as the Party of Peace and Love.

After all, it was progressive liberal Democrats who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars - Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and William Clinton, all progressive icons.

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

WW I, 35,000,000 dead

WW II, At least 50,000,000 dead

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

The Vietnam War Memorial lists the names of 58,195 dead Americans. Millions of south east Asians were outright slaughtered in the Vietnam War, a Democrat and LBJ war.

The Department of Defense acknowledges the death of 36,574 Americans in the Korean War, here.  It's been estimated that at least 2.8 million died in Harry Truman's War.

Post WW II, the German people were forced to face the bitter truth of Nazism and its role in slaughtering at least 50 million folks. That's a massive load for any conscious and its a horror and shame that Germans will live with forever.  The years may pass but history lives on.

While Germans have been exceeding remorseful, as they should be, you will never ever hear a Democrat fess up to its own responsibilities for actively participating in some of the worst wars and worst death tolls in the 20th century.

Instead, Democrats actually brag  about the virtues of their totalitarian liberty slashing accomplishments  while totally ignoring their own role in vaporizing over 100 million folks.

The Huffington Post aka Puff Post is a progressive circus that publishes an abundance of liberal braggadocio.

Barack Obama Promised A New Kind Of Politics, But Played The Same Old Game

The Puff Post piece is critical of Obama for not being progressive enough, despite passing Obamacare  and a nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus.  While Democrats are indeed rattled that Obama just hasn't delivered on the progressive agenda, the Puff Post elevates LBJ to the status of a progressive deity.

Johnson surveyed the legislative landscape and knew he had to shake things up.

Rather than negotiate with Congress, Johnson turned the goodwill of the nation into a force with which to bludgeon the GOP and expand what was politically possible. He took his case to the American people, reminding them that the GOP was the “Party of Lincoln,” and flooded Washington with religious leaders who lobbied Congress....

Barack Obama could have learned something from LBJ. As a candidate Obama promised to change the way Washington works and he rode a wave of global support into the White House. His first two years in office have repeatedly been compared to the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Society under Johnson, with historic achievements on health care, Wall Street reform and other domestic priorities.

But Obama’s first term has also left many of his supporters wondering whether those accomplishments could have been bigger in size, scope and impact.

Bludgeon the GOP? Those are incredibly strong words of praise for a man who bludgeoned millions with American bombs while sending over 58,000 Americans to their graves. In the language of progressive speak, it doesn't matter what any progressive does so long as he/she promotes and implements the progressive agenda.  The body count?  Collateral damage!

LBJ and the progressives also wiped out the money in the Social Security Trust Fund to fund his progressive murder fest, a murder fest that cost $784 billion, here, and money that was scalped off the hides and futures of ordinary Americans that progressives claim to love.   Now that's so progressive!     Social Security was so broke that Reagan was forced to impose the biggest SS tax hike in history to replenish it after the progressives plundered it to kill millions.  That's also quite progressive.

Progressives also gave us a dollar with  rapidly declining purchasing power, something that really hits the poor and middle class quite hard.  That's so progressive!

The purchasing power of the dollar in one graphic picture:

Of course it was progressive Woodrow Wilson who gave us the Federal Reserve and with it the absolute power of Wall Street Banksters to destroy the dollar and the middle class.

Imagine that!  Try telling the Occupy Wall Street folks that progressives are guilty as hell for putting America under Bankster tyranny.

What's really tragic is that Republicans who once stood for limited government and peace somehow managed to link up with the progressives on the road to tyranny and joined them.  Not only is America now stuck with 2 evil War Parties, those progressive moralists that bashed Bush/Cheney on foreign policy were suddenly all quiet when they won power in 2008 and their party was doing the killing.

Love humanity and value peace, liberty and prosperity?  Then don't vote Republican or Democrat.

Prosperity: A View from the Left, the Right and the Austrian Liberty Movement

With the economy in shambles and the middle class rapidly vanishing, there are 3 views on how to solved the America's increasingly critical economic problems: 1. the progressive left or Democrat view 2. the right wing or the Republican view and 3. the Austrian free market view.

While every sane American and even the political class will acknowledge that traditional American prosperity is in dire jeopardy, the views on precisely what constitutes prosperity and where prosperity comes from vary radically in the ideological camps.

The View From the Democrat/Progressive/Liberal Camp

The leftist Democrat/progressive views have been well summarized in a category captioned Austerity Hawks Want a Return to 1920's Capitalism on a progressive website that includes a series of articles on the issue.

Austerity Road to 19th Century

Deficit Hawks Continue Post-WWII Attack on Labor

Who Benefits From Austerity

High Deficits were the Objective of Right Economics

Austerity Hawks Want a Return to 1920's Capitalism

Is Obama Still on the Austerity Train?

Austerity and the GOP in Power

According to the Democrat/liberal/progressive view, there can be no prosperity for the masses without a government mandate.  Moreover, they demand absolute totalitarian powers to 1. unionize labor and give them enough power to force businesses to meet their every demand and 2. the power to tax for redistribution purposes just in case somebody has incurred their wrath and scorn by working hard and being successful in entrepreneurship.

The left automatically rejects the premise that free markets can deliver prosperity by giving the people the power to decide want they want in the way of goods and services.  Hence, the left strongly favors a top down command and control economy wherein government bureaucrats alone have the exclusive power to decide what people will get and at what price they will get it.

The progressive model is certainly nothing new and has been around since the days of Marx, Stalin and Mao.  Furthermore, the left totally ignores the fact that communism and socialism killed over 100 million folks during the 20th century alone and mostly by starvation.

Despite the incessant whining of American progressives that folks are poor because government and bureaucrats don't have enough power, there exist many nations on the planet where the progressive had all the power - Greece, Spain and Portugal to name a few - and all are suffering from profound economic decline, mountains of debt and bankruptcy.

Progressives have an intense aversion to the word austerity, although austerity is nothing more than living within your financial means and not spending yourself into personal and national bankruptcy. While progressives absolutely believe that promising and delivering the cornucopia of plenty  to humanity is their defining goal, they fall way short.  Europe's most debt ridden nations and America's most debt ridden cities are run by progressives who do nothing but lie and borrow to keep the great progressive lie alive.

Nobody summed up progressive thinking better than Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang.  What Lewis says about Greece easily applies to any progressive nation or entity dedicated to achieving the paranoid delusion of utopia through tyranny (the Marxist socialist recipe for miraculous abundance that murdered 100,000,000 folks).

As it turns out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms – and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a years. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance….pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension…..and there isn't a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.”

Progressives are facing the stone cold reality that reality really does bite so they are in an absolute panic.  Their solution?  Raise taxes and plunder everybody.  The recently elected French president Francois Hollande campaigned on a 75% tax rate on the rich.  He won an election and delivered on his promise.  What France will learn is that capital always seeks and finds the friendliest of abodes.  Accordingly, there will be a mass exodus of money and folks with money from France.  Nobody with resources is going to hang around and wait for the ax of the financial guillotine to fall.  As capital flees, as it always does when facing the threat of outright expropriation, the French economy that is already reeling from economic misery will only get a whole lot worse.

The View From the Conservative Republican Camp

Unlike progressives that are ideologically secure and comfortable in their statist economic and command and control government views, Republicans tend to be absolute frauds who wallow in the delusion that America already has a free market economy.  At Republican gathering, one will frequently see folks holding signs defending for capitalism.  Weirdly, Republicans and conservatives truly believe that the Republican Party is the party of free markets and capitalism.  Yet the truth tells a completely different story.  The so-called capitalism and free markets that Republicans claim to worship are really nothing but statist engineered oligarchy, plutocracy, corporatism and fascism.  It's the tyranny of the marriage of Big Government and Big Business.

Republicans are notorious for voting for corporate welfare and subsidies.  The Democrats also support corporate welfare and subsidies but generally only for their pet issues like green energy scams that are personified in scandals like Solyndra.  The Democrats love corporate welfare because state run and funded business enterprises is their goal; the Democrats don't want capitalism or free markets and would gladly outlaw all forms of private business initiatives.  The Republicans love corporate welfare because they are whores and crooks who seek to fill their campaign coffers with any special interest money.  Republicans love taking care of their rich oligarch friends and showering them with taxpayer dough, protectionism and monopoly.

Ironically, Republicans frequently accuse the Democrats of being socialists and Marxists but what the Republicans do isn't a whole lot different than what the Democrats do.  They just do it for different reasons.  Republicans consistently invoke capitalism and free markets as justification for their anti-liberty and anti-free market actions while the Democrats merely invoke "we're doing it for the people" as they sing their collectivist lyrics.

In reality, getting caught up in a game of semantics is an exercise in futility.  Is it even appropriate and relevant to debate the finer semantical points when both the Republican and Democrat solutions translate to the precise same end game, namely, the control of all resources and production by a handful of elites who have absolute power and dominion over everything?

Who benefits from such a system?  Nobody, except political party elites drunk on power and filthy rich oligarchs who buy political power to guarantee their monopolies while avoiding honest competition.

Even on the fiscal and spending side of the equation, Republicans are  notorious big spenders who are addicted to spending other peoples money just as much as the Democrats are.  Under Bush 43, the national debt increased a whopping $5 trillion but there was no backlash by Republicans.  Yet, the same Republicans who had no moral qualms whatsoever with Republican spending went into full attack mode over Democrat spending.  Even the Tea Party movement is a total fraud.

The Tea Party Republicans Spent More Than the Dems They Replaced.

If there are any differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, it's the contentious social issues that weigh heavily on each election. On the BIG issues like fiscal, monetary, economic and foreign policies, the tyrannical Republicans and Democrats are pretty much in complete agreement.

The View from the Austrians and Liberty Activists

While it can be conclusively proven that Republicans and Democrats are really two statist peas from the same tyrannical pod, the only political movements in America today that truly represents a change toward liberty is the Ron Paul liberty movement and the Libertarian Party. These folks advocate for -  gasp - peace, liberty and prosperity, three things that make Republicans and Democrats absolutely cringe. In fact, it makes them downright apoplectic. The establishment is stroking out because Americans are rising up to think the unthinkable and speak the unthinkable in a nation where thinking is verboten.

These liberty activists imagine a world without wars (murdering for defense contractor profits), a world without thieving central banksters that steal from the poor and middle class by devaluing currency (the Federal Reserve) and they also have the blazing audacity to imagine a world of free peoples voluntarily making and trading their widgets/services in peace. GASP again!

As odd as this may sound for the 132 million Americans who voted for Obama or McCain in 2008 and who will probably vote again for Obama or Romney in 2012, the views of the liberty activists are pretty much the exact same views of America's founders who envisioned a weak federal government, the wide dispersion of power, the freedom to produce and keep what you produce, and a federation of sovereign free states.

Liberty activists are ideologically anchored in the belief that government is a pox upon humanity because it murders, wages endless genocidal wars, steals from those who produce and uses the police powers of the state (the point of a gun) to impose its tyranny.  Liberty activists may be divided between the 100% Rothbardian purist anarcho-capitalists (no government) and the minarchist movement (bare minimal government to secure rights) but at this juncture the debate is hardly worth waging because America is so far removed from her founding principles that our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are nothing more than artifacts permanently consigned to the dust heap of history.  George Bush supposedly called the Constitution nothing but a "G-d damn piece of paper" that had no authority to limit his absolute power in any way.

Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Austrians and liberty activists understand that government cannot create wealth and prosperity.  In fact, the only thing a government can really do economically is outlaw the ability of its citizens to become prosperous while stealing what they have already produced.  In government think, a free and prosperous citizen is not only a sovereign citizen endowed with protected natural rights, but is considered a threat to government power.  Free and sovereign citizens tend not to empower governments with anything except bare minimal powers because they know full well that such a government will come after them and their wealth.

The Keynesian economic model is based on 2 defining characteristics 1. government can remain powerful by plundering its citizens and redistributing income,  and 2. when a people and nation are fully plundered, there's always the back-up game of printing money out of thin air to create the illusion of prosperity derived from government largess and its counterfeit money printing machine.

America has been in the "print fiat money out of thin air" phase ever since Republican Nixon de-tethered the dollar from gold in 1971 (via an executive order and without congressional approval) and rendered the dollar a paper fiat currency.

Paper currency always reverts to its intrinsic value of zero.

A real and enduring wealth is produced by producing something of value.  Governments cannot create wealth with gobs of paper fiat money. If they could, there would be no human misery or poverty on the planet and everybody would be oozing prosperity from every earthly crevice.

What is Wealth?

What is wealth and prosperity? We all want it because nobody wants to be poor, suffering and impoverished.

It sounds like a simple question. It is and the answer is astonishingly simple. However, it’s our deviation from the principles that accrue wealth and prosperity to the greatest majority of people that got us into deep dodo. Wealth is simply excess production. A corn farmer sows his seeds, lovingly tends to his crops and harvests the product of his labor. What he doesn’t need to feed and sustain his own life is wealth or savings. What does the corn farmer do with his wealth? He could trade his corn for meat or eggs or shoes or clothes and other things he might want. But - no matter what the corn farmer does, he absolutely must produce and must save enough seed to plant again or he will starve and suffer. That’s a law of economics that cannot be altered, modified or otherwise tampered with without negating the entire wealth building mechanism of human survival.

Human survival has always been based on the principle of working in some capacity to produce something of value to sustain life and create excess production for the purpose of exchanging it for other goods and/or to save for the future....

When property rights were secure before the age of government confiscation, crony capitalism, cartel capitalism, protectionism and fascism, capitalism was the most prosperity inducing of all human activities simply because the motivation to work and produce was extraordinarily high. Capitalism motivated sane values like self-sufficiency, thrift, savings, a strong work ethic and building communities that respected the property of others.

But what happens to the farmer when the government invades a “man’s castle” and violates his ability to produce and save by seizing his production, his property and/or limiting his capacity to produce and save?

This has been the trajectory of America for nearly 50 years. As government power grew, it stole the production of producers, it stole their wealth, it stole their seeds for future growth and it stole their savings that are plowed back into a productive economy.

And so we remain at political loggerheads as power made control freaks lock horns with the liberty loving activists who absolutely comprehend that government can not only destroy real and endurable wealth but also outlaw the wealth building mechanism itself.  It's a recipe for perpetual poverty.  The real tragedy, however, is that the American people still have a high level of trust in the ability of the government to deliver on its promises, promises of plunder at the point of a gun.

The Hardball Playing Democrats Have the Republicans Quaking in their Boots

Cartoon by Kevin George Tuma.

In 8/11, the Republicans and Democrats cut a deal to raise the debt limit by $2.4 trillion. Part of that deal was to create a Congressional Super Committee (6 Republicans and 6 Democrats) to cut $1.2 trillion in spending over 10 years. All they had to do was cut a puny $120 billion a year and they couldn't even do that on a $3.7 trillion budget. The Super Committee of 12 was a big fail. But another component of the deal was that in the event they failed to agree on spending cuts then hundreds of billions in defense cuts would automatically kick in.

Top Defense Dem: GOP Must Blink First To Avoid Pentagon Cuts

“Sequester” is a technical term for an enforcement mechanism built into the 2011 debt limit law....

In the event of its failure, though, the law included a penalty — including hundreds of billions of dollars to cuts to both defense programs and Medicare providers — meant to force members of both parties to deal with budget deficits in a balanced way.

It failed anyhow.

While the defense cuts are actually quite puny and span a decade, the Republicans are in an absolute panic. The Republicans refuse to cut defense spending. The Democrats refuse to cut social spending. And crazy Romney has vowed to increase defense spending by at least $2.1 trillion according to CNN (where the money is coming from, Romney doesn't say).

Defense spending to spike $2.1 trillion under Romney 

But here's the real kicker: The Bush tax cuts that Obama agreed to extend 2 years expire on January 1, 2013.  Now the Dems are playing hardball and vow that they will not extend the Bush tax tax cuts.

Democrats threaten to go over ‘fiscal cliff’ if GOP fails to raise taxes Washington Post

The Democrats play hardball Politico

Senator Murray Says Democrats Will Let Tax Cuts Expire The New York Times

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a member of the Democratic leadership, said on Monday that her party is prepared to allow all of the Bush-era tax cuts to expire and for automatic spending cuts to kick in unless Republicans give up their opposition to tax increases on the wealthy....

Mr. Obama agreed to extend all the expiring tax cuts for two years in exchange for his own payroll tax cuts and an extension of unemployment benefits. That two-year extension expires Jan. 1, which is also when more than $1 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts to defense and domestic programs over 10 years begin.

Of course, the real tragedy is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have any intention whatsoever of ever cutting spending.

What makes the whole issue so fascinating is that it's election year and each dishonest party will shamelessly pander to their respective bases.  The Dems will shout "we're gonna tax the rich" and the Republicans will shout "we love spending too, especially on senseless wars, but we prefer to do it with debt rather than taxes".

Either way, America gets royally stiffed because neither party is willing to solve our immense problems.  Taxing the rich won't restore our economy and in fact will only make the economy worse but deficit spending on the wars will also expedite our national bankruptcy as well as be economically devastating.  

The Best Government that Fascist Corporatist Bankster Defense Contractor Money Can Buy

Americans are wildly deluded about their political system and succumb to the comical belief that We the Sheeple People actually choose our elected representatives and leaders. That's a false and scandalous paradigm that needs to be busted wide open and smashed to smithereens.

For starters, the RNC and DNC machines are nothing more than money laundering operations for corporate America as well as wholly owned subsidiaries of the banksters, military industrial complex, prison industrial complex, national security industrial complex, Big Pharm, Big Agriculture and corporatist special interests. It's a game that only exists for one purpose and one purpose only, namely, to concentrated wealth and power while consummating the marriage of Big Business and Big Government. With very few exceptions, nearly all Congress Critters and state legislators are very appropriately attired when they look like this:

Nearly every politician is bought and paid for. Nascar styled logos can easily wallpaper the inside and outside of the White House, Congress, government agencies and the Federal Reserve. For all practical purposes, America is an oligarchy - a nation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. But the rich in America aren't rich because of free markets or capitalism, they are rich because they get special treatment and are frequently on the public dole.

Bernie Sanders Releases Explosive List of $4 Trillion in Bankster Bailouts

The Goldman Sachs Blessing "May the Lloyd be With You, AMEN"

Municipal Bonds: A license to steal and taxpayers don't even know they are being financially raped

Al Gore is a Welfare Queen

Yes My Fellow Americans, Congress Really Did Steal Your Social Security

How Sweet It Is - For Big Sugar Daddies & Other Corporate Welfare Queens


Washington, DC is full of dirty little secrets and a ton of tax dollars are spent on the propaganda machine that relentlessly stampedes truth, disclosure and accountability. What make this well oiled machine function so effectively is that print and broadcast mainstream media are an arm of the government and is actively complicit in protecting the system and all the corruption and cover-ups that go along with it.

Unquestionably, the U.S. Congress is the biggest and smelliest manure factory on the planet and Americans have become the most delusional folks on the planet for putting their trust in these dangerously worthless Congress Critters by constantly re-electing them over and over.

Democrats and Republicans are the poison roots that have destroyed America, albeit for different reasons. The Democrats cling to their fraudulent collectivist utopianism with promises of giving voters free food, free housing, free healthcare, free transportation, free education, free everything etc. The Democrats are quite upfront about campaigning on a theme of “I will fully utilize the police powers of the government to steal from others to give you what you want but you will only get what I think you should have and that ain’t much”. Voters drink the Fool-aid and grow frustrated, especially when the promised loot fails to arrive. Government never delivers on its promises. The only thing government ever accomplishes is conning folks into relinquishing their liberty, their prosperity and submitting to state tyranny and terrorism.

The Republicans campaign on their phony baloney commitments to vague talking points like freedom, spreading democracy around the world at the point of a gun or F-16, fiscal conservatism, small government, family values and even capitalism. But in fact, the Republicans grow government power, spend like drunker sailors, sacrifice capitalism on the altar of fascism/corporatism, increase spending and in recent years have become The War Party.

President Obama turned out to be just another “controlled” political hack committed to war, non-stop foreign interventionism, screwing the middle class and totally committed to the preservation of thieving Bankster power. It’s become clear that Obama’s shining star is fading rapidly. Instead of change, the American people got Bush on steroids, a bigger commitment to war and the continued slashing of civil liberties, as well as more bloated and unaccountable corrupt governance.

The RNC/DNC lock on political money doesn’t bode well for Americans seeking to raise new candidates and get rid of the “same old, same old” congressional institutionalists who thrive on power, greed and fraud. If you find a candidate that you like and would like to support, you are legally banned from contributing more than $2,500 to that candidate; contributing more than the legal limit makes you a criminal who can be prosecuted for violating campaign finance laws. But you can give millions to the DNC and RNC machines and their PAC's who don’t have that dollar limitation and this vastly contributes to the absolute power of the RNC and DNC. Independent thinking candidates are routinely squashed. Big money only flows to those who can deliver the taxpayer largess to special interest campaign contributors and it’s nearly impossible for any honest politician to ever raise sufficient money to compete with the RNC/DNC money machines. Corporate contributors don’t fund candidates who campaign on “I promise to reduce government power and end the fascist marriage of big business and big government”.

Top campaign contributors always include defense contractors, the Banksters, trial lawyers, big agricultural interests, big pharm and big energy contractors. Except for the trial lawyers who own the DNC, big corporate contributors are not political ideologues. They check their radar screens and simply fund the candidate they believe can win and, therefore, can be bought. If the Republican Party is on a roll because folks are angry with the Dems, money flows to the RNC machine. If the Dems are hot because folks are angry with the Republicans, money flows to the DNC machine. Because Americans were downright furious after 8 long miserable years of Bush/Cheney, it was clear that the Democratic Party was destined to be the clear winner in the 2008 election cycle. With the media hyping Obama as the latest messiah, his victory was easily predicted and guaranteed.

The top 10 corporate PAC contributions for the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are as follows:

Obama:

Goldman Sachs $739,521
UBS AG $419,550
Lehman Brothers $391,774
Citigroup Inc $492,548
Morgan Stanley $341,380
 Latham & Watkins $328,879
Google Inc $487,355 JPMorgan Chase & Co $475,112
Sidley Austin LLP $370,916
Skadden, Arps et al $360,409

McCain:

Merrill Lynch $349,170
Citigroup Inc $287,801
Morgan Stanley $249,377
Wachovia Corp $147,456
Goldman Sachs $220,045
Lehman Brothers $115,707
Bear Stearns $108,000
JPMorgan Chase & Co $206,392
Bank of America $133,975
Credit Suisse Group $175,503 

Opensecrets.org reports the top spenders on lobbying for 2008 were:

US Chamber of Commerce $91,725,000
Exxon Mobil $29,000,000
AARP $27,900,000
PG&E Corp $27,250,000
Northrop Grumman $20,743,252
American Medical Assn $20,555,000
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $20,220,000
Koch Industries $20,023,000
General Electric $19,379,000
American Hospital Assn $18,902,684
Verizon Communications $18,020,000
Boeing Co $17,540,000
National Assn of Realtors $17,340,000
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $16,220,165
Lockheed Martin $15,981,506
AT&T Inc $15,076,675
National Cable & Telecommunications Assn $14,500,000
Southern Co $14,080,000
Altria Group $13,840,000
General Motors $13,351,000

At the District of Crime Wheel of Fortune 'Pay to Play Game', they don’t sprinkle that kind of dough around DC without getting big paybacks.

In a Huffington Post piece titled The 15 Biggest Congressional Recipients Of Wall Street Campaign Cash , it’s amply clear that the Wall Street dough boys buy a lot of Congressional power. The Huffington Post obtained its information from the most reliable tracker of campaign cash – Opensecrets.org.

Charles Schumer (D) $2,167,300
Kristen Gillibrand (D) 1,173,400
Harry Reid (D) 1,038,210
Chris Dodd (D) 752,698
Michael Bennet (D) 612,808
Mark Kirk (R) 557,375
Arlen Specter (D) 557,175
Eric Cantor (R) 516,197
Blanche Lincoln (D) 515,000
Richard Shelby (R) 502,150
Jim Himes (D) 430,123
John Thune (R) 407,750
Ron Wyden (D) 404,750
Carolyn Maloney (D) 396,750
Barney Frank (D) 387,749

Yes, there are folks who truly feel the “LOVE” when it comes to deep affection for Congress, Bush/Obama/Romney, Republicans and Democrats but they don’t include ordinary working stiff smucks – just rich elites, powerful insiders and Banksters.

Corrupt as Congress is, the Banksters are far from the only larcenous gang perpetually drinking from the Congressional Holy Water Font – the cornucopia of crony capitalism. Everybody is lined up because there’s so much dirty money sloshing around in the District of Crime that it is always explicitly clear that Congress genuflects before its masters and those masters are far removed from “We the People”.

How much is spent on U.S. elections at the federal level? A staggering $5.3 billion was spent in 2008 according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

2012 elections? The big money just got a whole lot bigger and the corruption more intensely obvious.  The world and its peoples quietly march toward a global industrial feudalism consisting of the serfs and the masters who lord over them with a tyrannical iron fist..

America is ruled by the biggest crime syndicate in human history. Americans don't complain or even vote them out of office. These days, corruption is just the American way.  Astoundingly, corruption, greed and graft are welcomed as the new normal.

How Ron Paul Deconstructed the Phony Baloney Left-Right Paradigm

 

The Republican primary season was a hoot with its seedy cast of characters that included Bat Shit Crazy Bachmann, Sanitorium the Sanctimonious, Slick Rick ‘the Oops candidate’, the Angry Little Lunar Attack Muffin and a dude named Mittens whose claim to fame is that he had the holding power to just wait for his crazy competitors to self-destruct.

 The only sane guy in the Republican sea of insanity was Ron Paul, a guy who campaigned on peace, liberty and prosperity but he was rejected and got booed by a psychopathic Republican debate audience for suggesting that America invoke the Golden Rule when it comes to foreign policy. Republicans don’t like sane and their affinity for the psychopathic is truly mindboggling. But in the end Republican voters quit bickering about who is the craziest candidate and just hold their noses and vote for the most boring candidate that praises Jesus, promises more wars and commits to advancing Republican socialism and crony capitalism. 

The legacy of the 2012 primary season should worry the Dems because it spawned a liberty movement consisting of disgruntled Republicans, disgruntled Democrats, independents and other disaffected voting blocks. The Ron Paul Revolution crossed party lines because it focused on how the damn wars have bankrupted the nation and destroyed the economic but the defining characteristic of the Ron Paul Campaign is that it raised public awareness about the thieving banksters who operate the biggest ongoing crime syndicate in human history through the Federal Reserve.

The Occupy Movement jumped into the political fray with added sparks by emphasizing the difference between the 99% and the 1%.

The Democrat enthusiastically supported Obama in 2008 because he was perceived as anti-war and in opposition to all the things that progressives despise about governance. At least, that’s how Obama waged his magical campaign. But at the end of the day, the Dems just got Obushma, just another elitist bought and paid for New World Order hack that is clearly a wholly owned subsidiary of the banksters, military industrial complex and rent seeking crony capitalists.

Glenn Greenwald, a progressive I greatly admire on many issues, wrote about Ron Paul and his campaign:

The benefits of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats' own evils.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception...

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has soughtto overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional voteagainst it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. assubservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’smost repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Read the rest here

Salon

The words of Glenn Greenwald are indeed a scathing indictment of Obama and the Democratic administration and conclusively prove that there really isn't a spit of difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties, despite the pathetic but vociferous rants at election time that attempt to highlight the differences between the parties.  The only differences lie with the Republican and Democratic voting bases.  The Republicans want things to remain the same - big wars, big bankster bailouts,  big government, big assaults on civil liberties, big entitlements and big government powers.  The Dems generally oppose the wars, the crushing of civil liberties and the big bankster bailouts.  The Dems really do want change but Republicans are totally averse to change.

In the Romney candidacy, Republicans reluctantly agreed that he would continue in the footsteps of Bush/Cheney and while Republicans don't exactly trust Romney they decided to trust him more than they trust Obama.

Another progressive, Matt Stoller, wrote one of the best pieces on Ron Paul from the progressive prospective as Stoller delves into Libertarianism to reconcile prevailing progressive ideology with the Ron Paul movement. Stoller isn't a guy who haphazardly tosses out words nor does he fall into the typical liberal trap of justifying Obama's actions. Stoller has been on a soul searching mission to understand the Ron Paul movement and its vast appeal to frustrated Americans. Stoller actually accomplishes something that few progressives can comprehend, namely, that the American Empire and the wars that they so despise are indeed a direct result of the Federal Reserve that they tend to worship because it facilitates a monstrous nanny state federal government and its social entitlements.

The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul....

And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.....

Now, if you’re a libertarian, and you believe that centralized power is dangerous, then it’s obvious that state control over finance and mass mobilization of social resources for warfare or other ends are two sides of the same coin....

Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature....

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has.

Read the rest here

Naked Capitalism

It's abundantly clear that while thinking progressives are perplexed by Ron Paul, they also deeply respect him on many levels because there's a lot about Ron Paul that is hugely appealing to progressives.

As a libertarian, I don't share progressive views on most issues but I most assuredly do sympathize with their frustration on big issues like foreign policy and how the Federal Reserve actually expanded and consolidated raw and absolute power into the hands of the 1%. Furthermore, I cling to the hope that if we can achieve sound money that isn't manipulated by Wall Street and end the perpetual wars by slaying the military industrial complex, then America will definitely be a far more prosperous and freer place. We'd solve about 75% of our problems and we could fight about the rest of the stuff later.

Progressives definitely have a vested interest in listening to and learning from Ron Paul and his supporters. If the Democratic Party can be forced into the same ideological battle that liberty activists within the Republican party advanced with courage and conviction, then the Democratic Party will be the big winner, along with the American people.

Jesse Ventura Gets It - the R's and the D's Really Are the Democrips and Rebloodlicans

Our dysfunction and corrupt to the core political system is finally getting noticed by We the People. In reality, the Donkeys and the Elephants are breeding with each other and that union has produced a slew of horrifying liberty eating monsters. Are there any differences between the Republicans and the Democrats? Of course not. When it comes to endless wars, bankster bailouts, deficit spending, chronic assaults on civil liberties and corporate welfare, the Republicans and the Democrats are all on the same page. The only differences between the falsely constructed and phony baloney left right paradigm are the contentious social issues.

So why do the American people continue to vote Republican or Democrat?  It's a valid question.  The Republican and Democrat parties are masters at hooking the hapless sheeple based on raw emotion suffused with profound fear.  Republican rants include "the Dems hate God and want to abolish your religious liberty" or "the Dems are socialists and commies" or "the Dems have declared war on Jesus, God and Christmas", and on and on.  On the flip side, the Dems fire up their base with accursed accusation that include "the Republicans will take away your SS, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps" or "the Republicans will execute homosexuals" or "the Republicans hate folks of color".

The political party game is pure 100% raw emotion and given the human affliction to be an inclusive member of the herd mentality and its accompanying manifestations, it's a strategy that works exceedingly well for the elites who are masters at the spin that ruthlessly maintains total control.  It's always about control and creating a mass movement of terrified but compliant zombie voters who offer unquestioned loyalty and obedience to their masters.

On the other hand, the Independent voters are by far the most intelligent, the most aware and the most discerning of voters.  They actually research issues, voting records and policy positions.  They may lean left or right but they consistently apply some semblance of logical sanity to their voting decisions.  They also understand that the RNC and DNC machines are in fact wholly owned subsidiaries of the same folks, namely the banksters, military industrial complex and rent seeking corporate welfare queens.

Independent voters tend to long for abolishing political parties.  It's an excellent idea because it would move candidates out of the closet of the political party protection racket and actually force them to campaign on the real issues, something the Republicans and Democrats dread.

America's most famous independent politician is Jesse Ventura, former Independent governor of Minnesota.  Ventura doesn't hide his utter contempt for the two party duopoly of one.  Ventura gets straight to the point:

Former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura called for the abolition of the Democratic and Republican parties in an appearance last night on CNN, saying they are worse than violent warring street gangs.

In an interview with Piers Morgan, Ventura did not hold back, urging that “We need to abolish the political parties,” and “Make them political action committees.”

As he does in his new book, the former Navy Seal compared the current two party US political system to the infamous Los Angeles street gangs the Bloods and Crips.

Read the rest here:  Ventura: Abolish Both Political Parties 

Ventura's latest book, Democrips and Rebloodlicans, is very appropriately titled.
 

If frustrated Americans are fed up and disgusted with the economic misery, the DC District of Crime elites with zero accountability and the never ending arrogance of elected leaders, then Americans need to just stop supporting the Republican and Democrat parties, they need to stop voting Republican or Democrat and they need to comprehend that the present system is definitely not structured for liberty or the benefit of We the People.

The Republican and Democrat parties are two identical and corrupt peas in the same pod because they are owned and funded by the same folks.

Americans keep voting for change but the change never comes, and it never will until the corporate money is purged from the election system.  Only when our malignant political system permanently sheds its corporate control will We the People once again be back in charge.

Of course, booting Fedzilla and its draconian powers back to its constitutional limitations would go a very long way in restoring what we need more than anything else - peace, liberty and prosperity.

Judy Morris
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/judy.morris.report
Twitter: judy morris@judymorris3