TRUMP’S CHILDISH AND UNPATRIOTIC JEALOUSY OF PRESIDENT OBAMA

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

TRUMP’S CHILDISH AND UNPATRIOTIC JEALOUSY OF PRESIDENT OBAMA

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The problem with Trump is he desperately wants to be an Obama, but he just doesn't have Obama's character, eloquence, or intelligence - and he knows it - and that's driving him crazy.  So instead of trying to compete with Obama's accomplishments, he's trying to tear down his legacy.  He's so jealous of Obama that he's not only trying to sabotage a nuclear arms agreement that's beneficial to the entire world, but he’s also trying to deprive millions of Americans of affordable healthcare in a futile attempt to erase President Obama from history.  That's the problem with having an immature and self-absorbed narcissist as president, he places his own needs before the needs of the country, and even the world.  But Trump’s malevolent efforts may be a blessing in disguise, because they serve to reveal the GOP's true colors, and the fact that they don't give one bit of a damn about the American people.

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WHY AMERICA HAS BEEN SLIDING DOWNHILL EVERY SINCE

IT’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH RONALD REAGAN

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A Lesson in Republican Hypocrisy and Distortion

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Is the modern Republican Party really “the party of Lincoln,” and responsible for freeing the slaves? I don’t think so. But the GOP regularly, routinely, and with a straight face makes that claim. One Republican recently confronted me and stated the following:

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"It was Republicans who beat Democrats in the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves. It was Democrats who started the KKK as its military wing to intimidate the Republican party who were running the south after the war. Can a leopard change its spots?? Are the Democrats now the party FOR the black people after being against them for so long? So many of you are duped by the Devil's trickery. a few table scraps from massa's table and you run right back to his side. The Democrats are the racists."

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The above assertion is a prime example of how many Republicans can take a kernel of truth and create a banquet of lies. The truth is, while Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and so was Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, since the Civil War the Republican and Democratic parties have completely changed their relative political positions. So relative to their current political philosophy, the modern Republican party bears absolutely no relationship to its predecessor.  If we were fighting the Civil War today, the Republican Party would be the Confederacy.  Thus, we're dealing in semantics.  We shouldn't think in terms of Democrats versus Republicans, because parties change their polarities. We should think in terms of liberals versus conservatives, they don't.

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Prior to the Civil War the Republican Party was made up of big business interests and Northern aristocrats, and the Democratic Party was made up of Dixiecratcs and Southern agrarian interests - farmers and slave owners. Thus, the Republicans were relatively progressive liberals and the Democrats (or Dixiecrats) were Southern conservative slave owners, but a transition began to take place during the Great Depression due to corporate greed and a complete lack of empathy for the plight of the American people.

The Great Depression

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In 1929 during Republican, Herbert Hoover’s administration, the stock market crashed - much like under the Bush Administration - starting the Great Depression, but back then there was no Barack Obama to come to the rescue or mitigate the damage early on. So in spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Herbert Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. Much like the Republicans of today, Hoover and his Republican Party had absolutely no compassion for either the plight of the American people, or America’s veterans who had put their lives on the line for this country.
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During Hoover's administration, 15,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington demanding that they be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover responded by calling in federal troops to throw these ex-servicemen off government property.
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The conditions were horrific during the Great Depression. There was no such thing as Social Security, so when a person became too old or weak to work and had no income, they had to depend on their children for support. That meant instead of a husband and wife only having to support themselves and their children, which was tough enough during those times, they also had to support their parents. So three generations of a family could be living in one household - and in many cases, the parents of both the husband, and the wife, were living with the family.
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But that began to change during the Great Depression when Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came out against the corporations and to the aid of the poor with his "New Deal for the American People." With the “New Deal,” Democrats ushered in workers’ rights. They created Social Security so the elderly wouldn't have to go to the "Poor House" or become a burden on their children when they became too old to work.

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The Democrats also created unemployment insurance so people would have something to fall back on if they lost their jobs, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set rules of conduct for corporations that allowed workers to work with some semblance of dignity. The new law set a minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor standards, and many other regulations protecting workers.
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Prior to the FLSA corporations could work employees for as many hours as they liked, and they often set wages so low that families had to send their children to work just to survive - and many of those children were maimed or killed because they had to work under the most horrific conditions, such as in coal mines and the like.

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In addition, there was no such thing as Medicare or Medicaid, so when one of grandparents became ill the medical costs would devastate the entire family. These conditions kept lower and middle-class families in such dire need of funds that they had to accept whatever crumbs the business community chose to throw at them - and remember, at that time there was no Fair Labor Standards Act or unions to protect a worker’s rights, or a minimum wage, so businesses could treat the worker anyway they wanted, and pay them whatever they wanted.
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They could work an employee 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no overtime, and no paid vacation. In addition, since there were no child labor laws, if your boss didn’t think you were being productive enough, he could insist that you bring your children in (as young as 9 years old) to assist you if you wanted to keep your job. Then if you protested, he could fire you on the spot, in which case, your entire family - sick grandparents and all - would be thrown out on the street, because there was no such thing as unemployment insurance.
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As a result, in many cases the entire family, including the children, had to work long, hard hours under sweatshop-like conditions in coal mines and the like, which in many cases led to the death and/or maiming of young children. So in a very real sense, the Great Depression era workers lived under a form of slavery - the one difference was, they had to go out and find their own housing.
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Think back to the "Little Rascals" we use to watch as kids, and how ragged they were, or the cartoons we use to watch, where a landlord would come to the door (always portrayed in a black suit) and would tell a begging and crying mother that she had one more day to come up with the rent or she and her family would be thrown out in the snow. That was an accurate portrayal of the way people lived in those days, and those are the conditions that the conservative Republican agenda would restore in America today, and as we speak they are well on their way to accomplishing.  At this very moment the Republican majority in congress is trying their very best to take healthcare away from the poor and working class in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich.
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Think about it - while the GOP comes up with various pretexts to explain their actions, they are oppose to the minimum wage, they would cut unemployment insurance, "modify" Social Security, they’re against Affordable healthcare, they’re leaving no stone unturned to abolish unions, they’re blocking every jobs bill that comes before them, and in spite of record corporate profits, their corporate cronies are sending jobs out of the country and keeping unemployment high until the American working class caves in and accepts a lower standard of living.
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Keeping unemployment high served a valuable and useful purpose, both back then, as it does today. The scarcity of jobs not only gives the rich business community leverage over the working class, but it keeps us divided and at one another's throats.  In addition to that, today it provides an endless supply of young American men and women to be used as canon fodder for military adventurism. What do you expect them to do? We certainly can’t expect them to send their children to foreign lands to die for the country.
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Dying for this country is no longer for the "rich and wellborn," that’s for the "little people." Then,

when your children come back home maimed and broken from their service to the country, the GOP has absolutely no compassion for them. Just like with Herbert Hoover, they call them deadbeats and a burden on the nation for having to beg for food stamps, and then throw them off the premises. And that’s in spite of the fact that when most of the GOP - like Dick ‘five-deferment’ Cheney, and Donald Trump, who also got five deferments - were called upon to serve the nation, they evaded the draft to avoid having to fight in Vietnam. The GOP only love our troops as long as they can carry a weapon.  Yet, they're always waving the flag.
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That's why after President Roosevelt brought relief to the people with what Republicans refer to as “big government, socialist programs,” the Democratic Party began to become associated with the common man, and the Republican party embarked upon a single-minded mission that has lasted to this day, to reverse those "bleeding heart liberal" policies and return America to what had previously been the status quo - suffering and abuse.
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The True Conservative Philosophy

In order to understand the GOP’s true motivation, you have to understand the philosophy of the establishment conservative as oppose to the sanitized philosophy that they present to the American people. Alexander Hamilton was one of the founding father’s of fiscal conservatism. He said the following during the Federalist Convention of 1787:
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"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government."
Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787).
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In short, Hamilton suggested that if you weren't "rich and wellborn," he didn’t think you should be able to either vote or hold office, and many people who control the GOP today are still of that mindset. So what many rank-and-file Republicans and social conservatives fail to understand is, they’re being used. The corporatist (or fiscal conservatives) don’t care any more about them than they do Blacks, Hispanics, women, or gays, and when they are done with them, they’re going to discard them like a soiled Tampon, because the GOP’s ultimate goal is to turn America into a corporate feudalist society and lower the American middle-class standard of living to conform to that of the global economy, where workers only make as much a week as many upper middle-class Americans spend on lunch per day - and that goes for whether you’re Black, White, liberal, or conservative. If you’re not "rich and wellborn," you’re the enemy.  So contrary to popular belief, we're not in a race war - race is just being used as a weapon of war - we're currently knee-deep in a class war, and the working class is losing badly.
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But since the majority of the founding fathers chose to establish a Democratic Republic as oppose to a Plutocracy as Alexander Hamilton advocated, those who were of his plutocratic mindset had to keep a low profile in order to preserve their political viability, but they continued to work to change the system to their liking through their wealth, political clout, and ultimately, their employment policies. That’s one of the things that led to the horrendous working conditions for the average American worker prior to and during the Great Depression, and the "Citizens United" decision by our conservative-led Supreme Court has sent us trotting right back down that road.

A "New Deal" For the American People

In 1933 - after 12 years of Republican governance, and 4 years into the Great Depression - the very aristocratic, but quintessential "bleeding heart liberal" Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected - and he walk through the door coming to the rescue of the American People, and setting a Democratic tradition in stone in the process. So you see, the Democratic Party was the party of the people long before that had anything to do with Civil Rights. It's just that when Civil Rights became an issue, the party remained true to its tradition and embraced the cause of the underdog.
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That tradition was firmly established by FDR during the Great Depression. As soon as he took office he immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known at the time as the "Brain Trust." After assembling these men and others he went about the business of developing a" New Deal" for the working class people of this country, who at that point, were starving in the street. So it says much about the cynical character of the GOP that they could take the American penchant for justice and human compassion and turn it into something to be frowned upon with disdain. That's not who we're supposed to be as a people, so by definition, the GOP attitude toward the common man, is un-American.
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The New Deal had two components - one to help the economy to recover from the effects of the Great Depression, and a second component to bring relief to the American people and insure that they would never be placed in a position of total destitution again. To help heal the economy Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization; to bring relief to the people, he created job programs (much like the ones the GOP is blocking today), signed The National Labor Relations Act which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining, and he created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers some sort of income once they became too old or sick to work. He also signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers.
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With his New Deal in place, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this "bleeding heart liberal," not only led this country out of the worst Republican generated crisis that this country had ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII, and then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
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"In the 1944 election, during World War II, Roosevelt won a fourth term but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in office the following year. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt was the only President to have served more than two terms. Near the end of the 1944 campaign, Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, announced support of an amendment to the Constitution that would limit future presidents to two terms. According to Dewey, "Four terms, or sixteen years, is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed" - Yeah, and it wasn’t working very well for the Republicans either.
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But as a direct result of their experience with the Republican Party, our grandparent’s generation - the generation that went through the Great Depression, fought WWII, and who we now refer to as "The Greatest Generation” - wouldn't let a Republican anywhere near the White House, and we're seeing why right now with Donald Trump. They re-elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt 4 times, and again, the Republicans had to push for a Constitution amendment to force term limits on the presidency just to get back into the running  - and even then, they ended up getting Ike Eisenhower, who was a Republican in name only, and by today's standards would be considered a liberal. In 1957 he sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate Little Rock High School after Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus, blocked the entrance against the “Little Rock Nine,” and as his last act of office Ike warned America to beware of the military industrial complex.

The Republican Agenda And Strategy
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During Civil Rights Movement the Republican Party began to regain some traction as a result of literally millions of racist "Dixiecrats" migrating to the GOP.  So the modern Republican Party is now a coalition of three separate constituencies with confluent interests. The first group is made up of traditional conservatives. These are highly patriotic Americans who believe in limited government, the primacy of the people over government, and fiscal responsibility. But the other two groups that have coalesced within the GOP are much more malevolent - international business interests (fiscal conservatives), and social conservatives (the social bigots).
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It is the former of these two, international business, that controls the GOP. It's largely made up of wealthy and single-minded individuals with huge amounts of monetary resources, and thus, political influence - and they use every bit of that leverage to manipulate what has become their citizen army - the social conservatives. These are the people who hate any and everybody who doesn’t look, think, and act like themselves.
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SOCIAL BIGOTS

The social conservatives are the people we see armed to the teeth at presidential speeches, disrupting town hall meetings, and fighting against their own interests. In short, these are the "Joe the Plumbers" of the world who are being deluded by corporatist propaganda. Also among their ranks are the diehard racists who are still fighting to promote a segregationist agenda. The GOP has found these people easy to manipulate by simply appealing to their emotions.  This is currently Donald Trump's base.
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With the huge migration of social conservatives into it’s ranks, the leaders of the GOP formulated a new strategy - divide and conquer. They use their social conservative army to create anger and division among the working class, and that allows the GOP to attack popular safety-net programs by alleging that it’s being abuse by one group or another that the social bigots hate. Here’s an example of how that tactic works:
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Conservatives have taken the Democratic Party's strength and made it a political liability. First they took the party's penchant for being compassionate toward the plight of the American people and coined phrases such as "bleeding heart liberals" and "tax and spend Democrats." They then played on the frustration of the middle class by tying civil rights legislation, welfare, and crime into one neat bundle as the source of middle class woes; then they attributed all of these problems to what they called the Democrat's tendency to be " bleeding heart liberals." Then once the connection was made between minorities, welfare, crime, and the liberal agenda, it was just a matter of repeatedly hammering that message home.
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In addition, conservatives use such tactics as spitting out the word "liberal" as though they were saying rapist. In this way they not only implant a negative attitude toward liberalism in the mind of the voter, but it's said in such a way that the implication is made that it goes without saying that all the negative stereotyping of liberalism is true. In other words, their attitude seemed to suggest, "I could substantiate what I'm saying about liberals, but I don't think it's necessary since we all know what they're like." And since the GOP has been engaged in a brutal assault our educational system for the past 35 years, very few people know enough about past Republican atrocities, or the illustrious liberal tradition, to know the difference. So many of the electorate simply believe what they’re being told by FOX News, and they have absolutely no idea that they’re dancing with the Devil.
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Through these strategies conservatives accomplished three goals with one ingenious stroke - they defined minorities as slovenly criminals, they define liberal Democrats as "soft on crime," and they allowed themselves the freedom to place these thoughts in the American psyche without having to substantiate their facts. Moreover, they accomplish all this in every sound bite, and without seeming to be blatantly racist with the use of just one word, "liberal." In fact, conservatives have been so thorough in their disparagement of liberalism that at this point the word "liberal" is treated like vulgarity, and simply referred to as "the L word." And that is indeed ironic, considering what liberals have done for this country - and more likely than not, for the very grandparents of many of the most rabid liberal haters.
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That’s why we hear remarks from conservatives like, "Black people are wedded to the Democratic Party because they’re being bought with welfare checks," or that "Black people saw Obama as the Messiah." Such statements betray their ignorance, because they obviously have absolutely no knowledge of the Republican Party’s atrocious history, nor the parallel in history between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Hussein Obama - FDR save America from the Great Depression, and Barack Obama prevented a second one from happening.  That's why Donald Trump and the Republicans are trying to undo everything that President Obama put into place and erase him from history, but it's not gonna work.  In the end, they're just going to destroy themselves, because conservatives have a history of not being able to govern.  They're only talent is in obstruction.

REAGANOMICS

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Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan's vice president to be, called it "Voodoo Economics."
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Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed.
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GOP SABOTAGING THE HEALTHCARE OF

MILLIONS OF AMERICANS

Instead of the rich taking their huge tax breaks and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy-out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 - 15 years before the Great Depression.
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And what about Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit?  By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the national debt than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what did the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals was their "contract with America," a capitol gains tax cut -- for the rich.

That scam continues to this day.  After 9/11, fiscal conservatives decided to used the war in Iraq to ravage the national treasury. They gave themselves a $4 trillion tax cut to further deplete the treasury, then they told the poor and middle class, "Sorry, but we no longer have the revenue to fund the programs that you've come to depend upon for the past seventy years. And in the meantime, Republicans like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was hard at work trying to dismantle labor unions and the Fair Labor Standards Act with "Right to Work" laws. 

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So, can a leopard change its spots? Yes it can - and with regard to the Democratic and Republican parties, the leopard has changed its spots in a very big way. But the modern GOP has never been prone to allowing the facts to distort a well-crafted lie. That's why they have such a fierce aversion to a well-educated electorate.  An educated and well informed people is the bane of the Republican Party.  They depend on an ignorant, bigoted, and emotional base for their very survival.

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Thus, the facts dictate that the modern GOP’s claim to have any connection with President Lincoln whatsoever - other than as the enemy of everything he stood for - is not only a gross misrepresentation of history, but a blatant lie. The fact is, if the Civil War was being fought today, the GOP would be the Confederacy.  So don't get it twisted. Conservatives have ALWAYS been this nation's bigots, regardless to what party they were in, and they currently populate the GOP in huge numbers - and that bigotry is not just against race, but class as well.  So if you're a working class White person, to the GOP, you're just like Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, and Omarosa Manigault - a useful coon.

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Conservatives and Lower IQ

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Do Racism, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand?

Lower cognitive abilities predict greater prejudice through right-wing ideology.

Published on April 22, 2013 by Goal Auzeen Saedi, Ph.D. in Millennial Media

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201304/do-racism-conservatism-and-low-iq-go-hand-in-hand

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Low IQ and Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer | January 26, 2012 10:29am ET 

http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html

Eric L. Wattree
http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS MORPHED INTO THE DOMESTIC ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

 THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS MORPHED INTO THE DOMESTIC ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES

For the past thirty-five years the Corporate-GOP Alliance has been engaged in a brutal assault on the American people. They've sent our jobs out of the country, while at the same time, the Republican congress has blocked any funding for the government to create jobs by repairing the nation's badly deteriorating infrastructure, which was a highly successful tactic used to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. These actions have subjected the American people to needless suffering while corporations are enjoying record profits.

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At the same time, they abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," which forced broadcasters to give equal time to opposing views, and then they completely took over the mainstream media, which allowed them to lie with impunity. Thereafter, they began to subject the American people to an intense campaign of corporate brainwashing and disinformation over the cause of their suffering, and they mounted a vicious attack on our educational system. Teachers are being demonized, elementary, middle, and senior high schools are being defunded, and the cost of college has been placed beyond the reach of the Average American without going deeply in debt. Then, to ensure these policies remained in place, the Republican led Supreme Court ruling on "Citizens United" gave a foreign CEO based in Singapore more control over the American political system than an American citizen.
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All of this wasn't done without reason, and that reason is clear. The corporate establishment in this country is trying to create a permanent underclass that will be completely dependent upon their every whim.  By the time they're done, the options of the average working-class American will be few - they can either work for slave wages, or they can go into the military and lay their lives on the line in an endless string of wars to pad the pockets of a growing number of war profiteers. So they are forcing the poor and middle class to pay for the wars, and then fight the wars - because the children of the rich are no longer even expected to die for this country; that's the job of the 'little people'. Thereafter, while the war profiteers are raking in all the profits from poor and middle-class death and misery, when the veterans come home wounded or completely disabled, they call them deadbeats and cut their benefits. Those are not the actions of American patriots.

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"In Congress, Republicans in both chambers have launched sweeping attacks on long-held centrist priorities and have renewed threats to block Obamacare. These attacks are seen in House bills slashing spending in almost every federal program except for the military [they didn't cut the military budget because that money is funneled back into the pocket of war profiteers] and domestic policing for the federal fiscal year starting October 1. Anti-poverty, education, human services, environmental protection, energy, labor, Wall St. oversight-all face cuts averaging 20 percent, although some areas face cuts by a third or more.
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"Rabid Republicans are also acting with renewed zeal to roll back voting rights in key Southern states. In North Carolina and Texas, GOP-led legislatures are resurrecting a catalogue of Jim Crow-era barriers to minority voting, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning of the 1965 Voting Right Act's toughest enforcement provision. In North Carolina, the GOP wants to repeal 20 years of best practices that made North Carolina a model of fair and accessible elections. In Texas, the GOP wants to revise political districts to dilute minority representation and pass tougher voter ID laws."
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/18636-six-ways-rabid-republicans-are-declaring-war-on-america
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Nevertheless, most Republicans tend to wrap themselves in the American flag and walk around with flag pins in their lapels, but their unconscionable assault on the American people is anything but patriotic. Their purposeful undermining and exploitation of the American people could only be perpetrated by a greedy, power-hungry, and self-serving domestic enemy of this nation. But due to the affects of corporate brainwashing, they have the American people divided and at one another's throat instead of seeing reality for what it is.
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Americans aren't suffering because of their fellow citizens; they’re suffering because they’re being robbed blind by the Corporate-Republican Alliance. Undocumented workers aren’t taking their jobs; their jobs are being sent out of the country in order to make the American middle class more accepting of a lower standard of living. And labor unions are not what’s destroying jobs; jobs are being outsourced to destroy labor unions. Yet, corporate conservatives have a shrinking middle class railing against the poor, Blacks against undocumented workers, and Christians against any, and everyone, who doesn't look, think, and act like themselves. Thus, the most lethal weapons against American democracy - hatred, suffering, ignorance, and division - is being used against us, and the Corporate-Republican Alliance are using those weapons quite effectively in reverting a previously thriving American democracy into what is beginning to look ominously close to a third-world nation.

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So it is essential that the American people open their eyes and take this threat to our democracy seriously, because this nation is sliding downhill, and very fast. Who would ever have thought that they would live to see a vice president of the United States outing an American CIA agent, or 47 American senators sending a treasonous letter to a foreign head of state in an attempt to undermine American diplomacy on behalf of a second foreign power. And who would have thought that we'd ever see in our lifetime a governor of a state knowingly exposing a city of 100,000 people to led poisoning, which will retard the intellectual growth of children and have a negative impact on their health for the rest of their lives? And considering the fact that the city is predominantly Black, and the minority of White people there are poor, it's Hitlerian in its ramifications. So Rick Snyder should not only be forced to resign, but he should be charged, at the very least, with criminal negligence, because every time we allow the Republicans to get away with something like this, they take it one step further. That's why the nation is sliding downhill so fast.
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And again, the assaults being perpetrated against America listed above would have been unheard of in the United States just a short time ago, and it's all being done by greedy and self-serving Republican politicians who are completely disinterested in the interest of the American people. Their interest lie in America remaining miserable, angry, and divided, and they're doing everything in their power to keep us that way.
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So these are not traditional American politicians that we're dealing with here. We're now in a class war, and these Republican politicians are the enemy's assault troops.  So regardless to your race, creed, or color, if you don't have a few million dollars stashed away somewhere, you're their enemy. These are the very "domestic enemies" of the United States that we were warned about in our founding documents.
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And these people didn't just pop up out of nowhere. They've been around as "sleeper cells" since the very founding of this nation; they've just had to keep a low profile to carry out their agenda. Because many fiscal conservatives are not just racist, they're also class bigots. One of the founding fathers of conservative thought was Alexander Hamilton. He was an aristocrat who advocated that poor and middle-class Americans should be relegated to second-class citizenship, and the GOP has fully embraced his agenda. Hamilton said the following:
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AND THESE ARE NOT JUST THE BENEFITS

OF MINORITIES OR

LIBERALS THEY'RE GOING AFTER

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government." Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787).
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While Hamilton’s position was resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of the founding fathers - whose primary reason for coming to America in the first place was to get away from the European class system - there were many of Hamilton’s ilk who chose not to recognize the American ideal that "All men [and women] are created equal." Then they were later joined by Southern Dixiecrats, or social bigots, who also rejected the ideal of human equality.
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But what social conservatives fail to realize is that the corporate conservative's rejection of human equality includes them. Corporate conservatives don't care any more about them than they do any minority.  They're just being used to keep America divided, but once the corporatists seize firm control over the government, and social bigots are no longer needed, they're going to be thrown onto a virtual plantation right along with everyone else. The attempt to hide that fact is what accounts for the corporate conservative's intense distaste for public education.

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Corporate conservatives want to restore control over the American worker that they had during the Great Depression, and if you take a close look at the Republican platform it is clear that they're on a single-minded mission to do just that.  During the Great Depression there was no such thing as Social Security, so when a person became too old or weak to work, they had no income so they had to depend on their children for support. That meant instead of a husband and wife only having to support themselves and their children, which was tough enough during those times, they also had to support their parents as well. So there was often three generations of a family in one household – and in many cases, the parents of both the husband, and wife, lived with the family.
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As a result, in some cases the entire family, including the children, had to work long, hard hours under sweatshop-like conditions in coal minds and the like, which in many cases led to the death and/or maiming of young children. So in a very real sense, Great Depression era workers lived under a form of slavery – the one difference was, they had to go out and find their own housing.
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In addition, there was no such thing as Medicare or Medicaid, so when one of the grandparents became ill the medical costs would devastate the entire family. These conditions kept lower and middle-class families in such dire need of funds that they had to accept whatever crumbs the business community chose to throw at them – and remember, at that time there was no Fair Labor Standards Act or unions to protect a worker’s rights or a minimum wage, so businesses could treat the worker anyway they wanted, and pay them whatever they wanted.

They could work you 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no overtime, and no paid vacation. In addition, since there was no child labor laws, if your boss didn’t think you were being productive enough, he could insist that you bring your children in (as young as 9 years old) to assist you if you wanted to keep your job. Then if you protested, he could fire you on the spot, in which case, your entire family – sick grandparents and all – would be thrown out on the street, because there was no such thing as unemployment insurance.
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Thus, corporate conservatives depend on a poorly educated public for their very survival, because even a rudimentary familiarity with history would reveal both their background, and agenda. They don't want you to know that the people who lived through the Great Depression and fought WWII, the people who we refer to as "The Greatest Generation," wouldn't let a Republican anywhere near the White House.
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Our grandparents elected Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt into office an unprecedented four terms, from 1932 until he died in office in 1945. Thereafter, Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, had to push for the Twenty-Second Amendment creating presidential term limits for a Republican to even get a whiff of the White House, and even then, a Republican wasn’t elected until Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 – and he was only elected because he was the allied commander credited with winning WWII, and he was a Republican in name only.  He signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and sent troops into Little Rock Arkansas to integrate the schools.
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In addition, as President Eisenhower’s very last act of office he warned the American people of the military/industrial complex, or people like Dick Cheney and the kind of Republicans we have in office today. He had no use for them. Ike would have summarily shot Dick Cheney had he been in office when Cheney allegedly outed CIA operative, Valarie Plame.
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So the “Greatest Generation” understood what we’re only now finding out the hard way about the Republican Party due to the GOP’s systematic dismantling of our information and educational systems – their pronounced greed and lust for power has rendered them prone to being reckless, irresponsible, without limits, and a danger to our democracy. That's why they Hate Donald Trump, because he's making all of their shortcomings and hidden agenda glaringly clear to the public.
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DONALD TRUMP IS A CAPITIALIST AND A BAD JOKE, BUT HE SERVES A USEFUL PURPOSE - HE REVEALS HOW CONSERVATIVES REALLY THINK.

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Donald Trump is an ignorant, mean-spirited, xenophobic, and self-serving racist who's willing to tell any lie he can conjure up to promote his own interest. That makes him the quintessential Republican, and that's exactly why he's leading in the Republican polls. But the Trump phenomenon says it all. While the GOP establishment is distancing themselves from Trump, it's not because they disagree with what he's saying, it's because he's either too dumb, or too self-serving to realize that he's not suppose to be saying what conservatives truly believe out loud.  While the Republican establishment has been saying the exact same things as Trump for years, they’ve been saying it in political code, and with a wink.
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So the Republican establishment is afraid that this Trump episode will openly reveal their unspoken assault on the American people for decades, and the facts are simple - while the Corporate-Republican Alliance are all wearing American flag pins in their lapels and constantly paying lip-service to wanting to bring prosperity to the average American, an unequivocal historic record clearly demonstrates that this has never been the case, and not only that, it has never even been a part of the GOP's agenda.
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So in the 2016 election the American people are going to be given a choice to come clean. Do they really want the kind of America that they're always bragging about and profess to believe in, or do they actually want a fascist nation that subjugates the working class, demonizes minorities, and supports a Gestapo-like police forces that kill innocent Black children on the street with impunity? For those rabid conservatives who feel like they could live with the latter, they should think long and hard, because as their current living conditions suggest, this time it's not about simply establishing an Aryan nation, it's about establishing a corporate feudalist oligarchy where poor and working-class White people and their families are just as meaningless as any minority. Think about it - did they only send Black jobs out of the country? I don't think so. Are they now, even as I write, trying to take away the Social Security and Veterans benefits of only minorities?  No they aren't. And did Gov. Rick Snyder only expose Black people to lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan? Not really. So the facts are clear.  If you’re a poor or middle-class White person who don't have millions of dollars stashed away in a foreign account somewhere, they intend to make you the new 'coon,' just like they did during the Great Depression.

A SOCIAL BIGOT

As a final comment to social bigots, while I would hate to see America come crashing down as a result of our own stupidity, if worse comes to worst, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I wouldn't get a certain measure of satisfaction out of watching bigots get just what they deserve. You see, Black people are accustomed to dealing with the kind of adversity that would befall this nation. During the Great Depression while White folks were jumping off buildings, Black people were partying through the Harlem Renaissance and enjoying one of the most productive and creative periods in our history. So the irony is, in many respects the Great Depression worked to the advantage of Black people, because it leveled the playing field. During the depression White people were force to live under the very same conditions that Black people have been forced to deal with all of their lives - both then, and now. But due to the affirmative action program that White folks have benefited from in this society over the years, they just aren't equipped to deal with adversity. If you're already out to sea, you don't even feel a tsunami beneath you, it is only those who are living warm and comfortable on land who experience the devastation of its impact. That explains why my grandfather never even mentioned the Great Depression to me, because for him, it was just business as usual.

A BLACK WOMAN 'STRUGGLING' THROUGH

THE GREAT DEPRESSION 

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Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com

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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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An Irrefutable Truth About the GOP

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

An Irrefutable Truth About the GOP
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A gentleman by the name of James W. Lewis recently commented on my article, "Who’s In the ‘Dark,’ the Black Community, or Dr. Ben Carson?" In his comment he posed a question which under ordinary circumstances would seem to be very reasonable, and one that seems to currently be on the mind of a surprising number of younger Black people. He asked the following:
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"There’s one thing that has always bothered me about black folks. We constantly battle trying to prove we’re not all the same, especially what’s portrayed on television. We come from a variety of backgrounds, and our unique upbringings shape our beliefs, including political beliefs. If that’s the case, why do we ALL have to be Democrat (or even Independent)? The Democratic Party was once pro-slavery with obviously no, to very little African American support. The shift began in the 1940s with FDR’s New Deal. African Americans have been generally pro-Democrat ever since. If African Americans can change the face of the Democratic party, can’t the same be said for the Republican party?"
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James, in a word, no.
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People often suggest that I tend to advocate for the Democratic Party over the GOP.   In response to that, first, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not a Democrat, and I haven’t been since my early twenties. I’m a independent progressive thinker, as oppose to a liberal or conservative. There is a difference.
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Liberals and conservatives are both ideologues, and as such, tend to be different sides of the same coin. They both have a propensity to give ideology priority over unadulterated truth. So when truth fails to conform to their particular ideological position, they both have a tendency to try to bend and contort the truth in order to mold it into a more comfortable fit within their political philosophy.
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Progressives, on the other hand, are non-ideological. We believe in following truth wherever it leads and regardless to who’s ox it gores. Truth is our only constituent, so we tend to look upon the political landscape as though we’re observing an ant farm, rather than from a partisan perspective.
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At this point it must be granted, however, that progressives do generally come down on the liberal side of the ledger, but there’s a reason for that, and since we believe in truth, that reason should be obvious. The current Republican Party has become a refuge for scoundrels for some, and a refuge from reality for many others. So while I’m not advocating FOR the Democratic Party, I routinely and vociferously advocate AGAINST the Republican Party with my every keystroke, because the current GOP is filled to the brim with some of the most dangerously malevolent people in this country.
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Simply ask yourself, when was the last time a party had to, literally, hide their last president and vice president during an election? Granted, I’m not a historian, but I can’t think of another time in our history. But the Republican Party had to do it twice - in both the 2008 and 2012 elections - and with good reason.
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George W. Bush and Dick Cheney spent their entire eight-year reign enriching their cronies. In addition, during their time in office they didn’t do one solitary thing to help America, or the American people, and that’s been the Republican record for nearly ONE HUNDRED YEARS. The GOP has a clear and irrefutable one hundred year record of swindling the American people, which I clearly lay out in the following link. (http://wattree.blogspot.com/2010/10/gop-one-hundred-year-record-of.html).

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Thus, the GOP has clearly become the domestic enemy of the United States. So to even try to be nonpartisan with this group would constitute colluding with the enemy against the American people.
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Am I engaging in a hyperbolic rant? I don’t think so. Let me prove it: Who was the last Republican president who didn’t drag America under a bus? That’s a real brain teaser isn’t it? Now try to name one good thing that the GOP has done for the American people in the last 30 years. Let me answer that for you - Absolutely nothing.
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Rush Limbaugh was foolish enough to make his feelings known out loud - "I don’t want Obama to be successful" - and as everyone knows, Rush speaks for the Republican Party.
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 Thus, Rush gave the Republican Party their marching orders at the very beginning of President Obama’s administration - that the GOP should do everything in its power to prevent America from succeeding, regardless to the level of suffering that the American people may have to endure, and they've stood steadfast to that agenda.
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In yesterday's vote on gun control, in spite of the fact that a majority of 54 senators voted to approve the measure, the Republicans used the threat of filibuster to block true democracy and thumbed their nose at nearly 90% of the American people in favor of their corporate cronies. That, is the literal definition of a domestic enemy.
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The History of the Republican Party
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One of the founding fathers of conservative thought was Alexander Hamilton. He was an aristocrat who advocated that poor and middle-class Americans should be relegated to second-class citizenship, and the GOP has fully embraced his agenda. Hamilton said the following:
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“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.” (Debates of the Federalist Convention, May 14-September 17, 1787).
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The founding fathers rejected Hamilton's position in laying out the blueprint for this nation, but the arrogance of Hamilton's philosophy continues to exist, even to this day, in our politics - and it was exactly that arrogance that we witnessed in the Republican Party in yesterday's vote on gun control - "To Hell with the people; we're talking about my reelection here!"
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The modern Republican Party is a coalition between fiscal conservatives, or big business, and social conservatives, or social bigots. Even though these two factions don’t even like each other, they have one thing in common – they both have a vested interest in undermining Black people.

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Big business has a vested interest in not only lowering the standard of living of Black people, but the entire American Middle class in order to become more competitive in the global market against countries who pay their workers less per week, than the average middle-class American spends on lunch per day. And the great American bigot simply hates Black people in general. The most benevolent of them think that Black people should be relegated to shining his shoes.

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But it is true that most Black people used to be Republicans immediately after the Civil War up through the Civil Rights Era – Martin Luther King was a Republican. But the Republican Party was different back then. They represented the business community of the North, and the Democrats, or Dixiecrats, represented the farmers of the South. That was one of the reasons for the Civil War. The Civil War wasn't actually about freeing the slaves; it was actually a dispute between the big business Republicans of the North, and the Southern Democrats that represented the farming interests. Black people just happened to benefit from the dispute, and during the industrial revolution big business could use the additional manpower.
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But during the Great Depression the two parties began to change their alliances dramatically. After Democrat president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, turned on big business to help the poor and middle class with his "New Deal" for the American people during the Great Depression, working-class people began to gravitate to the Democratic Party. Then during the Civil Rights Era of the sixties when John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson began to support Black civil rights, many more Black people migrated to the Democratic Party, and southern racists began to move to the Republican Party. So, essentially, a complete shift took place in party alliances.
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So when you hear someone from the Republican Party saying that it was the Democrats who kept Black people in slavery and formed the Klan, they’re trying to play on your ignorance of history. A much better way of keeping track of those who victimized Black people is by following political philosophy. It was conservatives who victimized Black people, and those conservatives currently reside in the Republican Party - and as we speak, they’re desperately trying to obstruct our right to vote.
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But the Republican Party is currently in a state of turmoil. Every since social conservatives sought out refuge in the GOP subsequent to the Civil Rights Era, there’s been an uneasy alliance between the corporatist conservatives like Mitt Romney, and social bigots like Rick Santorum.
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So once again there’s a dispute between the interest of fiscal conservatives, or big business, who benefit from a more practical approach to social policies - and who would love to bring in as many undocumented workers as possible as potential customers, and to lower the cost of wages; and social conservatives, the social bigots - who, if they had their way would send all undocumented workers back to their respective homelands. So a second Civil War is brewing, but this time it’s going on within the Republican Party itself, and it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.
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But the bottom line is this - the bigots within the Republican Party hate Black people even more than they do undocumented workers, liberals, and gays; and the corporatists hate the entire poor and middle-class population. You heard Mitt Romney talking to his homies – he thinks nearly half of the American people are scum – Black and White.
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Thus, any Black person, regardless to who he or she is, who think that Black people can find a comfortable fit in the churning cauldron of Republican hatred, bigotry, and self-interest, has got to be a fool - a damn fool.

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THE GOP HAS BECOME DANGEROUSLY
UN-AMERICAN
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RELATED ARTICLE
Herman Cain: Black People Are Brainwashed? Please!
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com

Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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ONWARD CHRISTIAN FASCISTS

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me -
it's just that God does.

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ONWARD CHRISTIAN FASCISTS 

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It is easy to claim you love the Lord

as you show up on Sunday to pray;

Then denigrate as heathens all those
at home sleeping

instead of living their lives your way."

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It is easy to cry out,

"Oh save them, Lord!"
of those
immune to the games you play,

As you worship the scriptures

that serve your purpose,

and ignore
those that don’t go your way.

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While the "heathens" do rest

like God did suggest

on this 7^th and most sacred day,

You spend the day frowning

while literally drowning

in hatred even as you pray.

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THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF CRYSTAL SPRINGS

THE HOUSE OF SATAN

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GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

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It’s indeed ironic that the task of saving this country from fascist hypocrites and corporate thugs has fallen on the shoulders of one lone Black man. It shows that God has a sense of irony. God seems to be saying, "This nation’s greatness has been built upon lies, injustice and hypocrisy, so now you have a choice - you can either confront your hypocrisy, or allow it to become the instrument of your destruction."
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Did God talk to you about that, Pat?
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Related Post:

The Religious Right: A Threat to America

Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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