WHY I DON’T CRITICIZE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS EQUALLY .
Let’s get this silly non-issue settled once and for all. Black people vote Democratic because it's in our best interest and we recognize that the Republican Party is toxic to the Black community. While the Democratic Party is not everything we'd like it to be, at least it's not working against our interest.
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Common sense dictates that we have to prioritize our efforts. And while the Democrats may be the Bogeyman, the Republicans are the Devil, so it would be highly imprudent to criticize both parties equally. If we did that we would be dividing the Black vote and lending comfort to the GOP, who are leaving no stone unturned to reverse the Civil Act.
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So people like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West need to just put the silly argument that Black people are blindly following President Obama to rest. It suggests that Black people are stupid. So if they can’t contribute something constructive to the national dialogue, they need to just shut up.
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The Black community has been trying to send them that message for a few years now, but they’ve been thumbing their nose at us, and every time we look up they’re denigration yet another high-profile Black person. They've both become serial offenders in that regard. It's gotten to the point where even if they said something relevant it would be ignored, because they've become renowned for their petty, spiteful, irrelevance. West's latest racist slander is calling MSNBC the "Rent a Negro Network" - consider what an uproar that would cause if a White person said that. So yet again, West is being divisive, racist, and engaging in nonconstructive mudslinging.
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It's not clear whether West is struggling to remain relevant, or he's merely becoming senile.That's not our problem. But the fact that he and Tavis Smiley have become a liability to the Black community is very much our problem, so it's time to take the gloves off and actively go after these two.
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Yes, they have the right to their opinion, but when they begin to hurt the Black community by making us all look stupid, it’s time for us to shut them down and boycott any, and everything, they’re involved in. Only then, will we actually see just how important their opinion is to them. Frankly, I think they’re much more interested in their pocket.
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While these two are hard at work trying to divide the Obama coalition, the Republicans are actively engaged in trying to obstruct the Black vote, obstruct all legislation that could possibly provide jobs in the Black community and America as a whole, they’re trying to circumvent the United States Constitution and women’s right to privacy by invading a woman’s uterus, they’re trying to obstruct the rights of gays, they’ve disenfranchised Michigan voters by firing duly elected officials and replacing them with handpicked cronies who are completely unaccountable to the people, and they're applauding the murderer of an innocent and unarmed Black child. I could go on for pages, but I’m sure I've made my point. The GOP is, literally, the domestic enemy of the American people.
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On the other hand, much of what we’re complaining about with regard the Democrats is our own fault, because we've allowed ourselves to become so distracted by hedonistic pursuits that we're leaving the store unattended, so it's no wonder we're having problems.
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But again, Tavis and West aren't adding one constructive thought to the discussion. On the contrary - they seem to be delighted by the situation, because our misery provides them the opportunity to advocate that we cut off our head to cure a hangnail, when all we actually have to do is take a page from the Tea Party and start voting a few people out of office during the primaries.
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We need to start with congress, because they control the purse strings. If certain Democratic legislators are unresponsive to our condition, we should vote them out of office during the primaries, and then run someone who is more cognizant and observant of our needs. That’s what the Tea Party does, and that’s exactly why Republican politicians are scared to death of this small handful of people. We should follow suit and do the exact same thing, because to even entertain the suggestion that Black people become more bipartisan - or do anything else to dilute our vote in the general election - is total lunacy, because to dilute our vote, is to dilute our power.
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Thus, the very first thing we should do is put everybody on notice by making it unquestionably clear that we’re fed up with the nonsense - and the best way to do that is by shutting Tavis Smiley and Cornel West completely down as a clear and unequivocal message to their admiring clones, wannabes, and obsequious minions in the wings. Because even as we speak these people are watching, learning, and preparing to follow in their divisive and self-serving footsteps.
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It's time for the Black community to start cleaning house, and the most appropriate place to start is with these two self-appointed, unelected, omens of self-destruction.
Many of my conservative friends are advising me that by implying that the GOP is a domestic enemy of America that I’m being unnecessarily divisive, and I’m doing myself a disservice. One particularly good friend said, “Contrary to what you and Gordon love to espouse, the GOP is not the 'devil incarnate.' It may be politically convenient and divisive for you to call it that, but it is just not true.” Sorry Tom, but I beg to disagree.
The fact is, I’m neither implying, espousing, nor equivocating. I’m stating a demonstrable fact. The GOP leadership is un-American, period. And they specialize in holding the American people hostage. Their total disregard for America is made quite evident by the fact that every time the GOP wants to push one of their unpopular initiatives they begin to strangle a segment of the American people for leverage. Two of the most recent examples of that are the way they held unemployed Americans and first responders hostage in order to push through the extension of the Bush tax cuts to benefit the wealthiest 2% of the population. Thereafter, they threatened to shut down the entire government in an attempt to push through initiatives that would have brought severe hardships upon the poor and middle class.
Both the methods and propaganda of the GOP are not only un-American, but right out of the Nazi playbook. The GOP leadership has calculated that the more miserable they can keep the American people, the better chance they have of regaining power. That, in turn, would allow them to get on with the business of totally enslaving the American people. So they routinely employ tactics from right out of Joseph Gobbels’ handbook on the effective use of propaganda to keep us so angry and divided that we’re blind to their concerted effort to keep America ignorant, distracted, and miserable.
The issue doesn’t even require debate, because the facts are indisputable. But unfortunately, in politics, just like religion, people tend to close their eyes to any and all facts, no matter how revealing, that tends to contradict what they want to believe. The same is true in both parties and across the political spectrum. Many of President Obama’s supporters also suffer from this ailment. They close their eyes to Obama’s tendency to engage in collusive “compromises” just like Republicans are closing their eyes to the horrific Republican conspiracy against America - and in the case of both, that’s in spite of the fact it’s a direct assault on the quality of life of their own family and children.
But the GOP is enabled by being allowed to hide in plain sight behind Godwin’s Law, which asserts that whenever you bring up Hitler or the Nazis as a metaphor to define others you automatically render your argument meaningless. But Godwin’s Law doesn’t take into account that there are times when the comparison is not only appropriate, but unavoidable - and this is one such time. So I seriously reassert, without hyperbole and in all candor, that the modus operandi and goals of the current GOP leadership come right out of the Nazi tradition - in fact, so much so that it inspires a sense of deja-vu.
Adolph Hitler pointed out the following in Mein Kampf :
“The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward . . . Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side.”
This is exactly the tactic employed by the GOP. They assume that the people are stupid so they all constantly repeat the exact same script, and conspicuously avoid any vestige of truth that is unfavorable to them. That’s why on any given news cycle they all trot out the same mantras: “Tax and spend Democrats,” “Government controlled healthcare,” “Death panels,” “Obamacare,” “Job-killing policies,” etc.
Joseph Gobbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, also felt that it was essential to gain control over the media, which the GOP embarked upon during the Reagan administration when they abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The doctrine allowed for equal time for opposing points of view, and the GOP couldn’t have that. Then afer the doctrine was abolished, conservative interests began to buy and take control of television and radio networks across the country. The rest is history. If the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been abolished, every time Limbaugh, Beck, or Fox News made a ridiculous statement on public policy, the network would have had to give equal time to any qualified person or group espousing the opposing point of view.
Gobbels also advocated limiting the people’s access to information. It is this prescription that accounts for the GOP’s thirty-year assault on our educational system and their current attempts to revise history. It also accounts for their assault on the National Public Broadcasting Network. So now it isn’t enough to simply lie to the people, now they’re also trying to prevent them from hearing the truth. Now, as a direct result of this thirty-year assault truth, many young Americans don’t realize that it’s un-American for the government to torture prisoners, or for Gov. Rick Snyder to fire duly elected local officials.
Gobbels also discussed the tactic of accusing your opponent of the assault on freedom that you’re actually committing. This tactic has also been clearly demonstrated by the GOP. Every since Obama has been in office, the GOP has been accusing him of promoting big government and trying to take government control of our lives. But now it turns out that all over the country Republican governors are not only trying to install big government, but initiate totalitarian policies that completely strip the American people of all of their rights of self-determination.
That brings us to the Nazi device of creating a crisis as a pretext for initiating unpopular policies. The GOP contends that their assault on the poor and middle class is absolutely necessary to address the nation’s deficit. But what they don’t tell us is that they created the deficit through Bush’s reckless spending in the first place. John Dyer of MSN Money points out that Bush alone cost the nation $11.5 trillion, and I suggest that it wasn’t purely due to incompetence.
The GOP has been on a single-minded missionfor more than 70 years to reverse New Deal initiatives that President Roosevelt put into place to rescue the American people during the Great Depression. Thus, over the years the GOP’s determination to abolish social security, the minium wage, and the Fair Labor Standards Act has been even more virulent than their current determination to abolish President Obama’s healthcare reform. But these programs have been so popular among the American people that they haven’t been able to go after them legislatively, so the GOP has purposely spent us into a ditch in order to manufacture a crisis as a pretext to initiate policies that they wanted to pursue in the first place.
That explains a lot. It perfectly explains why the nation is now in such dire straits even though President Clinton left Bush a $150 billion surplus. It also explains why Bush couldn’t put forth a rational explanation for why he was so anxious to invade Iraq that he sacrificed the lives of American troops by sending them to war without the necessary gear to protect their lives. In addition, that’s also why he made the supremely irrational decision to pursue two wars and a huge tax cut simultaneously and put it all on a credit card, costing the nation $5 trillion. Bush had to take out a loan to cover just the loss of revenue created by his tax cut for the rich, and the interest alone on that loan cost the nation $265 billion.
But that’s not all it explains. When we take into account the fact that the GOP has been purposely spending America into a ditch as a pretext to attack the poor and middle class safety net, it also explains why in spite of the fact that the GOP bills itself as the party of fiscal responsibility, they not only applauded, but lionized Ronald Reagan after he came close to tripling the national debt. It also explains why even though the poor and middle class had nothing to do with creating this economic disaster - including the estimated $6 trillion cost of the Wall Street bailout - the burden of resolving the crisis is being placed squarely in the lap of those least able to pay.
But the most unconscionable example of the GOP’s attack on the middle class is with social security. They claim that social security is in a crisis situation so the poor and middle class have got to prepare themselves to take a hit. But the only reason social security is in crisis is because the government has borrowed $2.5 trillion from the program and they don’t want to pay it back. So the GOP solution to the problem is to make us bite the bullet to absorb the cost of money that they borrowed from us.
Now, in spite of the Republican claim to be against big government, Republican governor, Rick Snyder of Michigan, has signed a bill into law that allows him to declare a state of budgetary marshal law which allows him to take over the cities and municipalities in the state of Michigan and appoint “Emergency Managers” with the authority to fire duly elected officials, rescind municipal contracts and labor agreements, and ignore any and all rules of public accountability. So in essence - no, in fact - he’s installed a dictatorship in the state of Michigan, and other Republican governors across the country are following suit.
In addition, the GOP judiciary, who was supposed to be so big on a “strict constructionist” interpretation of the constitution, not only ruled that international corporations were equal to American citizens in addressing our political system, but in the 2000 election disenfranchised American voters to appoint the president of their choice. Then to add insult to injury, they ruled that the judicial jujitsu that they engaged in to circumvent the will of the people could not be used as a precedent in future cases.
So the GOP has but one step left. If they can gain control of our national government and establish the same rules that now exist in Michigan, America’s beautiful experiment in democracy is over.
So yes, Tom, the GOP is indeed the Devil incarnate - and worse.
An Indictment against the Mainstream Media (Reprise)
On September 15, 2002 - six months and four days prior to the Iraqi invasion - I published an article entitled "Would Bush's Saber Rattle as Loudly Against China?" in the Portland Independent Media Center (no one else would publish it at the time) that said the following:
Now that we've reached the anniversary of 9-11, I am consumed by one thought - in light of what I've seen over the past year I find myself much more afraid of Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft than I am the Al Qaeda. While I understand that terrorists strike without warning to destroy life and property to promote their own agenda, it has become increasingly clear that Bush and his cohorts threaten to be even more destructive by attacking life, liberty, and the very foundation of this nation in the promotion of theirs.
Over the past year these conservative war mongers have been playing the American people like a fiddle. Now they want to sacrifice American lives for nothing more than their own political advantage. Just ask yourself, what does Saddam Hussain have to do with 9-11? Absolutely nothing. Evidence of that can be found in the fact that if Saddam had been involved in 9-11 the administration would have gone after him initially. So why is it suddenly so imperative that we invade Iraq now? I'll tell you why. Since Bush was unable to produce the head of Osama Bin Laden, he now needs another villain to take Bin Laden's place in order to keep his numbers up in the polls - and if that means having to sacrifice a few American lives and ignite even more terrorist activity on American soil in the process, so be it.
It is a well known political fact that the American people tend to rally around the president when the country's at war. That's why the Bush Administration fell all over themselves after 9-11 to declare "a war against terrorism." And the American people reacted just as planed - Bush's numbers immediately went up in the polls. But now with the mystery surrounding the fate of Osama Bin Laden, the administration has found itself without a war to sustain those numbers, so now they have to create one.
While I'm not prepared to say that the Bush Administration allowed 9-11 to take place, it is clear that the timing of the 9-11 tragedy was without a doubt the best thing that could ever happened to Bush's presidency. Bush was a lame duck the minute he was sworn in. It seems that as soon as Bush entered The Oval Office the stock market began to falter and the economy started to weaken. And whenever he spoke, the next day's news was not so much what he said, but whether or not he got through the speech without falling on his face. In addition, his big tax cut that was touted as the key to boosting the economy turned out to be a bust, and he was so inept in dealing with congress that a Republican senator changed parties costing Bush control of the senate. As a result, when 9-11 took place, it was embraced by conservatives more like it was a football rally than the sober occasion that it was - thus, all the flag waving, ceremonies, and strutting about.
But where was all that bluster prior to 9-11? ABC News reported on May 16th of this year that the Bush Administration acknowledged that U.S. Intelligence officials informed President Bush weeks before 9-11 that Osama Bin Laden's terrorists might try to hijack a plane. It was also reported that Bush privately alerted transportation officials and security agencies, but other than that, he simply sat on the information. The administration claims that the information they received was non-specific, but one would think that even if they couldn't determine exactly when and where the attack was going to take place, at the very least they could have warned the American people. If they had, maybe some of the people who died would have chosen not to fly - or possibly, chosen to leave their children behind. But no, this president who now claims to be so concerned with protecting our welfare that he feels compelled to launch an unprovoked attack against Iraq, was at that time more interested in the impact that warning us would have on the airline industry.
What the American people needs to understand is that the power elite in this country doesn't view the United States in the same way as its citizens. They see the United States as a huge corporation, with its various industries as its subsidiaries. They see American citizens, particularly the lower and middle class, as simply pawns to be cajoled and manipulated in whatever way is necessary to meet the goals of the corporation. Therefore, they didn't view the tragedy of 9-11 in the same patriotic way as the average American citizen. After the initial shock, they saw 9-11 in terms of dollars and cents. Ultimately, it was viewed as an assault on their corporate superstructure. Later they recognized that the incident could be used as a distraction for the American people, and still later, an opportunity to move on Middle Eastern oil interests.
So let there be no doubt, all of the flag waving, ceremonies, and patriotic speeches have nothing to do with 9-11; they are designed to whip the American people into such a frenzy that they're blinded to Bush's actual agenda. And that agenda includes the following.
1).Committing America (and American lives) to a war in order to get himself reelected.
2).Taking control of Iraqi oil fields to benefit his friends in big business.
3).Keeping the American voter distracted from considering the ramifications of the recent corporate scandals.
4).Keeping the American people from recognizing how inept he is as president.
The rest of the world sees Bush's agenda for what it is, and the American people would too if they'd stop waving their flags long enough to consider the flag's true meaning. The American flag represents freedom and justice, not trying to dictate who should lead other countries. It represents the open debate of issues, not intolerance to any and everyone who disagrees with your point of view. It represents the guarantee of personal freedom, not the suspension of the Bill of Rights. If the American people would just stop to consider these facts, it would become clear that even while Bush and his conservative cohorts are frantically waving our flag, they are simultaneously waging war against the very values that the flag and this great country represents.
These issues can, and will, be debated ad nauseam, but the American people need only ask themselves two questions to put all of the administration's nonsense into perspective. First, would the administration be so anxious to go to war if we were talking about China as opposed to Iraq? And secondly, do we think that invading Iraq will make us more, or less safe from terrorist attacks? If we answer those questions honestly, it becomes clear that the administration is being disingenuous at best.***
So what I'd like to know is this - if a shade tree journalist sitting up in his den in the heart of a Los Angeles ghetto could see what was going on, why couldn't the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, CNN and all of the other media networks; why couldn't Harvard, Yale, and all of the various and sundry Ph.D.s from America's great institutions of learning; and why couldn't the nation's so called "think tanks," all of the nation's political scientists, and the United States Congress figure it out?
The answer is, they had, but they simply turned their backs and allowed young patriotic Americans to march off to their deaths. The most irrefutable evidence of that? None of their children died.
Now, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida, etc., the corporate media, with notable exceptions, is turning a blind eye and allowing the same thing to happen again, but this time, to America as a whole.
The current leadership of the GOP is the most dangerous threat to America in the history of this country. Hyperbole? I wish it were. But the evidence clearly demonstrates that the GOP has mounted a concerted effort to circumvent the American people and install a modern-day feudalism that effectively abolishes the will of the people and their elected officials to allow our cities and states to be run by corporate-like CEOs - and there’s no telling where it will go from there.
In spite of the GOP claim that they believe in limited government, The Michigan Messenger has reported that newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder, is poised to sign an emergency management bill that will hand total control of local governments over to "emergency managers" appointed by the government.
The Messenger reports:
"In a party line vote, and despite impassioned speeches of protest by the body’s Democratic minority, the Michigan Senate approved legislation that threatens to take over and even dissolve local governments that refuse to balance their budgets by breaking labor contracts.
"According to the law, which has already been approved in the House, the governor will be able to declare "financial emergency" in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services."
According to the Messenger, in a last ditch effort to protect the rights of the citizens, Democrats tried to add an amendment that would require "Emergency Managers" to hold monthly public accountability meetings to inform the citizens of how they are governing, but the amendment was voted down by the Republican senate.
Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan state AFL-CIO is quoted as saying,
"It takes every decision in a city or school district and puts it in the hands of the manager, from when the streets get plowed to who plows them and how much they are paid. In schools, the manager would decide academics or if you have athletics. This is a takeover by the right wing and it’s an assault on democracy like I’ve never seen."
Thus, the GOP, this party of "limited government," intends to completely take over the local governments under their jurisdiction, rescind the will of the voting public, and thumb their noses at any amendment that will require public accountability. And this power-grab is also taking place in other Republican-led states around the country.
This action and what’s going on in Wisconsin and other Republican-led states clearly demonstrates that the leaders of the modern GOP are without limits. To put it bluntly, these people are un-American. They are fundamentally opposed to our way of life, and greatly prefer a dictatorial form of government. George W. Bush let the cat out of the bag by admitting it when he said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier…just as long as I'm the dictator."
Americans need to wake up and connect the dots. The GOP now claims that they are so concerned about the deficit that they must suspend the United States Constitution, yet they weren’t concerned enough about it to suspend giving the top 2% of the population a tax cut that will add $4 Trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. Neither were they concerned enough about the deficit to discontinue taxpayer subsidies to Exxon, one of the riches corporations in the world, nor prevent the political class in congress from giving themselves an extra $93,000 in "petty cash."
And while they claim to love our troops, they rushed them into battle in Iraq without the necessary gear to protect their lives, and they awarded Dick Cheney’s former corporation, Halliburton (KBR), a no-bid contract to provide the troops with contaminated water and do such shoddy contracting work that at least 18 of our troops were electrocuted while in the shower. The Department of the Army classified their deaths as "negligent homicide." Then, if that weren't enough, the GOP fought tooth and nail against giving the troops any additional benefits when they left the service - inspite of the fact that our troops in Iraq were forced into extended tours of duty and spend more tours of duty in a battle zone than any other troops in American history.
The GOP has demonstrated over the past forty years that they are conniving, lack limits, self-serving, and have little or no respect for the rule of law. Richard Nixon was forced to resign after being involved in the plot to burglarize the DNC in theWatergate Scandal, and there’s evidence that strongly suggests that Ronald Reagan was in collusion with the Iranians to hold American hostages until after he won the presidential election (The hostages were released immediately after he took the oath of office). Reagan also traded arms with his newfound friends during the Iran/Contra scandal. In addition, he flooded American inner cities with drugs to support his illegal war in Nicaragua, then suggested that inner city children "just say no."
Republican, George W. Bush then went on to lie us into the war with Iraq, costing more than a million lives, including the killing and maiming of thousands of Americans troops. His administration also spied on American citizens, Cheney committed treason by outing a CIA agent, they committed war crimes that included torturing prisoners, and they purposely ravaged the national treasury. Now they’re using the excuse of a depleted treasury to claim "a national emergency" in order to mount yet another assault on the Constitution. And in the meantime, Republicans in congress are demonizing an entire religion as "Islamofascists" to spread hatred and fear and to distract our attention from their horrific agenda.
Doesn’t that feel just the least bit like deja vu? If it doesn't it's probably because you're a victim of the GOP assault on our educational system. They have a vested interest in keeping you uninformed, because they don't want you to realize that while you may be on their side, they're not on yours. They think of the American people as stupid, and they want to keep us that way.
"Fascism: A radical, authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy." - Wikipedia
Strive To Become Your Own Hero... Then Let No One Remove Your Cape.
BIO
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet, and musician, born in Los Angeles. He’s been a columnist for The Los Angeles Sentinel, Black Star News, The Atlanta Post, and is a member of the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists (http://www.spj.org/). He’s also the author of "A Message From the Hood."
Some of the greatest minds I’ve ever known held court while sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lots of ghetto liquor stores, while some of the weakest minds I’ve ever known roamed the halls of academia in pursuit of credentials over knowledge.
Am I a hater, you ask? You're damn right I'm a hater. I hate injustice. I hate hypocrisy. I also hate demagoguery, apathy, and the stupidity that allows it to exist. Hater? Absolutely. I'm a big time hater. I hate what I see happening to this country, and I hate watching the development of a culture that embraces ignorance with a stupid sense of pride. So yes, I am indeed a hater, but not only that - I'm a hater with a very low threshold for bullshit, so step off.
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