The GOP: A DEMON’S DELIGHT Satan is busy preparing a special place
in Hell for his children.
Paul Ryan, Pat Robertson, the GOP,
his children all,
and they’ve spread his dominion
across the Earth.
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Yes, Lucifer is dancing on searing,
and red-hot embers as he watch
his loyal children corrupting
the name of the Lord,
and turning his words
of love into instruments of hate.
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Listen carefully
and you can hear the dark moans
of erotic ecstasy as Satan looks upon
his children sitting in church, and
impersonating angels of God,
while faithfully harboring Satan's spirit of hatred, hubris, and greed.
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Yes, these are his children, all -
the children of Hell,
and they’ve done their job well;
they’ve starved the homeless,
slaughtered the weak, in the millions,
and demonized the good.
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Yes indeed, they’ve served their father well,
and they’ve brought him
many grandchildren.
So like any proud father,
Beelzebub just can’t wait
to welcome them home. . . . . and I can't wait for the reunion.
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:
. "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:
. “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.
After President Obama took the oath of office the chairman of the fed went to him and said, "If you don't do something by MONDAY, our economy is going to collapse." This was a gift from the Republican Party. These people
are not hiding the last Republican president and vice president for nothing. Under Bush, the nation was losing 800,000 jobs a MONTH. Now, just ask yourselves, who was the last Republican president who DIDN’T drag America under a bus?
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ENTRUSTING THIS NATION AND OUR ECONOMY TO THE GOP WOULD BE LIKE ENTRUSTING OUR CHILDREN TO CONVICTED CHILD MOLESTERS.
THE GOP: A ONE HUNDRED YEAR RECORD OF SWINDLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
In 1921 -- eight years before the great depression -- Republicans took over the helm of this nation for 12 years. During that time there were three Republican administrations, the first of which was the administration of Warren G. Harding. History remembers Harding's administration for one thing more than anything other -- scandal. It was during Harding's presidency that the Teapot Dome Scandal erupted. His administration was considered the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States -- until Nixon's, then Reagan's, and finally Bush's.
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Next, in 1923, came Calvin Coolidge, the president that Ronald Reagan is said to have most admired. Coolidge's policies of large tax cuts, allowing business a free-rein, and his encouragement of stock speculation contributed greatly to the impending stock market crash and the great depression that was to come.
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Then in 1929 Herbert Hoover came to power. During his administration the stock market crashed, starting the great depression. In spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. 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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Finally in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal democrat, was elected overwhelmingly. 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.
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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 give relief to the American people and to insure that they were 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 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 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 has ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII. He then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
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One would think that conservatives would have seen the light, but their passion to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. Therefore, from the moment that the New Deal went into place, conservatives have been determined to dismantle it. The closest they've come to succeeding started during the Reagan administration with Supply-Side Economics, or, "Reaganomics" -- and the battle is currently raging in Washington D.C. as we speak.
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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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Instead of taking the money 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 deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what does 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.
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Due to the continued freewheeling fiscal policies of conservative Republicans, between 1986 and 1989, spanning the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., the FSLIC had to pay off all the depositors of 296 institutions with assets of over $125 billion.
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Then in 1988 Silverado Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $1.3 billion. It was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation alleged that he was guilty of "breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest." The issue was eventually settled out of court with Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement.
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Then there was the Lincoln Savings and loan scandal in 1987, involving John McCain. The scandal was very similar to the one that is currently playing out on Wall Street. He was one of a group of senators dubbed "The Keating Five" involved in a scandal by the same name.
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In 1976 Charles Keating moved to Arizona to run the American Continental Corporation. In 1984, shortly after the Reagan era push to deregulate the savings and loan community, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loan and began to engage in highly risky investments with the depositors' savings. In 1989 the parent company, which Keating headed, went bankrupt, and it resulted in over 21,000 investors losing their life savings. Most of the investors were elderly, and the loss amounted to about 285 million dollars.
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After having received over a million dollars from Keating in illegal campaign contributions, gifts, free trips, and other gratuities, the Keating Five--Senators John Glenn, Don Riegle, Dennis DeConini, Alan Cranston, and Sen. John McCain--attempted to intervene in the investigation into Keating's activities by the regulators. Later, they were admonished to varying degrees by the senate for attempting to influence regulators on Keating's behalf. Charles Keating ended up being convicted for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, for which he received 10 years by the state court, and a 12 year sentence in federal court. After spending four and a half years in prison, his convictions were overturned. But prior to being retried, he pled guilty to a number of felonies in return for a sentence of time served.
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Then came the George W. Bush administration that caused close to a million people to die uselessly in an illegal war in Iraq, robbed the American people blind, whose fumbling ignited the longest war in American history in Afghanistan, and whose greed came very close to sending the nation into yet another depression.
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Now, after all of their repeated efforts to deplete the national treasury, they're unanimously voting against every piece of legislation that the Democrats propose to repair the damage they created, and to bring relief to the American people. Then they have the audacity to claim that they're doing it because they're concerned about deficit spending.
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They're against affordable health care for American families; they're against any kind of spending to put Americans back to work, and they're against extending unemployment insurance to relieve the burden of America's unemployed. What's particularly telling, however, is they're also against any kind of strong legislation to prevent the financial community (them) from being able to rob the American people in the future.
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The fact is, what they really want is to maintain the status quo, and make damn sure that the American people suffer until the 2012 elections so they'll have a chance to regain power and raid the treasury again. That's their one and only agenda - period.
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This is not just political rhetoric. Here is the activity of the Republican congress who ran in the 2010 election on their claim that their number one priority was to bring economic relief, and create jobs for the American people:
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History is clear. The conservative Republicans don't mind spending money, they just don't want to spend it on those who need it - us. Remember, they're the party of Alexander Hamilton, one of this country's founding fathers who believed that only those who owned property should even be allowed to vote. He also said:
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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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So, let's set the record straight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that "bleeding heart liberal", not only brought the nation back from the Great Depression and saved the world from Hitler during his life, but his "New Deal" for the American people gave us the greatest prosperity we've ever known, and allowed him to reach back from the grave to save the nation from Ronald Reagan 50 years after his death.
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That isn't to say that the liberal Democratic philosophy corners the market on what is in the best interest of the nation -- it is clear that both parties have had illustrious moments in the past -- but rather, this is one of those defining issues in American politics that determines whether this is to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, or a government where the citizens or nothing more than disposable resources for big business.
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In the past the Democratic Party has always been there to draw a line in the sand on this issue, but in recent history the liberal philosophy has been distorted to the point that even Democrats are distancing themselves from their own political philosophy.
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But what makes America great, are those dramatic moments in American politics when that one individual has the courage to put everything on the line to defend, protect, and save the American people from disaster. And the annals of modern American history will clearly show that during those moments, it was a "bleeding heart liberal" that stepped up to the plate. First FDR, then Bill Clinton, and now Barack Hussein Obama.
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Thus, future historians will record that there is nothing more honorable in American politics than a bleeding heart . . . because their hearts bleed for America.
Republican Greed and Fiscal Irresponsibility: A Brief Look at the Facts
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Am I the only one becoming nauseous over the Republican Party’s claim that they’re the party of fiscal responsibility? And what about their claim that they're the only ones qualified to save the American middle class, or that they’re the nation’s job creators, and that they have a plan to rebuild our economy? Well, since we don’t want to go back and forth with a lot of partisan bickering over this issue, let’s just take a brief look at the Republican resume. A cursory look at the facts will tell the true story.
. Due to the freewheeling fiscal policies of conservative Republicans, between 1986 and 1989, spanning the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., the FSLIC had to pay off all the depositors of 296 institutions with assets of over $125 billion.
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Then in 1988 Silverado Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $1.3 billion. It was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation indicated that Bush was guilty of "breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest." The issue was eventually settled out of court with Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement.
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Then there was the Lincoln Savings and loan scandal in 1987, involving John McCain. The scandal was very similar to the one that is currently playing out on Wall Street. He was one of a group of senators dubbed "The Keating Five" involved in a scandal by the same name.
.
In 1976 Charles Keating moved to Arizona to run the American Continental Corporation. In 1984, shortly after the Reagan era push to deregulate the savings and loan community, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loan and began to engage in highly risky investments with the depositors' savings. In 1989 the parent company, which Keating headed, went bankrupt, and it resulted in over 21,000 investors losing their life savings. Most of the investors were elderly, and the loss amounted to about 285 million dollars.
.
After having received over a million dollars from Keating in illegal campaign contributions, gifts, free trips, and other gratuities, the Keating Five--Senators John Glenn, Don Riegle, Dennis DeConini, Alan Cranston, and Sen. John McCain--attempted to intervene in the investigation into Keating's activities by the regulators. Later, they were admonished to varying degrees by the senate for attempting to influence regulators on Keating's behalf. Charles Keating ended up being convicted for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, for which he received 10 years by the state court, and a 12 year sentence in federal court. After spending four and a half years in prison, his convictions were overturned. But prior to being retried, he pled guilty to a number of felonies in return for a sentence of time served.
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So we mustn’t allow ourselves to be blinded by the GOP’s incendiary political rhetoric. Just take a moment to ask yourself, who was the last Republican president who DIDN’T drag America under a bus? If you answer that question truthfully, objectively, and honestly, it will become immediately clear that entrusting this government and economy to the Republican Party would be like entrusting our children to convicted child molesters.
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The Republican congress ran in the 2010 election on the claim that their number one priority was bringing economic relief, and creating jobs for the American people. As of June of 2012, here is a list of what they’ve done in that regard:
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WHERE ARE TAVIS SMILEY AND CORNEL WEST ON THIS ISSUE?
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.
Sphere: Related Content
Every time the American people look at Mitt Romney they should get angry, because he’s the walking, breathing, personification of the biggest scam ever perpetrated on America, "trickle down" economics. Romney is the very embodiment of trickle-down economics returning to rub our stupidity in our face, right down to his cynical pauses . . . and sideways half-smile that seems to say, "Now, let’s see if you’re dumb enough to swallow this load of crap, yet again." He’s such a cynical, insincere, and obvious con man that if he didn’t exist Saturday Night Live would have created him. He’s as stiff and emotion free as Max Headroom, and just as contrived: "Yes, my good friends, and what I love most about your fair city is the height of the trees." What!!!?
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Trickle Down, or Supply- Side Economics, which came to be known as "Reaganomics," 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. Sound familiar? According to the scheme, 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. Instead of taking the money 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 millions of jobs, and the country itself, 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 - fifteen years before the Great Depression.
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Even though this scheme has brought economic disaster to the American people several times in the past thirty years, the Republican party continues to repackage it and trot it back out every eight years or so. They tend to wait until after the Democrats have rescued the nation, and their previous disaster has retreated from the collective memory of the American electorate.
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Clear evidence of that is in spite of Ronald Reagan's grandiose 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 in history, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined.
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Reagan tripled the national debt. It went from $712 billion in 1980 to $2,052 billion in 1988. And what was the Republican Party’s plan to deal with that disaster? In it’s "contract with America" (Republicans are real good with slogans), Newt Gingrich’s Republican-run congress proposed a capitol gains tax cut, for the rich.
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It took Democrat, Bill Clinton, to rescue the nation. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, said the following regarding Bill Clinton’s presidency:
. "The Clinton years were unquestionably a time of progress, especially on the economy [...] Clinton's 1992 slogan, 'Putting people first,' and his stress on 'the economy, stupid,' pitched an optimistic if still gritty populism at a middle class that had suffered under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. [...] By the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged."
On September 27, 2000, CNN reported: . President Clinton announced Wednesday that the federal budget surplus for fiscal year 2000 amounted to at least $230 billion, making it the largest in U.S. history and topping last year's record surplus of $122.7 billion. ‘This represents the largest one-year debt reduction in the history of the United States."
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Then came George W. Bush, with his huge tax cuts for the rich, and reinstituting the Republican philosophy of trickle-down economics and reckless deregulation. That led to the 2008 economic crash, bringing the nation within a hair’s breath of a second Great Depression, and creating the conditions under which we are currently suffering.
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The primary reason that the American people continues to be stiffed by the Republican Party is because the average American fails to understand that we don’t have just one economy, we have two. We have one economy that governs the prosperity of the investor class, and yet another that governs the prosperity of working class. And both classes are in direct competition for their part of the same economic pie.
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Thus, the problem is, in order for the investor class to prosper, they must squeeze every penny and concession out of the working class. So when Wall Street is celebrating a robust economy, that means they are producing more product with fewer jobs, fewer work hours, and lower pay for the workers. That’s how they make their profit.
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You see, in the past when the United States had a strong internal industrial base, the investor class and the working class complimented one another. The corporate community provided the working class with, essentially, lifetime jobs with solid security and a living wage. As a result, the working class could afford to purchase the goods and services that the corporations produced. So the working class and investor class had a symbiotic relationship. One insured the prosperity of the other.
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But now, in the new global economy, where what used to be considered American corporations have become international conglomerates that have to compete with countries that are paying their workers less per week than most Americans spend on lunch per day, the American worker has become a liability. Thus, the corporate community has a vested interested in lowering the standard of living of the American middle class.
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In order for them to make ever greater profits, they feel that they must squeezing every concession that they can get out of America, and the American worker. That accounts for the aggressive assault on our educational system. They need more worker bees and fewer thinkers - or trouble makers. It also accounts for the assault on collective bargaining, and all manner of corporate regulations and employee rights. In short, they’re on a mission to convert America from a democratic republic, to a corporate sweatshop.
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Now enter Mitt Romney. If we elect Romney, we’ll not just be electing an Republican politician who is highly sympathetic to the investor class, we’ll be electing, indeed, the poster child of the investor class, and the old trickle-down economics crowd. In fact, the Chairman of the Board, as it were. It would be like entrusting our child to one of the most infamous child molesters in the country.
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The New York Post reported in the Josh Kosman article, "Romney’s Past is More a Working Class Zero," "Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts." But of course, the businesses generally couldn’t manage that, so workers were laid off and the businesses would go into bankruptcy.
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The article goes on to list some of the businesses that Mitt Romney squeezed the profits from, then sent into bankruptcy:
. "* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003."
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So say what you will about President Obama, but it seems to me that the credentials of Mitt Romney and his Republican cohorts’ as job creators makes the president look like Santa Claus. If you agree, go tell a hungry Republican. He might be Black, but that IS a pork chop in his hand.
If there’s anyone left in America who, at this point, can’t see that the Republican Party is the enemy of the American middle class, they have to be either feeble minded, or harboring a hidden interest which precludes them from wanting to see. All one has to do to get a clear view of this political reality is to open one's eyes and look at who the GOP is putting forward to assume the highest office in the land.
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One is Mitt Romney, a vulture capitalist who became a charter member of the top one percent club by purchasing perfectly sound companies, firing their employees, and then selling the companies off, one piece at a time, for profit. The other is Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives who was so self-serving and corrupt that in 1998 he was forced to resign from congress by his own Republican colleagues.
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These two gentlemen, and the self-serving activities of others of their ilk, are the two bookends that led directly to the 2008 collapse of the American economy, causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs, their homes, and their life savings. Mitt Romney represents the selfish capitalists who threw America under the bus for their own personal greed, and Newt Gingrich personifies the corrupt former politician who uses his influence in congress to lobby his former colleagues to water down the law, allowing the Romney’s of the world to ply their trade.
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Now, these two “gentlemen” are asking America to trust them to repair an economic environment that they both helped to create, and they both have a vested interest in maintaining. And how do they intend to repair the economy? Essentially, Romney says that we should allow those who are in foreclosure to lose their homes, then start anew with a fresh group of suckers. Specifically, he said in an filmed interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom." He then went on to say, "Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."
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Mr. Romney’s remarks make it abundantly clear that his only concern is with what’s in the best interest of the investor class. He has absolutely no concern for the devastation and turmoil that losing a home would visit upon the lives of a family that’s been turned out into the street - and we’re not just talking about an unfortunate few here. Mitt Romney is talking about casually writing off millions of Americans as collateral damage.
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Newt Gingrich is of an identical mindset. Gingrich promises “extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America.” And what are those proposals? During this time of record high unemployment, one proposal that Newt is floating is to fire the father from his union protected job and putting his children to work. He said, “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they’d have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.” Yes, Newt, but what would happen to their families?
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Again, this Republican frontrunner for president is completely oblivious to the dire straits of the average American family. His solution would make the situation worse. He’s not the least bit concerned with stabilizing the plight of poor and middle-class families. He’s only concerned with destroying organized labor by firing the father and replacing him with the cheaper, and un-unionized, labor of his children. And the irony is,this GOP fixation on returning poor and middle class American families to Great Depression status has become such a fundamental part of the GOP mindset that average Republicans, who would be devastated by such a policy, are applauding! They’ve been conditioned to hate this nation's first Black president so passionately that they’ve bought into self-sacrifice: “Obama is un-American - he’s engaged in a socialist plot to protect my family." It is truly unbelievable how easily the human mind can be controlled.
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What these average Republicans don’t understand is that they’re being manipulated. The corporate conservatives who run the Republican Party don’t care any more about them than they do black people, gays, undocumented workers, or anyone else. The corporatists are simply manipulating their anger, prejudices, and uninformed minds in order to keep the poor and middle class divided. That way, we’re so busy fighting one another that we fail to recognize that they’re cutting all of our throats.
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I suggest that Black people take a look at this as well. The corporatists are depending on angry and reactionary White people inflaming a knee-jerk reaction of anger and hostility among Blacks, which serves the very same purpose, keeping the poor and middle classes divided. That’s why they keep race on the front burner, using inflammatory buzz words and phrases like “the food stamp president,”etc. Corporatists desperately need to keep the race war raging. That way the poor and middle class of both races fail to recognize that we’re currently knee-deep in a class war, and our side is losing badly.
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Clear evidence of that can be seen in simply looking at the programs and institutions the GOP is attacking - Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, education, organized labor, etc. None of those programs or institutions are race specific. What they all have in common is that they are programs and institutions that serve to elevate the poor and middle class, of every race. The people of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan are finding that out the hard way. As we've said many times before, Gov. Rick Snyder (Rep.) has turned the state of Michigan into Michighanistan.
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So again, it’s time for America to wake up - and particularly poor and middle class Republicans. Because entrusting this nation and our economy to the GOP would be like entrusting our children to convicted child molesters:
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.
and red-hot embers as he watch
and you can hear the dark moans
slaughtered the weak, in the millions,
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