The Right Will Howl Tonight

Income inequality seems to have sprung up as a hot issue in the American elections.    With a consummate rent-seeker, Mitt Romney, carrying the Republican banner, America's crippling inequality - income, wealth and opportunity -  was bound to bubble to the surface.

Today's American Right (no, they're not conservatives) has reacted like junkyard dogs at the mention of inequality.  It sends them howling about "class warfare" and "unearned wealth."  We can expect to hear plenty of their growling tonight and for days to come.

Americans are taught to honour their flag, not to spit in church and to recoil in dread and panic at the utterance of the words "class warfare."  They're brought up to believe that class warfare = socialism = communism = totalitarianism and the destruction of private property.

But it's helpful to remember that it isn't Mitt's 47% or the entire 99% that are fueling class warfare.   In fact they've been on the receiving end of a powerful, divisive and destructive class war launched under Ronald Reagan that continues today.  Two years before Barack Obama was elected President, billionaire investor Warren Buffet got to the bottom of it:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

And that may just be what this election will be all about - whether Class Warriors like Romney manage to cement the work begun by Ronald Reagan.  That's not to say that Obama would make everything right again, he won't.   And, if he tried, America's "bought and paid for" Congress in both camps would thwart his efforts.

No, just as the neo-cons knew they needed a seismic event (9/ll) to springboard their perverted supremacist ideology, progressivism may need a similar scale, economic event to coalesce  blue and white collar workers in opposition to America's rentier class and the Congress that is in their service.  It's really just a matter of when.

What Is Really At Stake Today

The face of America, both at home and abroad, will be decided today and everyone is going to have to live with the outcome for at least the next two years.   The Republicans have made it clear they're not running to reinforce their position as official opposition but to get enough control in Congress to become the obstinate obstruction.  Today's editorial from The New York Times reveals that rational Americans are very worried:

There are critically important decisions to be made about whether the country moves ahead with confidence or moves backward and becomes even more polarized.

Voting in Republican primaries and special elections showed what happens when moderate Americans stay home or react to the barrages of fear and intolerance. We end up with fringe candidates like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada. Establishment candidates then spout the same disturbing ideas. (Witness Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader, trying to act like an outsider after 18 years in the Washington power elite.)

Democrats have been far too timid to argue the case, but they, and President Obama, have done many important things in the last two years. 

The Republicans have been rewriting history. They claim Mr. Obama’s economic policies are a failure and hope Americans will forget that it was President George W. Bush who turned big budget surpluses into huge deficits and whose contempt for regulation ultimately brought us to the brink of financial collapse. The Republicans want to go back to more tax cuts for the rich and more free passes for Wall Street and big corporations.

Tea Party candidates are particularly worrisome. Some want to privatize Social Security. Others want to eliminate Medicare. Betting on the Republican establishment to temper these excesses is a bad bet. 

...We urge all Americans to think carefully and then vote, especially young voters who voted for the first time in 2008. Sitting on their hands is voting for Republicans, none of whom will protect these voters’ interests. There are clear choices to be made.

The editorial speaks for itself and for just how much is at stake today as Americans head to the polls.   The United States does seem very much poised to move backward and become even more polarized, and we may all pay dearly for that.

Good for the Soul - Another Republican Falls to Hate-Based Blowback

The Republicans have been in power in too many places for far too long. It's made them say the most stupid, hateful things and they're starting to pay the price for it.

In keeping with the theme underlying the McCain-Palin campaign, North Carolina congressman Robin Hayes sought to warm up the crowd for a McCain campaign rally with this zinger:

"Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God."

Hayes later denied he'd said any such thing - until the tapes came out. When he shot himself in the foot, the incumbent Republican was five points ahead of his Democratic rival. Oopsie! Hayes Democratic opponent now leads 51-46.

America's Real Voter Fraud

Forget Acorn and a few workers who made up false voter registrations. The operative word is a "few." Here's a BBC News account by Greg Palast showing how Republicans are working overtime to steal the 2008 election



And this is supposed to be the "greatest democracy" on the planet? Maybe it should work on making itself just an ordinary democracy again.

Should We Be Sending Observers to the US Election?

This one stinks. It reeks. CBC News reports that a New York County sent out advance ballots listing the Democratic candidate as Barack Osama.

Election officials moved quickly to pull the ballots once the "mistake" was spotted by a local newspaper.

Just a typo they claim. Yeah, sure. Not Onama or Okama or Olama, no Osama as in "bin Laden." Typo my ass.

Rice Warns Iraq is No Sure Thing

Talk about tearing the guts out of John McCain's strongest campaign narrative. US State Secretary Condi Rice showed up at a Pentagon press conference today and warned: “Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is certain in this life. And success in Iraq is not a sure thing.”

Rice was echoing the warning of General David Petraeus that the decline in violence in Iraq is just one sign of progress that remains "fragile and reversible."

Curious how it's only the Old Geezer, Senator Erratic and his token veep who keep insisting that America is winning the war in Iraq. McCain's already thrown a gutter ball on the economy, it'd be terrible if he followed up with another on his pet issue.

Diseased Democracy?

What would an Obama landslide look like on November 4th? Anything better than a one vote victory.

The odds are really stacked against the guy. First of all there's the Cracker vote, the racists who wouldn't elect a black man dogcatcher much less president. Funny how racism is outlawed, just not at the ballot box.

Then there's the famous Republican vote-rigging machine, the backroom apparatus that played such an enormous role in saddling America with the disastrous administration of the past eight years.

John McCain back when he was principled and sane, fell victim to the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove tactics of push pollers who used what sounded like telephone polls to spread rumours that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black daughter. w. Bush of course said it was awful and washed his hands of it. He did nothing to stop it even though he could have and, if he'd had any respect for his country's democracy, would have.

Now it's John McCain's chance to stop the push pollers furiously spreading their telephone lies about Obama and, naturally, McSame 2008 says he has nothing to do with it. From The Guardian:

"Victims claim the fake pollsters work insinuations into their questions, designed to damage Obama. Those targeted in swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania include Jews, Christian evangelicals, Catholics and Latinos.
One of those to protest, Debbie Minden, who lives in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the pollster had begun by asking her the usual questions about her background and who she would vote for.

But the pollster went on to ask Minden, who is Jewish, how she would vote if she knew that Obama was supported by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and was responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. "It is scare tactics. It is terribly underhand," she said.

An Obama campaign organiser in one of the swing states said there had been lots of complaints about push polling in his patch. Callers said questions frequently included a reference to the widespread belief that Obama is a Muslim, even though he has repeatedly said he is a Christian.

The organiser said another question was: would you be less likely to vote for Obama if Israel had to give up all of Jerusalem? "They make this shit up. They are good at it. The unassuming listener will not realise it is untrue," he said."

Push polling is just one mechanism used to subvert democracy. For two years at least there have been efforts underway to prevent Democratic supporters from voting. Vote caging seems to be the tool of choice this year.

Now in a nation that claims to cherish its democracy more than anywhere else, that holds its democracy as the ideal for all other nations, efforts to subvert that democracy ought to spark outrage at the party level, with the candidates and with voters. The people who are doing this are known. You can't keep this secret. Yet those who know stay silent while the dirty work is done for them.

Ron Paul's Vile Track Record

Libertarians have heralded Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul as one of their own. Is he really? The Nation explored a number of newsletters published by Ron Paul or under his name and it's no wonder that he's doing everything he can to distance himself from them now:

..I was curious to see older editions of Paul's newsletters, in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles "Lefty" Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerpts stating that "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," that "if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be," and that black representative Barbara Jordan is "the archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism."

...with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

The article describes Ron Paul's association with the Ludwig von Mises Institute founded by Lew Rockwell who served as Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982:

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute--including Paul--may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, "There are too many libertarians in this country ... who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, ... find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought."

Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."

Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."

The entire article, entitled "Angry White Man" can be read here:

http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca