Friday, January 29, 2016

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


Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

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

For the past thirty-five years the Corporate-GOP Alliance has been engaged in a brutal assault on the American people. They've sent our jobs out of the country, while at the same time, the Republican congress has blocked any funding for the government to create jobs by repairing the nation's badly deteriorating infrastructure, which was a highly successful tactic used to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. These actions have subjected the American people to needless suffering while corporations are enjoying record profits.
.
At the same time, they abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," which forced broadcasters to give equal time to opposing views, and then they completely took over the mainstream media, which allowed them to lie with impunity. Thereafter, they began to subject the American people to an intense campaign of corporate brainwashing and disinformation over the cause of their suffering, and they mounted a vicious attack on our educational system. Teachers are being demonized, elementary, middle, and senior high schools are being defunded, and the cost of college has been placed beyond the reach of the Average American without going deeply in debt. Then, to ensure these policies remained in place, the Republican led Supreme Court ruling on "Citizens United" gave a foreign CEO based in Singapore more control over the American political system than an American citizen.
.
All of this wasn't done without reason, and that reason is clear. The corporate establishment in this country is trying to create a permanent underclass that will be completely dependent upon their every whim.  By the time they're done, the options of the average working-class American will be few - they can either work for slave wages, or they can go into the military and lay their lives on the line in an endless string of wars to pad the pockets of a growing number of war profiteers. So they are forcing the poor and middle class to pay for the wars, and then fight the wars - because the children of the rich are no longer even expected to die for this country; that's the job of the 'little people'. Thereafter, while the war profiteers are raking in all the profits from poor and middle-class death and misery, when the veterans come home wounded or completely disabled, they call them deadbeats and cut their benefits. Those are not the actions of American patriots.
.
"In Congress, Republicans in both chambers have launched sweeping attacks on long-held centrist priorities and have renewed threats to block Obamacare. These attacks are seen in House bills slashing spending in almost every federal program except for the military [they didn't cut the military budget because that money is funneled back into the pocket of war profiteers] and domestic policing for the federal fiscal year starting October 1. Anti-poverty, education, human services, environmental protection, energy, labor, Wall St. oversight-all face cuts averaging 20 percent, although some areas face cuts by a third or more.
.
"Rabid Republicans are also acting with renewed zeal to roll back voting rights in key Southern states. In
North Carolina and Texas, GOP-led legislatures are resurrecting a catalogue of Jim Crow-era barriers to minority voting, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning of the 1965 Voting Right Act's toughest enforcement provision. In North Carolina, the GOP wants to repeal 20 years of best practices that made North Carolina a model of fair and accessible elections. In Texas, the GOP wants to revise political districts to dilute minority representation and pass tougher voter ID laws."

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/18636-six-ways-rabid-republicans-are-declaring-war-on-america
.
Nevertheless, most Republicans tend to wrap themselves in the American flag and walk around with flag pins in their lapels, but their unconscionable assault on the American people is anything but patriotic. Their purposeful undermining and exploitation of the American people could only be perpetrated by a greedy, power-hungry, and self-serving domestic enemy of this nation. But due to the affects of corporate brainwashing, they have the American people divided and at one another's throat instead of seeing reality for what it is.
.
Americans aren't suffering because of their fellow citizens; they’re suffering because they’re being robbed blind by the Corporate-Republican Alliance. Undocumented workers aren’t taking their jobs; their jobs are being sent out of the country in order to make the American middle class more accepting of a lower standard of living. And labor unions are not what’s destroying jobs; jobs are being outsourced to destroy labor unions. Yet, corporate conservatives have a shrinking middle class railing against the poor, Blacks against undocumented workers, and Christians against any, and everyone, who doesn't look, think, and act like themselves. Thus, the most lethal weapons against American democracy - hatred, suffering, ignorance, and division - is being used against us, and the Corporate-Republican Alliance are using those weapons quite effectively in reverting a previously thriving American democracy into what is beginning to look ominously close to a third-world nation.
.
So it is essential that the American people open their eyes and take this threat to our democracy seriously, because this nation is sliding downhill, and very fast. Who would ever have thought that they would live to see a vice president of the United States outing an American CIA agent, or 47 American senators sending a treasonous letter to a foreign head of state in an attempt to undermine American diplomacy on behalf of a second foreign power. And who would have thought that we'd ever see in our lifetime a governor of a state knowingly exposing a city of 100,000 people to led poisoning, which will retard the intellectual growth of children and have a negative impact on their health for the rest of their lives? And considering the fact that the city is predominantly Black, and the minority of White people there are poor, it's Hitlerian in its ramifications. So Rick Snyder should not only be forced to resign, but he should be charged, at the very least, with criminal negligence, because every time we allow the Republicans to get away with something like this, they take it one step further. That's why the nation is sliding downhill so fast.
.
And again, the assaults being perpetrated against America listed above would have been unheard of in the United States just a short time ago, and it's all being done by greedy and self-serving Republican politicians who are completely disinterested in the interest of the American people. Their interest lie in America remaining miserable, angry, and divided, and they're doing everything in their power to keep us that way.
.
So these are not traditional American politicians that we're dealing with here. We're now in a class war, and these Republican politicians are the enemy's assault troops.  So regardless to your race, creed, or color, if you don't have a few million dollars stashed away somewhere, you're their enemy. These are the very "domestic enemies" of the United States that we were warned about in our founding documents.
.
And these people didn't just pop up out of nowhere. They've been around as "sleeper cells" since the very founding of this nation; they've just had to keep a low profile to carry out their agenda. Because many fiscal conservatives are not just racist, they're also class bigots. One of the founding fathers of conservative thought was Alexander Hamilton. He was an aristocrat who advocated that poor and middle-class Americans should be relegated to second-class citizenship, and the GOP has fully embraced his agenda. Hamilton said the following:
.
AND THESE ARE NOT JUST THE BENEFITS
OF MINORITIES OR
LIBERALS THEY'RE GOING AFTER
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government." Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787).
.
While Hamilton’s position was resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of the founding fathers - whose primary reason for coming to America in the first place was to get away from the European class system - there were many of Hamilton’s ilk who chose not to recognize the American ideal that "All men [and women] are created equal." Then they were later joined by Southern Dixiecrats, or social bigots, who also rejected the ideal of human equality.
.
But what social conservatives fail to realize is that the corporate conservative's rejection of human equality includes them. Corporate conservatives don't care any more about them than they do any minority.  They're just being used to keep America divided, but once the corporatists seize firm control over the government, and social bigots are no longer needed, they're going to be thrown onto a virtual plantation right along with everyone else. The attempt to hide that fact is what accounts for the corporate conservative's intense distaste for public education.
.
Corporate conservatives want to restore control over the American worker that they had during the Great Depression, and if you take a close look at the Republican platform it is clear that they're on a single-minded mission to do just that.  During the Great Depression there was no such thing as Social Security, so when a person became too old or weak to work, they had no income so they had to depend on their children for support. That meant instead of a husband and wife only having to support themselves and their children, which was tough enough during those times, they also had to support their parents as well. So there was often three generations of a family in one household – and in many cases, the parents of both the husband, and wife, lived with the family.
.
As a result, in some cases the entire family, including the children, had to work long, hard hours under sweatshop-like conditions in coal minds and the like, which in many cases led to the death and/or maiming of young children. So in a very real sense, Great Depression era workers lived under a form of slavery – the one difference was, they had to go out and find their own housing.
.
In addition, there was no such thing as Medicare or Medicaid, so when one of the grandparents became ill the medical costs would devastate the entire family. These conditions kept lower and middle-class families in such dire need of funds that they had to accept whatever crumbs the business community chose to throw at them – and remember, at that time there was no Fair Labor Standards Act or unions to protect a worker’s rights or a minimum wage, so businesses could treat the worker anyway they wanted, and pay them whatever they wanted.
They could work you 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no overtime, and no paid vacation. In addition, since there was no child labor laws, if your boss didn’t think you were being productive enough, he could insist that you bring your children in (as young as 9 years old) to assist you if you wanted to keep your job. Then if you protested, he could fire you on the spot, in which case, your entire family – sick grandparents and all – would be thrown out on the street, because there was no such thing as unemployment insurance.
.
Thus, corporate conservatives depend on a poorly educated public for their very survival, because even a rudimentary familiarity with history would reveal both their background, and agenda. They don't want you to know that the people who lived through the Great Depression and fought WWII, the people who we refer to as "The Greatest Generation," wouldn't let a Republican anywhere near the White House.
.
Our grandparents elected Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt into office an unprecedented four terms, from 1932 until he died in office in 1945. Thereafter, Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, had to push for the Twenty-Second Amendment creating presidential term limits for a Republican to even get a whiff of the White House, and even then, a Republican wasn’t elected until Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 – and he was only elected because he was the allied commander credited with winning WWII, and he was a Republican in name only.  He signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and sent troops into Little Rock Arkansas to integrate the schools.
.
In addition, as President Eisenhower’s very last act of office he warned the American people of the military/industrial complex, or people like Dick Cheney and the kind of Republicans we have in office today. He had no use for them. Ike would have summarily shot Dick Cheney had he been in office when Cheney allegedly outed CIA operative, Valarie Plame.
.
So the “Greatest Generation” understood what we’re only now finding out the hard way about the Republican Party due to the GOP’s systematic dismantling of our information and educational systems – their pronounced greed and lust for power has rendered them prone to being reckless, irresponsible, without limits, and a danger to our democracy. That's why they Hate Donald Trump, because he's making all of their shortcomings and hidden agenda glaringly clear to the public.
.
DONALD TRUMP IS A CAPITIALIST AND A BAD JOKE, BUT HE SERVES A USEFUL PURPOSE - HE REVEALS HOW CONSERVATIVES REALLY THINK.
.
Donald Trump is an ignorant, mean-spirited, xenophobic, and self-serving racist who's willing to tell any lie he can conjure up to promote his own interest. That makes him the quintessential Republican, and that's exactly why he's leading in the Republican polls. But the Trump phenomenon says it all. While the GOP establishment is distancing themselves from Trump, it's not because they disagree with what he's saying, it's because he's either too dumb, or too self-serving to realize that he's not suppose to be saying what conservatives truly believe out loud.  While the Republican establishment has been saying the exact same things as Trump for years, they’ve been saying it in political code, and with a wink.
.
So the Republican establishment is afraid that this Trump episode will openly reveal their unspoken assault on the American people for decades, and the facts are simple - while the Corporate-Republican Alliance are all wearing American flag pins in their lapels and constantly paying lip-service to wanting to bring prosperity to the average American, an unequivocal historic record clearly demonstrates that this has never been the case, and not only that, it has never even been a part of the GOP's agenda.
.
So in the 2016 election the American people are going to be given a choice to come clean. Do they really want the kind of America that they're always bragging about and profess to believe in, or do they actually want a fascist nation that subjugates the working class, demonizes minorities, and supports a Gestapo-like police forces that kill innocent Black children on the street with impunity? For those rabid conservatives who feel like they could live with the latter, they should think long and hard, because as their current living conditions suggest, this time it's not about simply establishing an Aryan nation, it's about establishing a corporate feudalist oligarchy where poor and working-class White people and their families are just as meaningless as any minority. Think about it - did they only send Black jobs out of the country? I don't think so. Are they now, even as I write, trying to take away the Social Security and Veterans benefits of only minorities?  No they aren't. And did Gov. Rick Snyder only expose Black people to lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan? Not really. So the facts are clear.  If you’re a poor or middle-class White person who don't have millions of dollars stashed away in a foreign account somewhere, they intend to make you the new 'coon,' just like they did during the Great Depression.

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

A BLACK WOMAN 'STRUGGLING' THROUGH
THE GREAT DEPRESSION 
.
Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
.
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