Our major corporations belong to a Right Wing organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council, more commonly known as ALEC. Their job is to advance their goals at the expense of your goals.

There are hundreds of pieces of legislation being introduced as public interest legislation. But it is actually written by ALEC, paid for by ALEC member corporations. It is handed over to paid state legislators all over the country to introduce into their state legislatures.

This isn’t stuff that is good for you. It is legislation that is good for corporations. It is a huge operation with people in all 50 states. Here are some of the bills that they have introduced or are introducing. Democrats are fighting a huge battle just to keep American citizens from losing the battle against pollution, clean air and water, civil rights, voting rights, pensions…even the right to join a union to bargain for better wages.

For example, the “Paycheck Protection Act” eviscerates unions by making union executives criminally liable for engaging in political acts. It makes it illegal not only for unions to collect money for political purposes through payroll deduction, it is illegal even for the union member to do it voluntarily. This is clearly a union-busting bill and it has been introduced all over the country. There are dozens of similarly titled bills just for legislators to use to break unions in order to reduce workers wages.

Unions are particular targets of ALEC because they represent political power that can balance the economic power of billionaires and multi-billion-dollar international corporations. These corporations want two things. First, they want to reduce regulations that make them clean up messes rather than leaving it for the tax payers to clean up, sometimes at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Second, they want to reduce wages. Labor is the chief cost in business. Reducing wages to the lowest common denominator means that corporations make more profit for their large stockholders.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has made it impossible for public unions to collect dues by simply disallowing the unions from collecting dues altogether. Instead, state employees would have to deposit checks in their own banks, then have banks send union dues to unions, or they would have to write a monthly check and mail it to the unions. What possible reason could there be for doing such a thing to inconvenience the workers? All other deductions from pay were permitted. The goal is to break up unions.

There are over 50 different pieces of anti-labor, anti-worker legislation from ALEC. That fact alone leaves no doubt that there is a concerted effort to use turncoat lobbyist-legislators to hurt the very people who send them to the state legislature. This is not a Red versus Blue state issue. This is in all 50 states and it is the rich versus the poor and middle-class.

Further evidence of that is tort legislation. Hundreds of bills have been submitted to state legislatures limiting damages and making the recovery of costs from corporate-caused accidents and product liability more difficult to obtain. One bill limits class actions only to citizens of the state where the action is brought.

The same bill limits class action lawsuits only to people who are not seeking monetary awards for damages. Another hold damages to $250,000 no matter how bad the damage. Another limits how much attorneys can charge, to make it less attractive for consumers to be able to get an attorney.

The Product Liability Act makes it much more difficult for consumers to bring a tort action for damages against a company. Imagine, if you will, a state legislator voted in to protect his community and yet has sold out to big corporations who want the freedom to damage those same citizens with impunity.

Privatizing schools is a big deal for ALEC. In fact, education in all its aspects is a target of ALEC legislation. They have clients who are private school systems. They don’t really care, except in order to get contracts, to make profits for shareholders—whether they are educating children.

They push legistlation like the Parent Trigger Act which basically says that if parents in a school district can be lobbied to do so successfully, they will have the right to close their school and hire a firm to create a private charter school for their kids. Or they can opt for school vouchers for about 75% of the cost of the tuition of the private school. This is a way to shut down school systems and hire teachers for less money. It is always about cutting salaries an benefits for workers.

Governor Walker has been a strong proponent of weakening school systems. He has cut over 2,500 teachers in Wisconsin. In Kenosha county alone 358 teachers were notified that, among that group, over 200 would be laid off. And new teachers are being hired for as little as $25,000 with no benefits. This in what had been one of the best school systems in the nation. In one year, Walker has brought it to its knees. But he succeeded in his task, paid for by Koch Industries and others on the ALEC board…he broke the union.

The Higher Education Sunshine Act requires that state universities (though not private religious universities, like, say, Liberty University or Bob Jones University) must have “intellectual diversity.” What does that mean? That the state legislature can essentially harass university professors if they seem to “Liberal” and that they can introduce “diversity” into the curriculum, such as, for example, Creationism.

The big oil companies and mining companies are leading the way among ALEC supporters. Some of the legislation tries to make states repeal their commitments to clean energy. They are proceeding with legislation to remove regulations on clean water standards after natural gas fracking.

ALEC is working hard for the dirty energy suppliers as well. The Energy Independence and Security Act would allow “dirty fuels” like those being developed from the Bakken Shale—dozens of times more polluting even than regular gasoline–to be used in government vehicles.

ALEC encourages more spending in election campaigns and less transparency. The Resolution in Support of the Citizens United Decision is a blockbuster in support of Citizens United. Sponsored by the National Rifle Association, it opposes any disclosure of who is spending the money to influence people about candidates.

It opposes any attempts by shareholders to know how a CEO or influence how a CEO of a corporation is spending money on political donations. The Resolution says that disclosing top funders or which foreign countries are contributing is an “enormous burden” and should be done away with. And voter fraud is their new bogus problem.

The Voter ID Act says that, in order to vote a person must have a valid, not expired, driver’s license or a state-issued ID. It is no longer good enough to have a piece of mail with your name on it or a piece of mail plus several credit cards or other IDs. Once again, the Neo-Fascist government of Scott Walker has gone further, requiring that, even if the ID is valid, there must be proof that this is the person’s current address.

These anti-vote programs are meant to drive away the elderly and student voters. Voter fraud is less than a fraction of even one-half of one percent of the votes cast. But ALEC has at least 23 different pieces of voter-fraud legislation that they are using to try to disenfranchise more liberal voters like students and those on Medicare and Social Security.

The goal is to elect politicians who will cut services to the needy. The result of that will be less government, which means lower taxes on the rich and fewer regulations on corporations. And that is what ALEC is all about.

Taxes are an important thing to some people and corporations who pay lots of taxes. Many of those people pay lots of taxes because they have devoted themselves to making lots of money. Some who make lots of money…amounts so large that many Americans cannot even imagine…make huge fortunes because of pure, simple greed. So it is no surprise that they focus on avoiding taxes.

The Super Majority Act is something that ALEC has been working on in many states…already in effect in the Neo-Fascist state of Wisconsin under Governor Walker…which says that in order to pass anything to do with raising taxes or fees there needs to be a Super-Majority which is normally two-thirds of the legislative body in question.

The Taxpayer Privatization Act would establish a commission in the state involved for the purpose of investigating departments that can be privatized and then privatizing any that can be converted. This is quite possibly the most blatant attempt by Republicans to turn government over to friends in private business. Contrary to what they claim, many if not most of these private firms cost more, not less, than the comparable government department.

Numerous bills have been introduced by a special organization designed merely to write such legislation, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, another Koch-Family-funded lobbying group, to reduce taxes on global corporations. These bills would require the state to prove that a physical presence of that corporation exists in the state before taxes could be collected. So, if the corporation has headquarters somewhere else, or only has an affiliate in that state, they could get away tax free, even if doing billions there.

Kraft foods which sells you items that go into your children’s bodies sponsored a bill to reduce or eliminate taxes on smokeless tobacco.

There are at least 93 bills that have to do with lowering taxes on corporations or on wealthy individuals. There are some that are obvious, like the Capital Gains Elimination Act, and the Taxpayer Right to Appeal Act and the removal of taxes on telecommunications. All these kinds of bills are being pushed by ALEC through their bought-and-paid-for state legislative agents.

In each category that ALEC has delineated there is a company or companies that is trying to get its legislation enacted. Some companies want to pay no taxes, so they will ride in on legislation by tobacco companies that are trying to regain a foothold in the teen market, to kill more Americans.

They are destroying America…all the progressive legislation to keep Americans safe from cancer-causing pollution and the kinds of high energy prices that bankrupted hospitals and schools and individual elderly homeowners—some died—in California in the Bush ENRON era are returning.

One of the organizations most involved with ALEC is the National Rifle Association, now clearly one of the leading neo-Fascist organizations in the country, a blight on society of the worst kind. They have combined with the private prison industry to promote crime and punishment, including incarceration for illegal immigrants as a business. They sell guns to anyone who will buy them. Then they push for crime legislation to catch the criminals into whose hands the guns frequently fall.

A part of that is legislation for longer prison terms and prohibition of bail. The idea is to keep people in prisons as soon as possible and for as long as possible. And now, prision labor is being used to make products for companies like Microsoft. So it can truly be called prison-labor which is basically what the Nazis did in World War II.

To show how far the National Rifle Association will go, despite the many multiple killings by people with guns on campuses, instead of creating legislation to restrict guns, the Campus Personal Protection Act does the opposite. It would prohibit local campus police from keeping students or anyone else who might be wandering around campus from carrying a concealed weapon.

Then there is the Shock Incarceration Act. This is made to look like a boot camp for delinquents. But in reality it is another opportunity for private prison corporations, allied with the National Rifle Association, who sponsored it, to take first time, non-violent offenders and imprison them for 120 days at minimum.

As you can see ALEC has its tentacles into state legislatures with literally hundreds of pieces of legislation. We could only touch on a small fraction of them.

But the message is clear. ALEC has an agenda to limit workers rights, end consumer protection on such things as high credit card interest rates, undermine and decertify unions, create more “right to work” states, enhance free-trade programs that send jobs overseas and privatize many government services for the profit of their supporters.

Corporations see ALEC as an opportunity to repeal consumer rights legislation, to reduce or eliminate torts decisions for product liability and limit the rights of citizens injured or killed by corporations. Not only corporations but negligent doctors and health insurers as well as pharmaceutical companies have used ALEC to try to protect themselves from penalties for injury or death caused by their activities.

In addition to privatization legislation for elementary and high school classes, some educational legislation demands that anti-science and pro-religion classes be integrated at the university level, taking education back 50 or 60 years.

Their chief target is unions. Unions demand living wages, benefits and decent treatment for workers. In addition, unions come out in large numbers to vote and to work in elections to see that populist representatives are elected.

New energy developments like natural gas fracking and mountain top removal mining have created enormous problems for some communities, polluting streams and drinking water. ALEC legislation is designed to free them from the responsibility of cleaning up the large areas of devastation often caused by these methods.

AlEC’s basic goal is to undermine state protections to go around federal laws, create conflict that leads to delay to save them hundreds of millions of dollars that citizens them must pay. They create legislation to take away authority from local governments to manage and protect their own resources. They attack regulations on climate change, on nuclear power safety and hazardous materials handling. ALEC has launched a deliberate and deadly attack on the environment.

We’ve talked about Voter ID acts and other attempts to restrict the rights of citizens to vote. In any Fascist organization there are two basic principles. Get power by any means possible, even if it means trampling or abandoning the people’s right to vote. And while waiting for power use that smaller voting bloc to increase your percentage of the vote. Meanwhile, obstruct any legislation that you don’t like.

ALEC has gone one step farther. They have found a way, using the money of rich Right Wing, Neo-Fascist corporations to spend tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to buy up the loyalties of many turncoat Republican legislators, traitors to their own constituents and to the American People.

Of course, in the end it is all about money and greed. One of the key aspects of ALEC legislation are the tax laws. They have basically hired disloyal Republican state legislators to ruin state finances by entering bills to prevent tax increases on the wealthy or on corporations. Many varied and different approaches mean that if they do not succeed at first, they can try, try again. And they do.

ALEC is doing more harm than simply creating legislation. The National Rifle Association, one of the leaders in ALEC legislation, has a sinister purpose that every city police department recognizes, whether they choose to admit it or not. The goal of this cynical organization is to sell as many guns, handguns and automatic weapons as they possibly can, the American people be damned.

We have more murders in just one of our large cities…Chicago, Houston, Detroit…than in all the countries of Europe in a year. They control guns. We do not, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. Now they literally want to bring guns into college classrooms, churches and public assemblies.

They want people to use guns and then be put in private prisons, staffed by their affiliated private prison corporations. Much of the legislation is about privatizing prisons. What a great idea! Let’s make encouraging crime and the solving of crime, just like the use of guns, a private business with motivations to expand criminal activity and then its punishments…for a profit. Let’s have more crime and more law enforcement and harsher punishments so that we can have millionaires and billionaires make a profit on prisons. And what do prisons need? Guards with guns.

Who is behind ALEC? It is going to shock you. The list of corporations and other organizations trying to take over your country, your state and your community is without question the largest attempted secret takeover of a country’s legislative bodies since the 1930s, when the Nazis, the Fascists in Italy and Spain, and the Communists in Russia surreptitiously acted to take government from the hands of the People.

The following group is merely the Board of Directors, or the “Corporate Board” as they call it.

CenterPoint 360 is a lobbying group that seems to have started with the tobacco companies. Atria is the former Phillip Morris company, tobacco and foods. The American Bail Coalition…self explanatory. AT&T telecommunications. Bayer is not only aspirin but other pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

Coca Cola is not only a soft drink company but a snack company based in Georgia, one of the Red States that has long been rumored to have allowed itself to be used as a front in Latin America for covert operations by the CIA. Diegeo is the largest international liquor company in the world. Its brands include Crown Royal, Johnnie Walker, J&B, Windsor Premier, Buchanan’s, Bushmills, Smirnoff, Ketel One, Ciroc, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Jose Quervo, Tanqueray and Guinness. Sales in 2011: $14 billion.

Energy Future Holdings is a Texas electicity generator with sales of $8 billion, owned by New York investment bankers,(speculators in energy) including Goldman, Sachs. Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods and Intuit Corporation (Quicken Software.)

Also on the Corporate Board are Peabody Energy (coal), Pfizer, PhRMA (lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies), Reed Elsevier (publishing), Reynolds American (tobacco), Salt River Project (electric power utility, Arizona), State Farm Insurance, UPS, and Wal-Mart.

That’s just the board as of mid-2011. It may change from time to time. We don’t know. It doesn’t matter. As of less than a year ago they were out to get you. One can only assume that, no matter whether they are members or not, this indicates that they find you vulnerable and will take advantage of you with every dollar of profit they earn.

There are hundreds of corporations who are members of ALEC, all trying to get a piece of your state government. And what does that mean? No matter what they tell you, it means only one thing. They want to pay less or earn more of something that involves your state government.

This is a long piece and a lot to absorb. You should know not only which companies are members of ALEC but also the names of the specific state representatives who have turned against the people and for the corporations. Do not misunderstand. These are evil people, doing the bidding of corporations who are out to hurt you and help themselves.

For more information, go to the web site: ALEC EXPOSED. This will give you a list of all the corporations and all the state representatives and what is behind it all.

If you do not follow up on this or if you do not act against ALEC by showing your local representative that this kind of behavior will lose your vote, then you, and you alone, are responsible for everything…potential loss of state government assets, public education, higher prices and perhaps even much, much higher taxes and costs for water, sewer, electricity and many other government services.

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So you hear it all the time. You’re a Nazi. I’m a Nazi. Everyone is a Nazi. No one is a Nazi.

So, which is it? What are the facts? Well, strictly by definition, the right answer is no one. Nazis were Fascists in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. So when we talk about Nazis, that’s it. No politician of the twenty first century is a Nazi. Nazis had a philosophy that literally caused the deaths of 50 million people around the world in a matter of only six years.

So why do people call other people Nazis? They want to accuse others of being the worst type of human being possible. There are some pretty rotten people around these days, and some of them are politicians. They are not Nazis. But one could say that some could be called Neo-Fascists.

The Fascist political philosophy began in Western Europe in the period after the First World War and before the Second World War. So all Nazis were technically Fascists, but not all Fascists were Nazis. But Fascism, as delivered by Germans and Italians, was was the cause of the Second World War.

Fascism is a political philosophy that has an exaggerated value of one’s own country–ultra nationalism. Today, we have a term that the Right uses inaccurately to describe this country. It is “American Exceptionalism.” It has some meaning, but very little in the way that it is used by Republican politicians.

After all many countries are exceptional, each in its own way. The Chinese people are exceptional. Their economy is growing at eight per cent per year. Ours is growing at less than two percent. The Chinese people are making their economy advance at wage rates for which Americans would simply lay down their tools.

Is American Exceptionalism our military prowess? So, if it is, then the Roman Empire was also exceptional…and for that matter…remember the Nazis? They were horrid but exceptional enough militarily that it took France, Great Britain, Australia, the Soviet Union, Canada and most of the free world, including the Unites States to defeat…basically…Germany.

Do we want our “exceptionalism” to be domineering and occupying military forces like the Roman Empire or like the Ottoman Empire? Or do we want to be more like Western Europe and Scandinavia today…peaceful and helpful? Most Americans would definitely opt for the latter.

When a country becomes obsessed with exceptionalism it means that they have an exaggerated idea of their importance to the rest of the world, and that means hyper-nationalism. That particular political philosophy, when aligned with heavy industry and the military itself…leads to Imperialism.

Imperialism is when one country sees itself as dominant in the world or an area of the world. It does not mean that the country is always tyrannical. But believing that its opinions, its values and its systems are self-evidently those that everyone else should follow always leads to circumstances where other people’s interests are moved aside for those of the imperialists. That is wrong and that is why imperialism is wrong.

Of course, when Americans talk about American Exceptionalism they mean our imaginative approach to Capitalism and free enterprise and our highly open and mobile society. They mean our inventions and our mass merchandising and our development of life-changing products.

But mostly, America has meant a lifestyle for a Middle Class that is the envy of the rest of the world. People come here to live from other places because, in America, one can find an opportunity for work, and an income and a home and family. We have good roads and clean water and good schools for children. All that is our exceptionalism. But some people, some very selfish, very wealthy people, want to change all that.

Lets return to the Nazis for a minute. Wasn’t the word Nazi made up of “National” and “Socialism?” Weren’t they Socialists? Actually, the Nazis left off the Socialist path as early as the late 1920’s and Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1932. By then they were aligned with the heavy industrial leaders and the financiers of Germany. Even to them, the Nazi leadership appealed to patriotism and German “exceptionalism.”

The Nazis were the most popular party but not the majority party. The Nazis came to power in a compromise in which General Von Hindenburg, the leader among the political parties was finally persuaded against his will to approve a compromise in which Hitler was made Chancellor. That was in November 1932. Now see how fast things can happen in a supposedly free and cultured society…if they let that one little piece of bigotry elect the wrong person.

Hitler promised elections again in March of 1933. One week before the election the Capitol building (the Reichstag) burned down and Hitler blamed the Communist Party. (We now know that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag and blamed the Communists He asked for special powers from President Hindenburg and got them.

He held the March 1933 elections and finally gained a majority in the German parliament. But there were still more than 12 million people who voted against him, even though those parties had been disbanded and were illegal. Hitler immediately tried to enact the Enabling Law which said that within 24 hours after any legislation signed by the Chancellor, it was law. With no Communists or Socialists allowed in the building, the legislation making Hitler dictator was passed immediately.

Within a month, all federal, provincial and local government leadership positions were transferred to members of the Nazi Party. Within two months, trade unions were abolished. Their union funds were confiscated and union leaders were imprisoned. Within four months, all other political parties were made illegal, leaving the Nazis as the one and only political party in Germany.

And, almost simultaneous with the Enabling Law, Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany was established in March of 1933.

A man named Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank or national bank, introduced Hitler to a number of industrialists who helped finance his rise to power and simultaneously helped him build up a military force, even though to do so was against international restrictions placed on Germany after the First World War.

The Nazis were a paramilitary organization from the outset, basically a gang who took on the Communists in street battles in a country in deep financial trouble after a gigantic inflationary bubble had burst with the world wide Depression. Men like Schacht helped them ally with very powerful forces that would finance an organization that the industrialists saw would do their bidding…for a price. The price, unfortunately for them, became too high…war, destruction and total devastation of their enterprises.

But the Nazis were basically nationalists, you say. And, yes, you might say, they were prejudiced against the Jews, but that was not new. Anti-Semitism was a traditional problem going back centuries in Europe and the Slavic countries and Russia, with pogroms occurring before the Middle Ages.

The fact is that the Nazis did not merely persecute the Jews. So if you think that zealous ideologues will spare their own…think again. Do not think that you would be safe if you were a Nazi. If Nazis were here today, no one would be safe. In an irrational world, not even the irrational are safe.

For example, in April of 1945, as the war was coming to a close, approximately 140 people were removed from Dachau concentration camp. Internment in Dachau could be a death sentence. Not everyone at Dachau was gassed and cremated. But there would be thousands of people in a barracks building originally built to house 250. Many people died of typhus, others were shot. Many of these people were non-Jews. They were simply victims of the insanity that happens when an ideology takes over the minds of men.

This group of 140 people were gathered together, put in trucks and moved from Dachau to another location in southern Tyrol on orders of the SS and transported by SS guards. Some members of the Army, hearing this, and knowing that the SS was often the vehicle for people that the Nazi leaders wanted eliminated, decided to intervene. When the prisoners arrived at the new location in Tyrol, far southern Germany, they surrounded the building. The surprised SS troops, not knowing what to do but knowing that the war was about to end, departed.

Once it was discovered who these people were, it became obvious that no matter what your rank or your allegiances or your status among politicians, or scholars or royalty…once the world goes crazy and follows a fanatical dictator…anyone is vulnerable.

Who were these people? They were distinguished men and their wives. There were families that had done nothing except perhaps disagree with Adolph Hitler.

Among the members who had been interned in Dachau, preparing for death, was one Leon Blum. Leon Blum before the war had been a famous French politician who later became Prime Minister of France—under the Nazis—the head of the Vichy government. And his wife.

Another was Kurt Schuschnigg the Chancellor of Austria who similarly fell out of favor and Richard Schmitz, the mayor of Vienna. Still another was Alexandros Papagos, Commander in Chief of the Greek Army. And Miklos Kallay, Prime Minister of Hungary.

Among the Germans were Franz Halder, former Chief of Staff of the entire German Army, and his wife. There was Wilhelm Von Flugge, the Director of I.G. Farben, the huge chemical company which at that time was the fourth largest corporation in the world. It was as if you took the Chairman of Dow Chemical off the street and put him in a concentration camp, marked for death.

There was Prince Philipp of Hesse, (Germany) in case you think being royalty would keep you out of the concentration camps. He was the grandson of the great Prussian King Frederich III, and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and related to virtually every royal house of Europe.

Then there was Fritz Thyssen, owner of Thyssen industries, coal and steel and one of the oldest and largest corporations in Germany, and himself an early Nazi. This shows what happens when you are a true believer when things are good, but try to get out when things go bad and people start to die. Thyssen, one of the richest men in Europe, knew he was a marked man when he disagreed with Hitler. He and his wife tried to escape. He was finally tracked down in Southern France, trying to board a ship for South America. They were sent first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau.

Of course Nazis, true believers in a political cause, do not spare the even more innocent. For the fact of being the brother of Claus Von Stauffenberg, who tried but failed to assassinate Hitler, Alexander Von Stauffenberg as well as every other relative of Claus Von Stauffenberg, including his father, and Alexander’s sons, daughters and sons and daughters-in-law were all sent to Dachau.

Finally, even those were imprisoned who would protest that life is precious and no one is so omnipotent that he or she can call for the death of another simply for disagreeing on politics. Martin Niemoller, originally trained from youth as soldier, who spent years as a German Naval officer, and was an early Nazi, later became a pastor and theologian. Outraged by the Nazi treatment of the Jews, he spoke out against Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and was eventually imprisoned in Dachau. He is famous for this very moving and prophetic poem, that is a warning for the world about those who would take power and rule absolutely.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

So it wasn’t just the Jews who were put in concentration camps. And it wasn’t just certain enemy soldiers who were sent to concentration camps instead of POW camps, although there were many enemy soldiers who were sent to concentration camps, like the legendary British Commando, Jack Churchill. There were the relatives of anti-Nazis and Generals and businessmen who failed to meet the demands for loyalty or performance required by Nazis. Anyone was game on any given day. And often Nazis didn’t bother with concentration camps. Sometimes they just killed people outright. Sometimes for little or no reason at all.

But the Nazis had not always been killers. Before they gained power, probably the majority were merely thugs, street gang members, some truly believed that they were fighting against Communists, against what they saw as limitation on their freedom. And do some extent, they were obviously right. One need only look at what happened to Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia before the war and all of Eastern Europe after the war.

Some Nazi members were like our average citizens. They did not pay much attention to politics. Hitler would create jobs. Yes, he railed against the Jews but the Jews had been largely the cause of the problem hadn’t they? So the Nazi propaganda told them incessantly. Average Germans did not know that the Jews were not the problem at all.

The stories about the Jews were just a distraction, an appeal to the people Hitler needed, the hard core racists who could be converted to true believers. Fear of secret Jewish rites, fear of secret disloyalty…both despite the facts to the contrary…fed the need for constant anxiety the Fascist system required.

And we come back to 21st Century America. Do we have Nazis? Well, we have a minuscule, derivative, copycat American Nazi Party. But they are insignificant, a bunch of boy scouts with a bad attitude. And we have the isolated, woodsmen-like Aryan groups who hate African-Americans merely because of the color of their skin and Hispanics because they can and Jews because they can easily grab on to the old anti-Semitic myths. There aren’t many of them, although enough to be watched carefully, and they are so consumed with hatred that they are easy to spot and relatively easy to control.

No, the New Fascists, or Neo-Fascists are not these relatively insignificant groups. The the true followers of the old Fascist principles are, like the original Nazis—very political. Hitler was not outside the process. He ran for election and won. And while the Nazi principles were strongly anti-Semitic, that was not unusual in Europe at that time. There were a number of laws restricting the occupations and social conduct of Jews from the late 1800s. It was accepted by many people in those days in many countries. We in the United States had restricted country clubs and private city clubs.

The Nazis were also all about jobs. Even though it was the Weimar Republic that started the autobahn, Hitler followed through and came up with other infrastructure projects to keep Germans working. But when he took power completely in 1932, things began to change in a sinister way.

So, today, we don’t call Right Wing, somewhat militant, and ideological organizations Nazis. That is an antique word, defining horrific policies. Nazis attacked other countries without reason, killed 6 million Jews and caused the deaths of 50 million people, and that is the accurate number. Fifty million people died as a result of the Second World War. You cannot ignore that legacy. You cannot call someone a “Nazi” because no one in political life today has done or is doing anything remotely close to that.

On the other hand, we do have an organization that has some very disturbing characteristics. What are they? Well, first of all they are very close to the military. They own munitions and military equipment manufacturing, some of the last manufacturing being done in the U.S. They have some prejudices, such as anti-Black and anti-Hispanic biases.

They are aligned with major corporations to the point that they hire state legislators to create and get the votes for their corporations rather than the people who elected them. They have initiated legislation against pollution, against education, against laws that control gun crimes and in favor of reducing public workers’ incomes or eliminating their jobs altogether and disbanding their unions.

They will tell you that it is merely an economic necessity in hard times. That is what all Fascist governments say. That is why they arise when times are bad, because it is only then that they can use that excuse. In normal times, when good leaders are following prudent practices and there is less unemployment and civic disruption, no one would give them a second thought. They cannot raise robotic followers in good times, only when a large segment of the people have been laid off from work, have no jobs and see no future do they become desperate enough to look for any solution.

It is clear now that the Right Wing has completely taken over the Republican Party and it has become a Neo-Fascist organization. It has become totally aligned with certain major industries and their secret lobbying groups (like ALEC.) It has as its credo that everyone should believe certain central Christian-political beliefs and they should be turned into law. Those are, of course, that contraception is wrong, abortion in any circumstance is wrong, that science is wrong whenever it conflicts with religion.

Neo-Fascists have their own religion and if you are not a true believer…as was the case with the Nazis and is the case with every other Fascist organization….you are an outsider. Being an outsider means that they will not protect you if you should do something that they do not believe in or…even worse…if you should condone it.

Right now that simply means expulsion from their organizations. But what do you think it means long term? Think about it. If you want to have an abortion…it will be illegal. If you want to have contraception…it will be illegal to sell contraceptive devices. So, if you do have an abortion or you do sell contraceptives….you will go to jail. Those are the laws that are being promulgated right now. Therefore, you need more police to enforce these laws and more prisons in which to incarcerate those who commit the crimes.

Neo-Fascism as a political philosophy compels members and everyone else to follow their doctrines…their interpretations of religious and moral codes. The United States was founded on the opposite principles. Each person…so long as he or she does not hurt others…is free to practice his or her religion and there shall be no state religion that tells us how to live. That is written clearly in the Constitution of the United States.

This Neo-Fascist Party of which we speak is obviously the Republican Party. This Party that so energetically tries to be imitative of the old Fascist Parties of Europe controls a large part of the country. And isn’t it interesting that it is the old, slave and segregationist South. It is of course designated as the Republican Party but we all know that it is not the old Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or perhaps even the major part of what Ronald Reagan stood for.

The new Neo-Fascist Party has worked with state legislatures to restrict voting rights for young people, the poor and the elderly. That is not the old Republican Party. Young people voted for Barack Obama in overwhelming numbers in 2008. Instead of trying to appeal to them for their votes, the Repbublicans have passed laws creating roadblocks to their votes. Wherever there are Republican state legislatures, the Right Wing organization, ALEC, has moved in to require special photo ID cards and special new residency requirements for college students, blocking them from the vote.

The Republicans in these same states are making it harder for the poor and elderly to vote by demanding that they have a state-issued photo ID, that often costs a substantial sum to a poor person. (That is against the law. It is a virtual poll tax. But will the Supreme Court, now made up of a majority of Neo-Fascist corporate lawyers—including one whose father was the head of the U.S. Fascist Party at one time…astonishing…not likely. These are typical Fascist tricks to suppress the vote.

Of course it should be pointed out that there is something like .000007% voter fraud. So it is much more likely that you will be hit by a car than that you will be in a location that experiences—any—voter fraud.

Remember the connection. Fascists, and now Neo-Fascists, are people who believe that strong authoritarian government aligned with big corporations, aligned with the military and the police, aligned with a certain set of ideological values—which today means Christian Fundamentalism–should tell the people how to vote and indeed how to live their lives.

But today we have a bigger problem with the Neo-Fascists. Those commonly referred to as the “Top 1%” have created a huge problem. Some billionaires, like the avowedly Neo-Fascist Koch Family, with major support from Wall Street and CEOs of major corporations have literally purchased the Republican Party.

That is why they will not add a 7 or 8% increase in taxes, even though they have literally made millions and billions over the last ten years, from the policies of the Bush regime, which they now want to resurrect. In the twenty-five states that they have won with huge expenditures and enormous lies about their intentions, they are now cutting state jobs, cutting back on education, and cutting government services in order to give tax and regulatory breaks to their friends in industry.

It is time to learn more about the real Republican Party and their plans…clear plans now…to continue to increase income disparity among citizens, to eliminate government programs for veterans, the disabled, the poor and the elderly. This is an organization that has become so dedicated to a ruthless, insensitive policy in the name of austerity, which, in reality (as you can see from the fact of the Grover Norquist pledge they have all made—never to increase taxes–) is really about continuing the fabulously wealthy lifestyles of the rich and making wage slaves of everyone else.

Read, learn, act…and most of all vote these scoundrels out of office.

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And it is not the same political party that nominated a Richard Nixon or Barry Goldwater or Bob Dole…or even Ronald Reagan…all tough politicians…and some former veterans. No, this is the Party of Strom Thurmond, a former Democrat who fought against Civil Rights, even after fathering a child with an African-American maid in his own household. Trent Lott, in praising Strom Thurmond, who ran for President to try to keep African-Americans from having full rights as citizens, said the country would be better now if that had happened. African-Americans like Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and certainly Barack Obama would disagree.

The current Republican Party is the Party of Jesse Helms, a former Democrat, who left the Democratic Party to work for some of his pet projects. Helms worked against legislation, for example, that would give equal rights to African-Americans to vote or drink at the same water fountains, eat in the same restaurants and ride buses, taking any seat they wanted. And Helms brings us to the states of North and South Carolina.

This hero of North Carolina voted against equal rights for women, equal rights for gays—even after it had been established that being gay was a clearly physiological condition and not a lifestyle choice. He voted against rights for the disabled, against voting rights for any minority. On the other hand, he never saw a military project or a war that he would not support. Although he voted against legislation that had to do with taking care of the mangled bodies of used-up veterans. He regularly spun half-truths into lies and was a blatant racist. That is the true legacy of the man whom North Carolina elected to the U.S. Senate until his death.

Now they have Richard Burr, who is not a blatant racist like Jesse Helms, but simply votes for anything that will keep the bigots happy and the religious nuts happy, so that he can vote against jobs in the U.S., vote against the minimum wage, vote for wars, vote for more oil company pollution, for dangerous mines and vote for cutting taxes on millionaires. Why? Money. He makes good money in the Senate with all the prerequisites and the staff and the contacts. Let’s face it. Almost every Senator who is not already rich becomes rich while a Senator or after he leaves because they work for the corporations while they are there. At least all the Republicans do.

Burr votes for the issues that corporations want. And then they send jobs overseas, like the furniture and clothing business that used to be in North Carolina but is now in Asia and Mexico. He votes to allow corporations to headquarter in the Bahamas and thereby pay no taxes on billions of dollars of income so that North Carolinians pay can pay more or lose government services, like those for the disabled or veterans or the elderly.

Oh yes, he votes against you. Every jobs bill he has voted down was against North Carolinians. Every tax cut he voted for was against North Carolinians. And lest you think that the poor in North Carolina, the 10th poorest state in the Union, are mostly black…think again. The average of African Americans in poverty is almost the same as the national average but the percentage of white Carolinians in poverty is above the national average.

Burr voted for the Republican budget. It changes Medicare into a voucher system. That means that you will have a set amount of money to use for health care, an amount which you have paid in. But not as much as you have paid in. And now you will be asked to continue paying in but you will get less back. And why? Because people like Mitt Romney (and he is one of the lesser super-rich) can live on $20 million dollars a year, while paying less than $2 million of that in taxes.

That is what Richard Burr, the Senator from North Carolina is voting for as you read this. And Social Security? There is a simple fix. We all pay in to Social Security. But, once again, people like Mitt Romney, who pays 15% in income taxes on $20 million, only pays Social Security taxes up to $106,000. If we doubled that and made him pay 7% up to $212,000, we could stop worrying about Social Security for another 75 years by which time we will have changed the entire thing to a savings plus mutual fund type account system.

But that is not what Richard Burr has voted for and wants. He and his Republican pals in the Senate do not want to tax the people with the money. They want to cut Social Security for you. There are only two options—either the rich pay a little more, which they will not notice…or you have your Social Security cut by 20%.

Here’s an example. Someone who makes (only) $480,000 per year takes home $40,000 per month less taxes. To fix Social Security, the additional taxes on this person would amount to another approximately $600 per month. But Richard Burr thinks that it is too much to ask of the half-million-dollar man and instead wants to cut your Social Security from $1,500 per month down to $1,200 per month.

Jesus never mentioned abortion. He never mentioned contraception. He never mentioned taxes, except to say: pay what you owe. He never mentioned gays or war. But he did mention greed and failing to help those in need. He said do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Not hatred. Not envy. Not judgment, because only God may judge you and others. Simple kindness and charity towards all. That means standing up for what is right. Not slavery. Not demeaning your fellow man. Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Carolina on our mind. Who is another Senator from the Carolinas? Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Let’ see how Senator DeMint has done for Carolinians. But first, let’s see how South Carolinians are doing versus other states.

South Carolina is the 7th poorest state in the country…seven from dead last…worst. Every 9th person in South Carolina is out of work. Fifteen percent (14.9%) live in poverty and eighteen percent (17.6%) have no health care.

What has Senator DeMint done for you lately? Well, he has tried consistently to remove the inheritance tax. That tax says that in South Carolina, a state with an average annual household income of under $47,000, when a very rich person dies, the heirs—who never actually worked for this money–will pay 55% tax on all income over $5,000,000 or if a couple, over $10,000,000.

So let’s say Daddy Warbucks dies and his estate is $25,000,000. Junior Warbucks and Ms. Warbucks Jr. will get only $17,500,000 after inheritance taxes, before deductions. Remember, now, they won the gene-pool lottery. They didn’t earn a penny of this money.

The New York Times reports that most inheritance taxes ended up being about 15%. That means that Junior and Ms. Warbucks would get something like $22,000,000. Poor Junior Warbucks from South Carolina, according to Senator Jim DeMint. He and his wife can live an average-income life in South Carolina for only 4,400 years before they go broke!

So what does this mean to South Carolina? It means that Senator DeMint is trying to keep from South Carolina money that could be used for jobs. And he is trying to give to people like Paris Hilton more money than they deserve and almost never need. If they are the heirs of multi-millionaires they are usually already rich. As Paris Hilton already is, for example.

How much money are we talking about? It is about $3 billion a year to the government. More in total than many programs that are being cut. South Carolina’s share of that would be at least $40,000,000. Who needs that more…the half of Carolinians whose incomes are less than half of the other Carolinians, those making less than $23,500 per year, or the elderly barely surviving on Social Security, or a bunch of Paris Hiltons driving around in their $80,000 Mercedes convertibles?

Is this what you want your Senator concentrating on? Senator Jim DeMint has voted against every jobs bill that has come up in the Senate since the Great Bush Recession started in the fall months of 2008. He hates unions who try to advocate for workers to get them better pay. (Unless you think that $46,000 a year is great pay and you don’t need more than that.) Why is South Carolina the 7th poorest state in the country and Jim DeMint is out working for millionaires in New York and Boston and Los Angeles?

How about health care? President Obama came into office with a huge number of people not only out of work but once out of work…out of health insurance. Health insurance has been a problem for everyone since before Bill Clinton. Other countries have fixed it, long ago. But in our country, since the Conservatives came to power, about the same time that Rush Limbaugh began lying to Americans and then lying about how he lied to Americans to cost them a fortune…since then, health insurance (since 2001) has gone up about 103%…in other words what used to be $7500 is now $15,000, per year.

So, the President, knowing that the health insurance companies would fight him, took them head on in 2009. He got the bill passed. But Senator Jim DeMint is one of the leaders in trying to get it repealed…in South Carolina, which is the 7th poorest state in the country, with the 4th highest rate of unemployment.

And one important point. In a state where the principal Senator is fighting against regulations on Wall Street, fighting against health care reform and fighting against a whole raft of issues against American women, the new health care reform will make a huge difference.

One of the little-known provisions is that one of the health insurance companies in the exchange must be a non-profit. In other words, a company that will be able to immediately charge 30% less than other health insurance companies for the same services. That, in addition to the other pure-competition features is one of the reasons that this will cut health care costs and one of the reasons South Carolina’ own senator is fighting against it.

We dislike DeMint not because he is a racist, which he seems pretty clearly to be. That’s not important. We dislike him because he is lying and making a few million…mostly poor… people in South Carolina believe that they will not be better off with Obamacare…when in fact they will be much, much better off.

That is why South Carolinians must take at your Senators. They are screwing you, and in addition perpetrating a fraud on some of our otherwise best fellow citizens. When Southerners vote them in, they unwittingly vote for billionaires and against their fellow citizens of South Carolina.

When Southern states vote in enough of these former Dixicrat obstructionist Segregationist Senators, other states can’t get veterans taken care of; they can’t get granny into long-term care; they can’t get health care at reasonable prices or sometime get it at all. The American people, because of these Southern Segregationist Right Wingers, who have found financial support by doing the bidding of billionaires and oil companies, other citizens need to worry about whether Social Security will be there in the long run.

Social Security at one time was less a factor in retirement. We used to have pensions from major corporations, but these same Southern Senators, with George W. Bush, pushed through laws that allow corporations to bankrupt companies and walk away from pensions, then start the companies up again. The pensions are tossed to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation to administer. So what happens, retirees get no more than half of what they were supposed to get. And who pays it? Not the corporation. We do, American citizens.

In addition, Liberals states have to put up with challenges from ultra-conservatives who can now run unlimited television lies, funded by billionaires, to fool Northern state voters into voting for them. (Because of Neoconservatives that these Republican Senators—mostly from Southern states–put on the Supreme Court.) So, now, states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio have to run more elections to throw out those elected officials who simply lied and then when in office, did the opposite of what they said they would do.

When Southern Senators tell their constituents that Northerners are different, which they aren’t…it’s simply a great political move to hold Southerners down…then all of us lose our civil rights to the super-rich. The result is that men like Rick Scott, who walked away from a large hospital chain with $100 million by cheating Medicare patients out of more than $1 billion dollars can become Governor of Florida, where there are more Medicare patients to cheat than probably any other state. Is he really governor or is he just casing the joint for his next scam?

But back to Jim DeMint. DeMint has sponsored a program to take senior citizens off Medicare and onto private health insurance systems. South Carolina senior citizens, who voted DeMint into office thinking he would sponsor legislation for them, are not exempt.

One of the features of this is that it would create insurance exchanges that would pool resources of private health care systems to lower prices for senior citizens. And DeMint says it is better than the “government takeover of health care.” Well, the “government takeover” of health care for seniors, called Medicare, has worked pretty damned well for the last 50 years or more.

The problem with it is that Republicans refuse to make the top 1% of Americans, those making about $400,000 and more…much, much more…to pay a reasonable share of taxes in our current emergency. DeMint and nutty Rand Paul, the lunatic optometrist-turned-Senator from the apparently dim-witted state of Kentucky have created legislation that will parallel the Ryan budget.

That budget astonishingly cuts well over $500 billion in programs for average citizens, while cutting taxes…again…for billionaires and millionaires. We now have a top income tax rate of 35%–that’s only on income over something like $500,000. They want to cut that tax rate to 25% and they say it will increase revenues. That is what Reagan said and Bush I and Bush II. So how did it work out?

Those three alone caused $14 trillion in national debt. And Rush Limbaugh and Fox News tells you that these Republicans are being honest with you and really, really love you…while looking the other way so that Wall Street could get rich from stealing $7 trillion in wealth from the American people.

Instead of making drug companies reduce their prices, DeMint voted for the prescription drug bill that makes you pay for drugs at inflated prices (often as much as ten times more than Europeans for example.) This is what he voted for and he voted against forcing pharmaceutical companies to bring their prices more in line with costs or bring U.S. price more in line with what they charge the rest of the world. Now wants you to trust him while he steals your Medicare. He tells you it won’t work. Medicare is doomed. He’s wrong. Here’s why.

His plan, the one that he says will reduce the cost of health care insurance for the government by $1 trillion, will do so because you will personally be paying the health insurance industry, not the government. And there will be no subsidies. Now we have subsidies in government Medicare and the new health care reform act has brought more subsidies for lower income people. So premiums will be lower and those lower premiums will be somewhat subsidized so that people do not have to choose between prescription drugs and food or shelter.

ACA, or Obamacare as it is called, is not a government takeover, as Senator DeMint calls it. It is a new system where the government will say to private insurance companies…you must make a real open-market effort to compete with one another for health insurance business. When that happens in 2013 and 2014 (and this is somewhat the DeMint plan—for seniors only) prices will come down. Only DeMint’s plan for seniors doesn’t make any demands on the insurance industry to bring down prices.

Have health insurance prices ever been lowered by the insurance industry in your lifetime? Of course not. DeMint, sorry to say, works for the health insurance industry against South Carolinians as do virtually all the Republicans in Congress.

The President’s plan, ACA, (Affordable Care Act) also called Obamacare, forces prices down, but keeps private insurance. If prices should not come down fast enough, the government has a fail safe. The states can introduce non-profit health insurance of their own. if they don’t come down, then non-profit organizations can get into the mix as long as they offer the same plans. That will drop prices through the floor–at the very least…30%.

Moreover, while Medicare can control some costs, Obamacare is going to reduce cost in general with private industry finally competing, and if not, competing with multi-state non-profit organizations. So Medicare costs will automatically go down as a result of all health care costs going down. The problem for South Carolinians is this: Jim DeMint knows this and he is not stupid. You can tell that this is not rocket science. So he has to be lying. Why would he lie?

The health insurance industry spent $400,000,000 to try to defeat the health care reform bill in 2009. They have continued to spend similar amounts to repeal it. Jim DeMint continues to carry water for and support every kind of delay and anti-reform action he can—just like this legislation that is already incorporated into the reforms. He does so despite the fact that his state is the 7th poorest in the nation, and his constituents are among the neediest…and it must be said….many more of the needy are white rather than black.

These Senators are not helping Carolinians. The Carolinas have some bad traditions…slavery and segregation were both blights, stains, on the reputations that America has for personal freedom and equality of opportunity. But the Carolinas have some wonderful people and some of the most beautiful countryside and shore in the United States. Strom Thurmond does not represent the best of Carolina; on the contrary he represented the worst in all of us…Northerners have very racist attitudes too. In the south it may be 60-40 in favor of racism, but in the North it is at least 40-60.

That twenty percent makes a huge difference in the kinds of people we vote for. In the North, while Southerners are right to say we have racism…far too much…it is also true that to Northerners race is not an issue in electing our representatives. Jobs, education and other social issues are much more important.

Temporarily, the media, especially talk radio, has generated hateful attitudes. And Fundamentalist preachers in some cases have used hatred to create congregations of the unsatisfied and unhappy losers in a society made up of winners and losers. This has dominated the less sophisticated areas of the country and encouraged bullies and bigots to take over the Republican Party. Some of those same people have found their way into Congress.

In the Carolinas, these two Senators, Burr and DeMint, are prime examples of the way in which seemingly genteel and rational people can use money and media to make the people of two great states vote exactly against their best interests.

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You can throw about 90% of everything you hear on television about Obamacare right out the window. Here are the simple facts. You will soon, if it is not repealed by a Republican Supreme Court (and then you should be very afraid…having nothing to do with health care but with your personal freedom as an American) it will provide less expensive, high quality, universal health care for everyone. For many Americans, almost nothing will change, except that they may opt in to one of the plans that offer what they now get–but for less money.

Remember this. Nothing will change for the worse…only for the better. That was the idea we tried in Clinton’s era but failed. The problem has continued and become much worse…with increases in premiums of over 100% from 2001 to 2008…huge annual increases. The people were raped by the health insurance industry and there was nothing they could do about it.

Costs were too high. People who paid premiums were being denied service. And still, 49 million Americans, almost one-third of the workers in this country, had no health insurance. Obama attacked the problem head on. And now those days are gone. Despite the Republicans and their bosses in the health insurance industry, health care reform is law.

Why is it being challenged in court? Because the Republicans have been paid by the health insurance industry to stop it. And they know that President Obama is likely to be re-elected and the Senate will probably be re-elected and that the House of Representatives, does not have the votes to overturn a veto. So the only option for repeal…which is what the health insurance companies need or they will lose huge, huge profits is to win in the in the Supreme Court. But this time, the issue is very clear.

The point on which the law is to be determined valid or unconstitutional is whether the Federal government can make an individual citizen do something. In this case, the attorneys simply say that while the government can make you pay taxes and register for selective service, they cannot make you buy a specific product from a private company….the so-called individual mandate.

The answer in legal terms is, yes, the government can make you do something, if it is for the common good. In the case of selective service, it was to build up the needed number of men–500,000 of them who went to their deaths in WWII–to fight the Nazis and the Japanese. Many other mandates have been issued… for the good of the majority This request—people can pay a penalty and not get insurance, which basically is the amount of money necessary for the rest of us to cover their expenses if they don’t choose to buy insurance—is necessary for the rest of the citizenry to be able to get affordable health insurance. So who is filing this lawsuit and why?

Well, let’s make it clear, once and for all…the opposition to affordable health care for all Americans is coming from the health insurance and the other health-related businesses now making a fortune on the American people. They spent over $400 million in 2009 alone trying to buy members of Congress and they bought a lot of them, but not enough. They lost. Democats, who held the House and the Senate and the Presidency, thank God, won by a paper thin margin.

The Republicans have long been in the pocket of the health care industry. For example, the head of the the House of Representatives committee on Energy and Commerce overseas the drug industry in 2003 was Bill Tauzin of Louisiana. Tauzin, a Republican, headed that committee and rammed through the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill. At the time, 2003, and since, prescription drug prices had risen and have risen to a point in the United States (though less elsewhere in the world) that seniors could not afford the drugs their doctors often prescribed to keep them alive.

The logical thing would have been to force U.S. drug manufacturers to charge Americans prices similar to those that foreign countries were paying. This was anywhere from half to as little as ten percent of what Americans paid for the exact same drug. But Tauzin and the pharmaceutical industry had a different idea. Keep the price of drugs high and simply have the government collectively, rather than individual citizens, pay the tab.

And pay we did. In a bill that was passed by holding a vote open for two hours beyond the House deadline, the cost would eventually be more than $550 billion. So, whatever small breaks…and they were small…the public got, we paid for them many times over.

Tauzin did well. He soon left the Congress and joined the pharmaceutical manufacturers as their lobbyist. Was it worth it to sell out the American People, the elderly and the poor? Absolutely. In 2010 alone his compensation from the pharmaceutical manufacturers was over $11 million dollars. One year’s compensation.

So there is big money in health care. For example, the average income of the other head lobbyists for health care is about a million bucks. Karen Ignagni, the blonde who represents America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) makes about two million a year. But Tauzin’s publicly stated income was always around $2 million, so you can see that these people get multiple other payments, bonuses, etc. apparently.

But the people who are really raking in the sheaves are the CEOs of the health insurance companies themselves. Here are some representative health insurance CEOs with their annual salaries for that year.

Ronald A. Williams – Aetna – $23,000,000
Edward Hanaway – Cigna – $25,000,000
Stephen Hemsley – United Health – $13,000,000
Dale Wolf – Coventry – $9,000,000
Angela Braley – Wellpoint – $13,000.000
Michael McCallister – Humana – $6,000,000

Not bad, eh? Of course it’s not bad. When you have a business where you have more customers than you will accept and can charge prices at will and deny claims at will…what’s not to like? That’s the system from which we are trying to rid ourselves. And we can. And we must.

Almost 50 million Americans now have no health insurance. From 49 million in 2009, it went up to 49.9 million in 2010 and in 2011, even with the initial improvements from Obamacare, it will continue in very large numbers like these until 2013 when the first of the big changes kick in.

The idea of starting in 2013 was that the insurance industry would have time to adjust. The problem may be…and this could actually be good for Americans in the long run…the insurance industry has spent most of its time trying to repeal Obamacare. If it is unprepared in 2013, when people can begin to see the enormous benefits that they will receive, it may turn out that we will have the “public option” after all. That would drop prices through the floor and lead to much more compassionate and people-centered non-profit and local government health care solutions.

Instead of funneling 30% of our payments to health insurance companies, and instead of insurance companies simply passing on extremely high bills to the consumer and leaving the consumer to pay health insurance bills of $14,000 to $15,000 per year, the cost curve would begin to bend down almost immediately.

About 150 million workers and their families are covered by employer’s health care programs. In those cases, the average family pays about $4,700 per year for health coverage, meaning that the employer picks up about $10,000. In some large corporations, the health insurance is done by the company itself, but still, overall, about 28% of costs are picked up by the employee.

So, if an employee loses his or her job, and that employee has some medical condition, current law, COBRA, says that the health insurance company must continue that person on their existing insurance for 18 months but the former employee must then pay the entire amount, which means that the cost would go from something like $400 per month to $1250 per month. This is a substantial increase for the average worker who is now unemployed.

So this isn’t a good system. First, with employer based insurance, we only pay a share of $15,000, but it is still $15,000 that someone has to pay eventually. Of course, if a person does not have insurance or insurance from a job, he or she normally a.) can’t afford it, and b.) isn’t eligible anyway because of a “pre-existing” condition.

This was, and is, a major problem that had to be addressed. The Republicans not only ignored it, but, as we have seen with the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill (also referred to as Medicare part D) they made things worse.

Now, the same Republicans who caused all our fiscal and health care problems in the first place say that Obamacare will be too expensive. That is exactly the opposite of the truth. The CBO says that it will save the country something like a trillion dollars over ten years. But that is not the important thing. The main thing is that competition will drive prices down. In addition, many states are talking about adding a local public option.

Here’s how it will work. A multi-state group will offer health insurance, with certain minimum features in it, so that it works, to those who do not have health insurance through their companies. This is what is being done in Massachusetts right now and the favorability factor among those who are in the public (through private insurers) system is well over two-thirds and in some cases eighty percent.

But here is what is important. In Massachusetts, which already had a high percentage of people insured, over 85%, the insured rate is now 98.2%. For children the number is 99.8% who have health insurance. Compare this to the national average of under 85%, Costs for the average citizen have come down and costs for employer based health insurance are less. And that is just one state. When three, four or five states are together in pooling patients for insurance bids across state lines, the costs will come down dramatically.

We now spend about 18% of GDP on health insurance. Europe spends 6%. We should be able to get our costs down to at least 10% of GDP over a few years. This would save individuals and the government…are you ready, about $1.2 trillion a year in health care costs. The government’s portion of that is about one-third (Medicare, Medicaid…elderly and poor…heavy users of the system) or $900 billion. The government alone will save about $400 billion a year.

Now…why don’t we hear those numbers? First, because the health insurance industry does not want you to hear them. And second, because they can’t be proved. If you want your house painted and all you care about is price, you will find that there are many people who will come and bid on your house and soon one will come and say to you…how much can you pay…and your house painting prices will go through the floor. This is what is going to happen with health care.

But you can’t say exactly how much you will save. So, in the highly structured world of the Congressional Budget Office, you cannot make that assumption. Even though you can tell from current prices and profits and current situations that can be compared elsewhere in the world. But that is what will happen.

And there is something else. The government will set targets for health care prices. If they do not go down as they should, the government will step in and act as an insurer and the prices will be below those of the private companies by a huge margin. That is the so-called “public option.” The government will say that they have a figure that the health insurance plans should hit, and the government will offer its plan at that number.

So, if your costs go down commensurately, in several years you will be paying about $8,000 per year, plus adjustments for inflation, rather than $15,000. So will Medicare; so will Medicaid; so will private health insurers, if there are still any around.

And here’s the real test. The Massachusetts individual health insurance costs have gone down by 40% while the rest of the country’s rates have gone up by 14%. That’s a simple and easy test. Do prices go down in this kind of situation? They do. If we take the national average, that means the Massachusetts health care buyer spends $9,000 per year instead of $15,000 per year. At a certain lower income level, Massachusetts buyers still get health care, and pay for it, but at a much reduced cost.

Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center, a Right Wing think tank sponsored by the Koch Industries family, says that Obamacare will cost the government over a trillion dollars over the next ten years and add another $350 billion to the budget. You can see from what happened in Massachusetts that this is not true and is not at all likely to happen.

If the costs on individual insurance have dropped by 40%, then that is likely to happen, perhaps in an even more significant way for the rest of the United States. Canada, with a much smaller system than ours, about ten percent of what ours would be, operates on about 12% of GDP. Polls show that they range from very happy to wildly approving of their system. Almost 100% of them rate it better than our system, for all the Neo-Fascists’ commentary on how they hate their Canadian system.

So who are these people attacking Obamacare? Charles Blahous, Ph.D., is a former staffer with the Bush II White House. He is not a politician, nor is he an historian or political scientist. He is in fact, a chemist. And his particular brand of chemistry, it is interesting to note, deals in the computation of chemical effects, without empirical evidence.

In other words, Dr. Blahous’s entire career has been spent not examining what happens after several things come together. And that is why he does not understand (some would say “deliberately”) the potential economic affects that result when every citizen begins to pay less from competitively priced health insurance.

In fact, Dr. Blahous applies none of the benefits from reduced cost and expanded eligibility. He merely adds costs while not subtracting results. That is how he arrives at the number he does. He did the same thing when he was working for George W. Bush in trying to privatize Social Security. Had he been successful, everyone over 65 in the country today would automatically take home 40% less in what would be a private Republican variation of Social Security. We dodged a bullet…actually a cannon shot…by virtue of electing a Democratic House of Representatives in 2006.

The woman writing about Dr. Blahous’s report is much worse than he is. Grace Marie Turner is one of the most despicable people in the health insurance scam industry. Her millions have been earned by pandering to the private health insurance business, doing their bidding and that of the super-rich, like the Koch Family, for a long, long time.

She runs the Galen Institute, named for the ancient healer, who would be scandalized by their use of his name to simply make the health industry richer, year-after-year at the sacrifice of human life. Her stated goal is to put citizens, rather than government in charge of their health care decisions. It is not accidental that her institute was begun immediately after the Clinton health care initiative was being promoted. She attacked the initial reforms. He job for the industry is to attack public health care, because that is the only way that the private firms can lose their public-gouging plans.

Here’s the kind of person Ms. Turner is. She has a site called “Health Reform Hub” and in the middle of the first page, she tells a blatant lie…almost the first thing you see. She says,

“ObamaCare will lead to a dramatic decline in employer-provided health insurance — with as many as 78 million Americans forced to find other sources of coverage.”

That’s not true. That is based on a survey by McKinsey and Company. The Congressional Budget Office, the Urban Institute and the Rand Corporation have all come up with the opposite outcomes in their surveys.

In addition, this scare tactic by Ms. Turner deliberately does not take into consideration the point of the survey. The point is…are we about to change the way health care is delivered? Employers are beginning to see a better and more efficient way forward.

If all citizens can purchase health insurance at reasonable rates from a private firm in an exchange…or through a public option as a default if the rates are artificially held up…then why should employers continue to pay for health care? Just give the money to employees—it might not even need to be the full amount–and let the government negotiate with insurance firms for the best possible health insurance rates.

Employees would then be able to travel throughout the industries in which they work without changing health insurance, losing it or having it cost more. The only losers would not be employers or individual workers.

The losers would be Ms. Turner’s sponsors, the pharmaceutical companies, whom she helped to a $500 billion dollar windfall with the Medicare Prescription Drug Act and the health insurance industry which she helped to postpone health care reform for 14 years while hundreds of thousands of people died as a result.

Should she be put to death, knowing that she influenced the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? We could not advocate that as citizens. But if we could, as a society, put to death someone legally, merely for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people by pursuing successful legislation that would cause their deaths, then certainly many of us would strongly advocate that she be put to death, electrocuted or as in the old Greek system that Galen would have known, merely strangle her in a public place. Just as we would do to any dictator or tyrant.

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They did nothing to alleviate the suffering they caused. The revenue shortfall, plus their war spending has caused almost the entire current national debt. They spent $7 trillion more from 2001 to 2008 than the government received in revenues.

In 2008, they ignited the Great Bush Recession. That resulted in a total of 15 million unemployed. Eight million jobs were lost in less than nine months from October of 2008 until July of 2009. The first day President Obama walked into the oval office, that month, January of 2009, the economy lost 700,000 jobs…January alone.

The result was that unemployment payments and loss of tax revenues to government increased the deficit to over one trillion dollars per year. In 2009, 2010 and 2011, despite cuts and hiring freezes, layoffs and early retirements the deficits were over one trillion dollars each year.

It need not have happened. President Clinton finally stopped the deficits. While he left a cumulative total of $5 trillion in debt, he also left a balanced budget. Bush then spent $7 trillion more than government revenues between 2001-2008. He then left a Great Recession which cost $3 trillion more in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

If you look on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official employment records, you will see that, at the end of his term President Bush had created a net one million jobs. President Clinton created 22 million jobs. That alone should tell anyone the difference between an administration that spends its time cutting taxes for the wealthy and going to war and an administration that focuses on real jobs.

Then the Republicans obstructed recovery. They used the filibuster loophole in the Senate to kill any recovery. Then the Koch Brothers, using Americans For Prosperity and FreedomWorks, organized the Tea Party. They created huge organizations that demonstrated against middle class programs like Medicare, Social Security, and health care reform. In an alliance with the health care industry, they spread huge lies about the Affordable Care Act, after $400 million in campaign contributions to Republicans did not quite prevent the legislation from passing.

This is where we are now, with 50 or so members of the Tea Party helping Republican Senators to obstruct jobs bills, pass union-busting bills, end child labor laws, end women’s abortion rights, end contraception, entering Christian-only legislation and trying to instigate another war, this time against Iran. The same old Republican mantra…keep women barefoot and pregnant and keep the rest of the world…and American workers…subservient to American corporations.

Now there is a new Republican budget. They want to end Medicare and substitute vouchers that will cover, as they themselves admit, only 32% of the cost of insurance. Measure this against the current Medicare system that covers an average of 75%. And half of those on Medicare have only Social Security as more than half their income. So, by definition they fall into the category of those in poverty.

Each family will receive a check for $8,000 to buy health care insurance. Nothing anywhere says what health insurance companies will be able to charge. So it could be worth, and probably will be worth only about half the insurance costs.

Today there are 50 million people without healthcare and yet the health insurance companies spent $400 million in one year alone, 2009, to prevent them from getting health insurance. President Obama fought for an affordable health care plan, which Congress created. The alternative Republican plan, brought out too late to vote on, merely created health savings accounts which do not work because the people who need them most do not have any extra savings, which is what HSAs count on. The only other thing the GOP plan did was to push for more anti-medical liability. They wanted to encourage malpractice by reducing all payments for malpractice to $250,000.

The Republican budget proposal for the next ten years does reduce the deficit. But it does not create any new taxes. It does not eliminate tax loopholes. It does not create any new revenues from any source. It merely cuts services for the middle class and the poor.

It isn’t a legitimate proposal at all. The Republicans are relying on their control of the media to fool the American people. They hope to continue to control the House of Representatives. They want to shut down government and kill all social safety net programs. They want to shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, student loans and alternative energy proposals.

They want to drill in your back yard or in national parks on the Washington Mall, in Yellowstone Park or along the beaches of Florida and California and South Carolina and Oregon. These Neo-Fascists live in their own little 99% white enclaves, with their other Right Wing “Christian” friends. They want no part of American society at large. These are people who have secure jobs, for now, and who want to use their leverage to diminish the leverage of others who do not believe as they do.

They are relying on their control of the media, on their control of the House of Representatives and their Neo-Fascist obstructive tactics in the Senate to cause trouble for the country, hoping to confuse the electorate as they did in 2009, resulting in a shut down of government, large cuts in recovery programs and this monstrous attempt to kill all social safety net programs while offering more tax cuts to the rich.

This program is being moved forward by a selective group of political forces. It is being led by a large group of very wealthy men who have discovered that they can become immensely rich and stay that way if they support Neo-Fascism. Neo-Fascism is the support of a totalitarian political party aligning large corporations, with the military, with a large number of corrupt Christian churches and one political party, in this case, the Republicans.

The Republicans will not raise taxes. How can this be when the government is losing money and borrowing huge amounts to pay the bills? The Republicans work for the rich and the rich make them wealthy enough…or so they think…that they do not need government. For the top half of the top one percent, this has meant over a million dollars saved over the period of the Bush Administration.

Since the government lost $10 trillion over that period, it is safe to conclude without a shadow of a doubt that money was borrowed. The government borrowed money from China, that all taxpayers must pay back, and gave each of the top one-half of one percent a million dollars apiece. The catch is this. The Republicans won’t pay it back by raising taxes. They will pay it back by using the money already in government.

Their plan is to pay it back by cutting essential government services and using the money that would have gone to you in subsidized health care or the Social Security (that you paid into as insurance) or health services for children…none of which the top one percent of Americans will need. So they get a million bucks on top of tax rates that were already cut in half-and then reduced again by Reagan, lowest tax rates in the world, and everyone else pays for it.

If those who make $380,000 and now pay about 23% in actual taxes, or $87,400, were asked to pay another five percent, another $19,000, would that break the bank? Does a net income of $273,000 after taxes really make that much difference from $292,000?

You can quickly see, when we go higher than $380,000 how silly it is, especially with annual millionaires and billionaires, that they will not pay a slight additional in such dire circumstances as the country faces in 2012. An additional five percent to make all American lives better seems like a small thing to ask of the world’s richest people.

The Republican budget takes non-Social Security spending from 12% of GDP in 2010, to 6% in 2022, and 3.5% in 2050. The budget plan doesn’t say how the Republicans can reduce costs that sharply. But there is a pretty good idea of how they would make it happen. Once there is no other option they will say we must cut more. They will continue the “no new taxes” pledge. Then they will have only one option…because a large part of the Neo-Fascist base is the military-industrial complex…and that is Social Security. They’ll rob it like a small-town bank.

With Medicare, right now with the ACA (Obamacare) in place, about 25% of costs go to the patient and about and 75% are covered by the government from premiums, taxes, etc. Under the Republican plan, this will be turned on its head. Medicare patients will pay 68% of costs and government will pay approximately 32%.

The first thing that the Ryan plan does, if it has not already been done by the Supreme Court is to pledge to repeal Obamacare. The health industry supports this. You have to be stupid to believe that an industry that charges you about $17,000 a year for health insurance, denies medical insurance to anyone who has previously been ill and allows 50 million Americans to go uninsured…then lobbies against any kind of universal care…has your best interests at heart.

How can anyone believe that a group, like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and literally all the Right Wing pundits, who agreed with Rush Limbaugh’s calling a young law student at a Catholic university a slut, a whore and a prostitute because she wants birth control pills could care about what happens to women’s health? It just isn’t rational.

Unlike Obamacare, there will be no restraint on costs under the Ryan/Republican plan. So you will not only pay more as a percentage of costs, but you will pay a higher percentage of much higher costs. What the Ryan plan calls “premium subsidies” in other words a check for a part of your health insurance costs, will only be 32% of the costs of health care. It is written in the budget plan. With Medicare, you now get a 75% subsidy. And under Ryancare the age of eligibility goes up to 67. Under Romney, apparently it would be 69.

On the other hand, Obamacare shuts down the power of the health insurance industry to pick only the healthiest people and deny anyone who could potentially cost them money. Then it creates real competition across state lines, with large insurance exchanges, and, if costs do not go down, the possibility of a public option. Companies can also form as Co-ops and drive the high-priced firms from the marketplace.

So, in 2022, under the Republican budget, Medicare ends and the private companies take over. That will be a disaster for American senior citizens.

The premium subsidies for Medicare under the Republican budget is $8,000. But the actual costs, according to CBO, for those over 65, a less healthy segment of the population, is $15,000. To some degree there will be means testing but CBO says that this whole plan does not add up. And, as it is a plan written essentially by health care companies for health care companies, it does nothing to control costs for individuals. They simply now will pay more and the government less of a larger bill.

The whole problem with the Ryan exercise is this: health care is not a viable business unless you can charge whatever you want and insure only those that you want. Obamacare says that health care is a needed public service that cannot be done for profit without regard to what happens to the public.

If health care works, it necessarily spends money on patients. The more it spends, the better service it gives to patients, i.e., the more care is being delivered. But the problem is that the more care being delivered, the less profit to the health insurance companies. So the for-profit health insurance model does not work. In order to make it work you must limit those with insurance to the more healthy among the population and provide the least expensive health alternative. And this is legitimate under the for-profit model, where the chief obligation is to stockholders.

That is how the for-profit system works and that it why it is not good for health care. We need to make changes. But Obamacare tries to make a gradual transition. It changes the system in a way that everyone knows will make it less profitable for the health insurance companies and therefore make health care itself less expensive and more accessible to the average citizen.

The goal of Obamacare for the average citizen is to reduce the cost of health care and make it affordable and obtainable for each American citizen.

We spend 18% of GDP on health care but we have the 37th best health care in the world. We have 50 million people uninsured…one out of six people has no health insurance. Europe spends an average of 6% and they cover everyone. And 36 countries have better health care than we do.

So what is the Republican solution? In summary, the Republican ten-year plan once more cuts taxes for the rich and increases Medicare costs and reduces the obligation for high quality care. While the Ryan plan increases national revenues, it does not say where it will get those revenues without taxing.

The wealthy under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II were made fabulously wealthy. Twelve-car garages with marble floors and murals on the wall. Or with a turntable rather than having to…horror of horrors…move one car in order to get another of your dozens of cars out of the heated and cooled garage. It’s only another $200,000. You drop that in a single night in Vegas, don’t you? After all, this is only one room of your 47,000 square foot mansion. (These are not fantasies. These are merely two examples of the amenities in the multi-million dollar homes that one may see on any evening on television.

The rest of us who do not have 12-car garages and 47,000 square foot homes are paying a good percentage of our incomes in taxes. We merely ask that those individuals who are doing so well that they can have a giant turntable in the middle of their garage, or a golf course around their home can make some additional sacrifice in a time of Recession.

America has about 3 million people who have wealth of over $1,000,000 not including their homes. That’s about one percent. There are about 40, 000 people who have wealth in excess of $30 million. Almost half of all members of the House and Senate are millionaires. We have something like 400 billionaires, including, for example, ten or eleven in the Pritzker Family. (Who are, from all accounts, very good people–good employers, philanthropists and extremely hard workers.)

But we also know that there are roughly 1400 to 1500 multi-millionaires and billionaires who pay no taxes. No one is going to complain about someone living on the non-taxable income from a million bucks. You won’t “get rich” on that. But we have people in their peak earning years who are making billions on hedge funds who are paying nothing or next to nothing on their incomes. If we stop those things, stop loopholes, like income earned abroad staying abroad, oil depletion allowances, corporations registering in the Bahamas to avoid taxes, and if we make our natural resources pay the United States as much as they pay those who are already billionaires and work against the United States, then we’ll be fine and we won’t need the drastic measures that the Republicans have laid out in their non-tax, but social services-cutting budget.

The Paul Ryan Republican budget takes good care of those wealthy who have done well but it does nothing for those who are still trying to get there. And it deliberately attacks the poor and the elderly who retired in a time when the Republicans reduced America’s income by 7 trillion dollars.

We’re not talking about government revenues. No, we’re talking about the estimated amount that Americans lost in the Bush Stock Market Crash of 2008 and everything from lost 401ks and evaporated home equity that came in its wake.

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Why are we so harsh on Ryan? We dislike him because we know that he is at least smart enough to know that he is being conned and used by Right Wing billionaires. They are using him, and he seems quite willing, to push through an agenda that includes the structured removal of the safety net that even Ronald Reagan said was an essential part of our society.

Billionaires in Wall Street promoted a speculative bubble in the real estate market and expanded it to an outright swindle on a scale never before seen in this country. Then they deliberately shut it down. The goal, we now know, was to basically bankrupt the people of the United States by taking away their one single most important asset…the equity in their homes.

Is it really a conspiracy? Well, when you have an income of a billion dollars, it becomes difficult to expand it beyond that. But what you can do…if you can control Wall Street with enough leverage to cause a Recession…is make everything worth less, including the equity in people’s homes and their 401Ks and the cost of labor.

In the 1980s the Regan Administration, as a part of many regulations that were changed or dropped in order to help an ailing Savings and Loan Industry, added a piece of legislation to make it easier and cheaper to borrow against the equity in your home than it was to borrow on credit cards or personal non-secured loans. That was step one.

In the early 2000’s the mortgage industry began to offer riskier and riskier loans. By 2005, people could actually acquire a home through an interest-only loan or a no-documentation loan. Everything was done to make home ownership easier and much, much riskier. The real estate business boomed with prices going sky high. Then everything collapsed.

There were millions of home foreclosures in which millions of Americans lost their entire equity or were stuck with homes whose value had quickly dropped below the value of the mortgage they held. Those who did have equity saw it drop dramatically. Even before the Stock Market Crash of October 2008, slightly more than 50% of homeowners owed as much on their property as the equity they had in their property. This was the first time nationally in the history of recorded housing statistics that a majority of homeowners had this little equity in their homes.

So what’s the point? The point is that there is a very good argument that can be made, and should not be ignored, that a large number of Republican legislators, people like Paul Ryan have been co-opted by large corporate interests, such as oil companies and multi-millionaires and billionaires, like the Koch family. The rich have used campaign contributions to get Republicans in Congress to work for them rather than for their constituents.

That is important in the context of the Republican Budget Proposal for 2013. It is time to start looking at their proposals with the suspicion that the plan is to de-fund the United States government, including such long-time and essential programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. (that we citizens, not merely the Billionaires, pay for.)

Those are all important programs that will cost us a lot…for a little while. Why only a little while? Because, even though as far back as Reagan and Tip O’Neill’s talks and modifications on Social Security we had knowledge of the amounts of money we would need. But those funds were basically borrowed for wars and tax cuts and never replaced.

It all began in the second Bush Administration. They had surpluses and they spent them. Now the current crop of Republicans…who were there, most of them, to spend the money, say…“tough luck.” They took the money for wars and cut revenues by giving out tax breaks. The Republicans lied us into the Iraq War. Most Democrats were against it. The war in Iraq caused what was supposed to be a short war in Afghanistan to last for over ten years, the longest war in our history …still going on!

The Bush tax cuts went overwhelmingly to a segment of the rich who had already had their taxes cut by 50% by Ronald Reagan. Those Reagan tax cuts had already resulted in unbalanced budgets that accumulated $5 trillion in debt before Clinton was able to balance the budget once again. Bush and Cheney came to office, added two more tax cuts and another $8 trillion (EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS) on top of that.

The Seven Trillion Dollar Swindle

By deliberately deregulating Wall Street, the anti-regulatory Bush Administration helped the swindlers to another $7 trillion of the taxpayers’ money. Where does the $7 trillion come from? That represents the equity lost in your home. In other words the loss of value between 2007 and what it was after the crash and what the value is now, which is undoubtedly even lower. What is the value of your 401K versus what it was in 2007? Here’s what happened.

Wall Street bought mortgages that they knew were worthless. They then sold them to other people. How many? Trillions and trillions of dollars worth. When people found that they were worthless, they tried to get rid of them. But something worth $100 suddenly became worth $5. Losses by banks and investment companies were in the trillions. All that money is passed along to you. Your home, once worth $500,000 is now worth $275,000. Your 401K, with a variety of stocks which had been going up and up…is now down by half.

All that cumulative value that was lost comes to around $7 trillion. Those are the estimates. Our GDP is only $15 trillion. So you can see what happened. We crashed. Remember the bank bailout? It was supposed to be $350 billion. It never came to that and most of the money loaned was returned. What does that mean? It means that those major banks, the ones selling all this phony investment in flim-flam mortgages, had actually sold a lot of it off. Someone got it, the bad stuff…lots of it. We did, through pension funds and mutual funds and others who lost a lot of money.

So now, as we have all lost so much money, businesses shut down and put 8 million more people out of work…overloading our social services. Any sensible person would say, let’s just cut as much as we can afford to from government and add back some of those taxes that we cut. Let’s tax some of those people who sold the bad mortgage securities and banked that money.

That is not what Paul Ryan and the Republicans are saying with this budget. CBO, the bipartisan federal bureaus tasked with analyzing the costs of any legislation on which it is asked to render an opinion, did so on this budget. And they were not happy with it. While it reduces the national debt to 10% of GDP by around 2050, it does it on the backs of the poor and middle class.

First of all, Ryan and the Republicans attack Senior citizens with a vengeance. In 2022, the current Medicare system would be scrapped and Senior citizens would get one single subsidy for Medicare in the form of a voucher…basically a check. This would reduce costs, according to the CBO to 6% of GDP…what Europe currently spends.

The Republicans Will Repeal Obamcare…then Medicare.

The first thing the Ryan plan does is repeal Obamacare. So, for example, this means that your kids, if under 26, will go off your insurance after they leave college. It means you will go back to paying more for prescription drugs. And it means that you will not even be guaranteed health insurance at all. And there is no guarantee that you will be able to get health insurance after age 65 on the Ryan plan because these vouchers are for private health insurance companies that will have no obligation to insure sick people.

The wealthy paid a 74% top rate the day Reagan walked through the door. They had been paying that rate or higher for about 40 years. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Carter all had top income tax rates that were at 74% or more.

Measure that against the current top rate of 35%. See any difference in those numbers? Let’s say we cut your pay from $740 per week to $350 per week? Do you think you could cut enough out of your budget to keep living in a remotely similar lifestyle? Of course not. And that is why we are $15 trillion in debt. Why would anyone seriously consider a budget prepared by these Republican big spenders and economic morons?

Even their presidential candidate is cut from the same cloth. He made $225 million in personal wealth. That is success. For him. But he did it by closing down plants and firing people, often sending their jobs to China and India. You don’t measure the success of a country by how many people you lay off or how you balance a budget when the people are starving. A country is its people. That’s what a country is…a place where people live.

In 2013, Ryan’s plan would kill the Obamacare procedure of competitive insurance exchanges. That would allow the insurance companies to continue to monopolize each state market with little or no competition, thus raising the prices on consumers again. This is good for health insurance companies, especially the CEOs earning an average of $14 million a year.

The Ryan plan switches Medicaid funds to a block grant to the states. Here’s the problem with that. The Confederate States still have enormously racist governments wherever they are Republican…which is most of them. When it is a choice between taking care of poor black people or balancing the budget, which do you think they will do? Of course, let black people die.

Governors like Walker of Wisconsin, Daniels of Indiana or Scott of Florida, Snyder of Michigan or Kasich of Ohio can simply use those funds to balance the budget while giving tax breaks to wealthy businesses. The money not going to the Treasury from corporate taxes is replaced by money from the federal government that was supposed to go to health care for the poor.

Under the Ryan plan, this is how Medicare will be eliminated. The Ryan budget proposes to cut government non-Social Security spending from its current 12% down to 6% in 2022 and down to 3.5% by 2050. As the other government spending is expected to remain relatively stable, the only conclusion one can make is that the cuts in spending will come in large part from the money you put into Social Security.

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For some reason, we always return to 1933, Germany, for an analogous situation to the current Republican Party. It is not an easy thing to do, to compare current society…supposedly enlightened and better educated…with one that was deeply scarred by anti-Semitism, war mongers, murderers and deviants, but the political facts run so strongly parallel that we must.

And the reason we must is that what happened in Germany was the greatest or second greatest devastation of the human spirit and perhaps the most widespread genocide in history…deliberate, monstrous murder of women and children on a scale never seen since the Middle Ages or before. Fascism became brutal and barbarian, only with modern methods of mass murder.

By 1933 in this country, in the midst of a terrible Depression, with one out of four people unemployed, we were lucky. We elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as President. He immediately put 4 million people to work, in less than 6 months! He then began a huge number of other public infrastructure programs to put the country back together.

It was an attempt to simply put the country into a growth mode so that people could work rather than be on welfare. It was the same kind of mess Bush left us in the Fall of 2008. Although, as huge as the Great Depression was, our current situation may be worse, unless we stop the Neo-Fascist obstruction. Germany was working out of it in 1933, too. But their solution had a sinister plan behind it.

In Germany, after World War I, the problem was not Depression at first; it was inflation. By the late 1920s, the Deutsche Mark was so inflated it would take a bushel basket to buy a loaf of bread. Then came the worldwide Depression which hit Germany about 1931. By this time, Hitler and his staff had so engineered the NAZI Party (basic translation would be National Socialist German Workers Party) to become a thoroughly nationalistic, nominally Socialistic, and within the Party itself….predominantly racist…group.

Hitler’s genius was his understanding of the German people…probably because, being Austrian, he had spent time observing them. Because he knew their weaknesses, he could exploit them. And what were they? They had great pride in their nation’s military history.

They were descended from Teutons and some of their myths and the lore of their warlike gods had been incorporated into some of their great literature and music. A serious feeling of national pride. Germay had always been a group of conflicted collection of princely states hanging loosely together for reasons of security. But in 1871 they were organized, grateful for the military leadership that brought them together and became a very militaristic society.

After the indignities forced on the Germans through the severe punishments meted out by the League of Nations post WWI, the economic deprivations offered fertile ground for a nationalistic political party. The Nazis adopted that position. So…what does that mean for us today? What can the lessons we learned from the Nazis do for us today?

Well, first of all, you can tell pretty quickly what is not a Nazi. President Obama is the farthest thing from a Nazi and that is, in the Fascist propaganda method, the person on whom you want to hang the “Nazi” tag. And that’s what some of the more radical Right Wing radio people have done. And they do it because their listeners are mostly uneducated, racist, low income people who mindlessly follow whoever panders to the largest number of their racially distorted views.

A man who supports unions, like Obama, is not a Nazi. A man who is black….since Nazis are both racist and anti-Semitic…is probably not a Nazi. A man who supports the poor and the elderly, wants to tax the rich and wants the military to wind down the wars and come home…is definitely not a Nazi. But the Neo-Fascists (Republicans) will say he is because that is how their propaganda machine works.

So…winding up this Fascist-Nazi business….Obama is not a Nazi or any kind of totalitarian at all. The Republicans are Neo-Fascists. That means that they have demonstrated that the kind of government they like best is one in which the large corporations and the military and the very wealthy control government. It is a political party that demands complete and total obedience and punishes free thought.

How do we know that they vote like Fascists? Fascists are ideologues. They vote on a position, and no matter who suffers or how many people are hurt, they vote together. In addition, they vote to stop anything that they don’t like. In the 110th Congress, the Republicans set a new record of 112 filibusters, meaning that they would not allow simple majority votes to be made by the majority party. In the 111th Congress, they did it 100 times. In this session, the 112th, they continue to filibuster legislation for jobs, health care, civil rights and other progressive issues at a record pace. In order to filibuster, the Republican Senate has had to vote in a bloc, and they have done so.

What are the other indicators? Religious fanaticism. The Nazis had a certain philosophy. The Republicans, Neo-Fascists do too. Racism, alignment with military interests, using the poor as mercenary soldiers, indoctrinating them into Fundamentalist Christian religions in order to get them to fight against Muslims, whom the ubiquitously describe as terrorists. Indoctrination into one political dogma or else being targeted by a true believer in the primaries.

Current Republican dogma is fanaticism. One only need look to the Presidential candidates. Each one tries to out-flank the other on the Right. When Rush Limbaugh calls a woman a “slut” and a “prostitute” on the air for using what 98% of American women say they use…birth control pills… not one Republican candidate for President stood up to defend her or defend American women for using birth control. It is crazy. And that is what Fascists are…like the Nazis…crazy.

Right now, with a divided political spectrum, the Neo-Fascists who have taken over the Repbulican Party can only punish people politically. But in the states where Neo-Fascist governors have taken over, the swing to the Right has involved the elimination of unions by disparaging them as thugs. The reason they have done so is that unions are the principal means for American workers to negotiate for wage increases.

As late as the 1970s, unions were strong and contributed enormously to the betterment of the American Middle Class. But post-Ronald Reagan, and especially since the union-busting tactics (a $2 billion a year industry) of the Bush era think tanks and lobbyist groups, private industry unions involve only 7% of the private workforce.

The reason that the Republican governors who work with ALEC, the Neo-Fascist Republican legislative developers, to kill public unions is that they represented 12% of the public sector unions. Governors like Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich of Ohio, Snyder of Michigan, Christie of New Jersey, Scott of Florida and Daniels of Indiana are all on board with ALEC, which is a legislative group that is dedicated to such things as decertifying unions, anti-global warming laws, anti-abortion legislation, anti-contraception legislation, destruction of child labor laws, lowering the minimum wage, adding more guns to society at all levels, including the right to carry a concealed weapon or carry an AK-47 automatic military weapon, and privatization of both public schools and health care.

These are all radical Right Wing proposals that are perfectly understandable if you know who is behind ALEC. Here are just some of the sponsors of ALEC who are sponsoring this kind of legislation: BP Oil, Exxon/Mobil, Peabody Coal, Chevron, AT&T, VISA, Bayer, Shell, State Farm, American Electric Power, Allergan Pharmaceuticals, United Health Care, Lumina Copper, Pharma (the Association of Pharmaceutical companies), Altria (Philip Morris Tobacco), Conoco-Phillips Oil, Freeport McMoran, FEDEX, WalMart, Time-Warner, Koch Industries, Cox Cable, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Atmos Energy, Hewlett-Packard, Entergy, UPS, Wellpoint Health Insurance….and many more.

On the board and the advisory group to ALEC, paid by ALEC, by these corporations are various Republican State officials who are drawing up and submitting the legislation. Do you understand what this means? These legislators are double-crossing you.

Legislators in states like Indiana and Michigan and Ohio and many others are working to create legislation, not for you, but for Koch Industries and BP Oil and United Health Care and Wellpoint…legislation, in fact, that carves money out of the state of Indiana and sends it to these billionaires.

For example, take State Senator Judson Hill of Georgia. One of his ALEC causes is health care. Working on behalf of ALEC, he and 1800 other state legislators who have signed up with ALEC are trying to defeat health care reform. His sponsors are not the people of Georgia, even though ALEC and the Right Wing radio talk show propagandists have been hammering away at a public and universal health care system for the health insurance companies. No, Judson Hill is working for Pfizer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, United Health Care, big Pharma, and all the other groups mentioned above, each of whom have their own issues they want these 1800 legislators to introduce.

You can call it a simple bribe. But the bribes would not be possible, nor would the organization ALEC be possible unless they knew that one political party, the Neo-Fascist Republicans were in their corner. You can look up ALEC and the 800 pieces of pro-corporate anti-American citizen legislation they have written and sponsored through these traitors, these anti-American, pro-Global Corporation legislators who have turned their backs on the American people.

Corporations are in the pockets of the Neo-Fascists. The Neo-Fascists hope you don’t notice before they have enough money to get out of the scam without going to jail. Don’t let them. Organize and act. You don’t know it yet, but once you study this situation you will understand we are very far down the road towards Fascism…and you won’t be one of the Fascists…not unless you adhere to all the principles.

Robert Bennett, one of the most Conservative Senators in the U.S. Senate was kicked out…not by Democrats but by Right Wing (Tea Party) Republicans because he wasn’t enough of a radical on the Right. These people are talking about war with Iran in exactly the same way that they talked bout war with Iraq, exaggerating the danger and doing everything they can to heighten the tension.

Ask yourself this…would a “reform” group like the Tea Party that wants to cut government (supposedly)…a supposed neutral group…would they join the Party that caused $2.5 trillion of the deficit (before balancing the budget) or the one that caused $12.5 trillion, most of it since 2001?

Ask yourself this. Would a Party that says it springs from the will of the people…the Tea Party Republicans…vote for a budget (Neo-Fascist Republican budget) that cuts Social Security, Education, Medicaid, Medicare, and wants to kill health care reform that will bring our 18% of GDP health costs down to 12% thus dropping our health insurance costs per family from approximately $11,500 to $8,550. That’s an average but most people will not pay even that amount because of subsidies currently in place that will continue and be used differently under the Affordable Care Act (health care reform.)

So it is pretty simple. Do want Hitler in the form of Ron Santorum, plus WalMart overseeing all the products you buy, or Pfizer telling you which drugs they will produce…one pharmaceutical company recently refused to make enough of a certain cancer drug to cover all the people who were receiving it…even though they were being paid. Some pharmacists refuse to sell birth control pills…under the Neo-Fascists there will be no contraception and no birth control and definitely no abortion if you are raped.

Exaggeration? Not much. All of those things are either already in effect…and there are worse things…like the end of Social Security and Medicaid…in the platforms and the budgets of the Neo-Fascists. And they are definitely in the plans of the big corporations. Do they sound heartless? They are. They aren’t working for you. Giant corporations and the people making fortunes at the top of those corporations are only worried about one constituent…the stockholder…as they should be.

It is our legislators…our mayors, governors and national representatives…who should be looking out for us…not for ALEC. But the Neo-Fascists don’t see it that way. So you can change Parties now or change later. But if the Neo-Fascists finish off their plans to control everything…then “later” will never come to us any more than it did to the Germans….who lost 10 million people to war, destitution, famine and destruction for twenty solid years before the rest of the world could even begin to stabilize their country again.

These hugely wealthy Neo-Fascists behind the Republican Party have already gobbled up half the Senators who vote like robots for them, and most of the House of Representatives as well as 1800 state legislators in dozens of states. How long do you think it will be until they take over the rest of the country?

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He lives a secretive personal life, because, like Rush Limbaugh, he has hurt so many people that there are many people who would kill him, literally tear him limb from limb if they ever get their hands on him. He says he does his radio show from “a bunker.”

Remarkably, in interviews, the interviewer apologizes for using cuts of his own show to demonstrate what he does. In other words, what he does is so vile, that he himself is sensitive to the playing of tapes of his work!

Like all Right Wing Republicans, he writes books. Now, why do Republicans write books that have the same tired old crap in them over and over again? To make money. When Ann Coulter writes a book, a huge number of books are bought up by Right Wing Republican organizations. And why do they do it? Because book tours are good ways to promote Right Wing ideologies. The books are underwritten by big supporters of the Republican Party. Ann Coulter would never even sell enough books to pay for the printing.

Likewise, even though he does have a large Right Wing radio listenership, most of those people don’t buy books. Some of them probably can’t read. It’s not that kind of audience. But the Right Wing organizations, pushed by the Neo-Fascist publicists in the Republican Party get corporations to buy up tens of thousands of books at a special price and give them out to attendees at conferences, and meetings and conventions.

Every Right Wing organization buys up at least enough books to put any solid Right Wing author on the best-seller list. It’s automatic. It has nothing to do with books. It has to do with promoting the Right Wing (Fascist) agenda.

Let’s take for example a cretin named Mark Levin. He sells books on a large scale for precisely this reason…the support of the Right Wing. And why? Well, here is how he serves them. Just some examples of his work.

He refers to small business being “under attack” from government. People who are exclusively involved in small businesses do not agree. They never bring up government or government regulation in small business seminars. Never. The topics are…people, how to get them and keep them. Customers, how to get them and keep them. Financing, how to get it…and they can’t or have a very hard time of doing so. And remember, the government is not financing small business. The private banks do, or at least that is what they should be doing. But they are not.

At one point, in an interview, (and these are his exact words) “And we hear these politicians saying, ‘we have to have skin in the game.’ And I think to myself, skin in the game, is that what we were founded for, to have skin in the game? No. We were founded for them to assure that our liberty is protected. Not for us to give skin in the game to the bureaucrats and the politicians.”

Does anyone have any idea what that means? First of all, no one is saying that someone else should have “skin in the game.” No one has used that term at all, ever, except this clown, Mark Levin. Second…it is a meaningless phrases and even more meaningless the way he presents it. We are asked to have skin in the game, he says, but doesn’t explain why or to whom or what for or even what it is all about.

Then he says…no…no skin in the game…just protect my liberty. What? Who is not protecting his liberty. We spend $700 billion a year, more than all the countries of the world combined to protect his liberty! We’re in two wars. We bombed Eastern Europe. We killed Bin Laden. We sent planes and drones to make sure that Kaddahfi was bumped off. We are the strongest country in the world by far. How much protection does this yellow-bellied, draft-dodging coward want?

Now here is one of the maniacal idiocies that Mark Levin puts in his books. In an interview he says that the Ayatollah Khomeini was inspired by Plato’s Republic to create a “genocidal theocracy” in Iran. It was largely because, Levin states, the Greeks wanted health care for everyone so that they could control everyone. Ok? Having health care for everyone was going to enable them to control the population by euthanizing the sick and the elderly.

So, here we have a parallel drawn by Mark Levin….he finally reads Plato which most of us did in college…and his analysis (or so he says) is that if you read and are influenced by Plato, you are for health care (he apparently is not, or is only for health care for some…and some would call that de facto euthanizing about 45,000 people a year) and you are in league with Khomeini’s followers and aligned with Iran. All that from one simple reading of The Republic.

Next, he moves on to his fantasy interpretation of Thomas Moore’s Utopia. Here’s his opening about Utopia, “Thomas Moore’s Utopia…many people argue it was a fiction…” When you read or hear that, think of it this way, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs…many people argue that it was a fiction…” Of course it was a fiction, idiot. It was (St.) Thomas Moore’s imagined ideal society.

Of course, Levin goes on, because he want to make an “intellectual” argument to all the bumbleheads who listen to him. He says: “And that’s the problem. Communism in many respects is based on this notion of radical egalitarianism.” Somehow, an obscure book is creating wave among Democrats. Of course, Utopia has had virtually no influence from the late 16th Century until now on anything except perhaps a couple of communes in Arizona or California in the heydays of pot and hippiedom.

From this odd, largely unread source Levin says that the Democrats are now working on “the attempt at equal incomes the attempt at phony representative government.” Does this strike an immediate chord with you? Are you going to leave the totalitarian Democratic Party?

Let’s see. That would be the one fighting against people like Levin who are restricting the vote. It would be those who are coming out into the streets of lower Manhattan, sleeping there, in protest of the actions of the rich and powerful. This would be the same Democrats who want to raise the taxes on the rich to 39.6 percent and thereby “equalize” the incomes of the Koch Brothers at something like $20 billion a year–after equalization—with the average worker’s $46,000.

Levin is trying hard but so far he’s flunking his humanities exam on Plato and Thomas Moore. He even refers to “isolationism” (which has always been a Republican value) as coming from the idea of a peninsula and people being pushed out of urban areas into suburban areas in Utopia. It is bizarre the way he tries to shoehorn things that Moore said to make them fit today’s reality.

He then goes on to compare Moore obliquely to Mao Tse-tung. So a Utopian society, an imagined world, is translated into hard-core Communism and…and…the implications of course…the whole purpose of his commentary is…to tie the Democrats to this kind of thinking. He then ties the Communist Manifesto to another much, much earlier philosopher, of the 17th Century, Thomas Hobbes.

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, during the height of the English Civil War. Cromwell and his parliamentarian ideas had defeated Charles II . Hobbes was a monarchist, and his book was devoted to showing the relationship that citizens should have to a monarchical authority and vice versa. But there was no question who held authority…the central government in the form of a benign monarch.

So why does Levin use this arbitrary example? So that, once again, he can make comparisons between this “intellectual” political theory and the Democrats. Absolutists, big central government, and as Levin puts it “this monstrous centralized sovereign” have control over citizens with a contract (compact is Levin’s term) from which they cannot escape.

So, Levin says, see…you cannot escape paying taxes, nor can the “sovereign” escape giving you unemployment (thanks to Democrats) or Social Security (thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrat) or Medicare, (thanks to Democrats. It passed with no Republican votes and a heavy lobbying against it by Ronald Wilson Reagan while he was still working for GE.)

If Levin were looking for a real advocate rather than a phony one that he could compare to a “tyranny” he could have used John Locke. Locke was also a proponent of the social contract, was not a monarchist and was perhaps the most influential source for the Declaration of Independence.
Levin is a little unintentionally funny when he says that Hobbes thought people were “nasty, brutish…and there’s a famous quote of his…” But Levin should really have read Leviathan rather than simply reading the Cliff Notes or the comic book version. What Hobbes is referring to—remember this was during the British Civil War—was that life, not the people.

Life, he maintains, in a time of war demands that people do what is necessary to take care for their own welfare because in those times, life is often “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Which of course seems to be the kind of life that Mark Levin and his monopolist sponsors want to return to society today. They falsely accuse the Obama administration by making these absurd comparisions, hoping that no one has read anything, while actually supporting Wall Street and the oil cartel and others who would destroy American Society completely.

Oh, but Levin is not through yet. He hasn’t yet earned his thirty pieces of silver from Pontius Pilate. Now he brings up the Communist Manifesto, which he says “…is really trash.” One of the great, if controversial, documents of world history, influencing billions of people…trash, according to Levin. “They create the ‘straw man’ of these two classes, the landowners and the laborers.” Straw man? I guess we must all have been wrong about the Russian Nobility who owned all the land…not just 90% of the land…all the land…and their workers, the serfs, the laborers, who were bound to the land, like slaves.

And that was not just in Russia. Has anyone ever heard of the right of primogeniture? This is the right of the first born son of a landowner, in Continental Europe and Eastern Europe, England and probably, very likely, Russia…to inherit the family land and continue to pass it down generation after generation.

That domination and ownership of land by the nobility and later the transfer of that same idea to the ownership of manufacturing facilities became the clear distinction between owners and workers during and after the Industrial Revolution. And in the mid-19th century two political theorists, journalists and activists, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid out those relationships and in the Communist Manifesto said that they were not fair or morally sustainable. This is what Levin calls “trash.”

Of course the idea of bringing up the Communist Manifesto is to try to make a comparison between the Democratic Party and the idea of destroying everything in its path. Which, of course, is what Communism became under the Bolsheviks and Lenin but which was not exactly the intention of Marx and Engels. Nonetheless, there is no comparison between the capitalist-based, democratically empowered ideas of the Democratic Party and those of totalitarian Communism. Levin knows it but he is, of course, a liar.

And why does Levin do these things? Remember, the ideas of the Republican Party in the last 20 years has been to use Fascist methods. Here is one that applies to Levin. You, Levin, belong to a Party that is authoritarian and dominates the thinking and the actions of its members. So what do you do? You compare your enemy to the very thing that you most resemble, in this case, the ideas, as described and interpreted by Levin, of Leviathan. In other words, you steal something from someone’s pocket and then you point to the very person from whom you stole it and cry “Thief! This man stole something from me.”

He then goes on to say that people have died, been brutalized under theses theories…once again, use the rhetoric that describes what you want your audience to register in their minds….Utopian, bigger, more powerful, issues regulations….all the buzz words of the Right. The idea is just to set up a framework…that the “politicians” (and who does Levin think he’s kidding…he means “Democratic” politicians) are too Utopian.

The comparison of course, that the billionaire-supported Levin wants to make is between this Levin-created idea of “Utopia” existing only in his mind, and the “Constitution” which again, is an interpretation that exists only in his mind. He says of course that the Constitution does not allow for a “Utopia” where there would be health care, social security, Medicare for the aged, subsidies for health care for the poor, and benefits to those who work but are laid off.

None of those things are in the “Constitution” as Levin interprets it for us from the demands of the billionaires who want to pay less taxes, not more…which they are going to pay no matter what Mark Levin says. Of course Levin says that FDR tried to “destroy” individualism, you must “attack” individualism to control the country from the central government.

So, here we go again, the Utopians are attacking the Forefathers. Ridiculous. We have come so far from the original government of this country that we are lucky to have any Constitution left at all. Every single person in government owned slaves in 1789 or knew someone, or was moderately at least friendly with someone who did. We no longer own slaves, nor even allow segregation. Times change. People change. Except Mark Levin.

Of course Levin takes two words that President Obama once used in a speech “fundamental transformation” of society, by which he meant more education and a better ability to respond to international competition…and Levin changes their meaning completely…which he admits. He says: “these are not my words; they are Obama’s words.” But then he makes up what his own meaning.

So his version has two points. Does the President, he asks, have the power to fundamentally transform America? The answer to the question and the premise that he made up in his head is of course “No.” And then he says, based on his own premise, not that of the President’s which was completely different…”That means you don’t like America very much.”

We could go on for pages and pages about this guy because his lies are relentless. He works hard for his masters. He wants to be paid by those billionaires and multi-millionaires. So he keeps it up. But whenever you get the chance, look up Mark Levin on YouTube. And remember when you give to Democratic candidates that the kinds of lies I laid out here are falling on the ears of people listening to radio, day in and day out. These lies, no matter how outrageous, begin to take their toll.

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The problem is that the moral of the story is always the same: It is how someone is an ignoramus. President Clinton was an ignoramus…22 million jobs, a balanced budget and a war won in 30 days with no casualties to the contrary. This time President Obama has become Newt’s object of scorn. He is variously the traitor or the warmonger, depending on the day of the week, or the superficial Liberal, the callous elitist or the inexperienced buffoon who ruined the economy. While we understand that Newt is trying to get a nomination to run a Presidential campaign, his taking one small sliver of truth and turning into a monumental lie is not the way a man who wants to be President should try to get there.

So we will point out his outright lies and obfuscations. When we are through, no one should believe him.

Here’s a good example. Newt wants to do away with Social Security. He wants to do away with it because…to keep it will cost the government money. So Newt will discuss the Chilean retirement program. He will say that Chile has a good voucher program that enables people to retire with a substantial amount of their income.

The fact is that it was established to be a good, private retirement program by American consultants in Chile. The idea was that it would pay something like a third of the average income of a person on retirement, which would be at 60. So if you made the average income in Chile, about $6,000, you’d get about $2,000. The problem is that it did not work.

The program offered five different mutual funds and they have different fees. Many Chileans opt for an annuity, which means that they pass up their retirement funds and have a monthly income, like…Social Security. It is a little more expensive, about 10% versus our 7%. But the Conservative U.S. consultants working with Dictator Pinochet, decided that, no, companies (all owned by the rich in Chile) should pay nothing. The workers get less in net proceeds from the system. It is like our health system in that the overhead eats up a lot of the proceeds to the workers. That is why the workers are leaving the system and going back to the government system that has always run in tandem.

So Newt’s solution is to give everyone a personal retirement account. There would be mutual funds that would be handled by people like Charlie Schwab or Lloyd Blankfein…who tried to get your money under Bush, and would have, except that the Democrats tossed the scheme out the window. The problem with the system in Chile is that it is a private system. Not everyone has it. And many of those who have it are leaving it, opting for a government system because the 15% in fees they are paying annually is often wiping out any gains they may have.

We need to overhaul our Social Security system. It is not a retirement system…the money pays creates only a poverty level income. With Medicare costs to seniors increasing it barely sustains life. But Newt has no plans to take Social Security in hand and perhaps pay back all the money that he and his Republican congressional colleagues stole to pay for wars and tax cuts for the rich. Let’s just say that Newt is less than credible on his comments having to do with retirement and programs for the elderly. He is far, far from a social progressive.

Well then, what about energy policy? Newt loves the Bakken Shale deposits. The Bakken oil shale contains about 20 billion barrels of oil that can be extracted. It was thought that there were only about 3 or 4 billion but modern methods have changed those estimates. The extraction is not a tidy process but it provides a good income and some strong economic activity in areas of North Dakota and Montana.

So 20 billion barrels of oil would handle our national needs for about 3 years, if it were to fulfill our needs, which are slightly less than 7 billion barrels a year. So, all this wonderful Bakken shale oil that Newt is predicting is similar to his 1994 predictions on the costs of health care. Working unbeknownst to us for the health insurance industry, he said that we did not need Clinton’s universal health care program because of the advent of HMOs would automatically begin to reduce prices. He lied then. He lies now about the Bakken oil shale deposits.

His current story is that if we use the Bakken and if we open up federal lands to drilling and off shore we can be independent of oil from the Middle East. He’s wrong. The Bakken Shale oil field dwarfs any other potential resources and as you can see it has a limited ability to solve our problems…3 years…and then only if we do not sell any of it to China…which is the existing plan.

Newt is really appealing to the fears of the American people in a subtle way. He’s saying…falsely…that we can have an impact on oil prices and by implication can bring gas prices down to $2.00, as he and other Republicans casually suggest. That can no longer happen or if it should, it would be a very temporary price war for some unknowable reason.

So it is all about politics. We’d all like $2.00 gasoline but it won’t happen again because we can’t come close to controlling the price of gas. Oil is priced on the world market and we simply do not and can not have the production to make a difference. Newt does not suggest, because he is not paid to, that we develop renewable energy, but we must. Fast.

Newt likes use the image of President Obama bowing to the Saudi ruler (the same one that George W. Bush held hands with.) Of course all heads of state bow to the Saudi ruler, out of respect for the Saudi customs…just as we do with the Japanese officials and their customs and many other rulers, including Queen Elizabeth. Newt’s political secret is that he can say truly stupid things like this and yet he knows how to do it without being called a moron. Newt says we will save this “embarrassment” because we will be energy independent.

Of course we will be…in his mind…because that is the only place that it could possibly happen. We use 22% of the world’s oil supply, and even with the Bakken, we only have about 5% of the world’s oil reserves. The Bakken is a big increase for us…but we are a small part of the world’s supply…not, as Newt mistakenly says…outrageously says…that we may be the world’s largest producer. We’re nowhere close.

Here are the facts about U.S. oil production. We produce a net 9 million barrels of oil a day. We’re not small potatoes. We’re the world’s third largest producer of oil. The problem is that we use about 19 billion barrels of oil a day, which means that we must import about 11 million barrels.

So is New right? Not really. We import most of our oil from the Western Hemisphere…Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. We only get about 18 percent from all the countries of the Persian gulf combined. So, if we stepped up our production, as Newt suggests, or put into place a conservation program, plus alternative fuels, plus a very environmentally friendly natural gas plan, we could cut the usage from the Persian gulf down to a trickle.

In fact, what Newt isn’t talking about is the fact that our consumption is way down and has been dropping because of deliberate efforts since the mid-2000’s. Under President Obama our domestic oil production, even with the necessary restrictions on deep water drilling after the BP disaster, is at an all time high.

Another thing that Newt doesn’t mention is that oil companies get a huge tax deduction, about 40% because of the fact that their natural resources are reduced every time they take a barrel from under the ground. But that has long ago been paid for. Additionally, many American energy corporations owe the government billions in unpaid royalties for drilling on leases from public lands. So there are many things to be done before we start drilling in everyone’s back yard.

Newt does bring up one very important point. He says that if we drill in Bakken, full tilt, drill in the national parks, drill in every piece of the Gulf where fish aren’t taking up space, we can create a million jobs. We need a million jobs, especially in the oil and gas business because those are the kinds of jobs that can create another million jobs. So that would put us about half way to where we need to be to start attacking the huge unemployment problem. If we could get one million energy jobs in place, every new job would start to put someone back to work who lost a job in the 2008-2009 crash.

And Newt points out something else we should consider. According to his “experts” the royalties from developing all of our oil resources could be as high as $18 trillion. Well, good. Then let’s develop our oil and natural gas resources with public companies or joint public-private companies. Let’s not pay royalties but keep the money for the government and for the workers and the taxpayers. We could then pay off the national debt that the oil companies helped to create. If the royalties are potentially $18 trillion, then the revenues to the Treasury, after cost of production, would have to be, at a minimum, in the range of $35 trillion!

The oil companies can hardly scream when they don’t use the leases we gave them. They can’t complain because we are doing something that their pal, Newt Gingrich recommended we do. Only Newt didn’t think that we would do it to make the country rich…only his super-rich, billionaire pals in the oil patch.

Newt doesn’t like taxes. Why should we “punish” the rich by taxing them, Newt wants to know. He doesn’t like our current top rate of 35%. He wants to bring taxes down to 15% top rate, flat tax. He literally says that he wants to make the goal for everyone to pay 15% and bring the size of the government down to balance at those revenues. That’s about five or six percent decrease from the present situation, in which we are spending one trillion more than we have.

Does anyone see a problem? Here’s what it would mean. No Social Security. None. No Medicare or Medicaid. None. They’d have to be abandoned. And Newt apparently hadn’t thought this through, like most of his proposals, because it would also mean a huge cut…huge…in our military spending. Remember…we already take in one trillion less than we spend and that is at a 35% top rate and a net of about 23% actually paid by the top earners. Even if we could eke out a real 15%, it would add 500 billion dollars to the deficit.

We have 312 million people, the third largest population of any country in the world after China and India. While the population grew, we cut government many times since 1988, making it more efficient, streamlining it and consolidating it. That is, we did until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the so-called “Neo-conservatives” came along and, with their cohorts in Congress went on $7 trillion spending spree with money we didn’t have.

Now the so-called “Tea Party” unskilled, inexperienced, pseudo-religious political hacks, put into office by Right Wing billionaire money, want to cut services for the average citizens (and the poor…no coincidence that a huge percentage are black) to cut taxes for the rich. And Newt wants to cut more taxes for the rich.

Newt wants to do away with the, as he puts it, “Death Tax.” Of course others of us call it the “Paris Hilton Retirement Plan.” The fact is that the Inheritance Tax is a substantial amount of money that would be lost to the government. Even with the deductions for the first $5 million inherited and then only about an average of about 15% actually paid on on the rest, the revenue to the treasury is about $32 billion annually. Now Newt would say that this is only about 4 days of running the government.

But others say that it could be the annual hospital costs for current veterans or school lunch programs for indigent kids. If the wealthy taxpayer keeps $5 million up front, then 85% of the rest, it should be enough to get by on. Even if you pay some tax, and keep, say, $5,850,000 out of $6 million…that doesn’t sound exorbitant. But how much does that $32 billion really mean to the government? Well, look at it this way. It is more than the annual gross national product of Bolivia and Iceland added together.

Let’s be rational for one single minute. If anyone should be taxed, it should be those who suddenly had more than $5 million that they didn’t earn dropped into their laps. It is the same as winning the lottery only you didn’t even buy a ticket. While you were waiting it is also more than likely that you were living in the lap of luxury. Then you got a much better tax rate than the lottery winners, who do not get the first $5 million tax-free. (Or $10 million if married! )

We are all taxed one way or another….and most of the taxes are NOT paid by the top one percent…that’s a manipulation of the facts…those people paying 15-25%, the ones above the poverty level up to the lower end of the top 5% pay the largest share of the tax burden. More than the rich. So, Newt is a failed thinker. Or a liar.

Newt hates Obamacare. He hated the Clinton proposals. He hates anything that the health insurers and the hospital lobby and the AMA groups that are still greedy…some have remembered who really pays their bills…not the insurance companies but the customers of the insurance companies who pay the premiums. For the privilege of staying alive.

Newt wants to prevent you from staying on your parents’ insurance up to age 26, as the new bill allows you to do. Here’s what he says: I want to get you a job instead. Is he kidding? Does he think anyone but the audiences at Bob Jones and Regency University and Hillsdale College who are paraded into the auditorium to applaud…actually believe this crap? What do you do if, as the Republicans have seen to it today, you don’t have a job? Something like an actual 20 million people or perhaps even more cannot find a good, full-time job.

Newt Gingrich has never once voted for a true jobs bill. He voted to cut government. He voted to put women on welfare to work in order to get their money. That’s what he calls a jobs bill. That wasn’t a totally bad idea. But it was actually President Clinton who did it and he did it the right way. It actually took women off welfare and eventually led them into meaningful jobs. Newt doesn’t want to help people up…he’s a latent, quiet, hypocritical racist. He liked the law when he thought it would punish lower class women.

We should turn the inner cities into laboratories of how we can train and employ people. We should invest as much money and effort and research and development into curing poverty as we do killing people. Then maybe we could go around the world helping people instead of shooting them and blowing them up.

Isn’t it ironic that the people we enslaved, who should now be helped and raised up, as Newt lies that he wants to do, should subsequently be humiliated and oppressed for simply being the result of their former enslavement, a great part of which was being deliberately kept in total ignorance. We now punish them for what we did to them.

Newt the “educator” taught political science classes that turned out to be merely Right Wing recruiting programs. Where was he in developing training programs for minorities or the superannuated worker, laid off with an industry that had been moved to China? Where was he when neighborhoods sent a tiny fraction to play sports, instead of sending the brightest academic stars in the ghetto to public colleges? he was nowhere.

The fact is that Newt Gingrich, while he pretends to be an activist and an intellectual, is neither. He was a bad legislator. He was fined and asked to resign. President? Newt Gingrich should not be considered for the presidency of so much as a junior college or a local PTA.

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This is new. It is part of the law that tries to stop health insurance companies from putting out health insurance that is low cost but really doesn’t cover anything. One of the basic needs of younger women particularly is access to contraception.

The Catholic Church doesn’t like this because it is against contraceptive devices. This is a hangover from ancient canon law, one designed to create more Catholics, larger families, in past eras, when infant mortality was greater, when more people were involved in agriculture and larger families therefore needed, and when the Roman Catholic Church was aggressively trying to expand in the wake of the diversity of religious beliefs and institutions.

So now comes this challenge from the Catholic Church and suddenly it is taken up in a somewhat specious argument by the Heritage Foundation. In arguments that are so ridiculous that they should be banned from the airwaves, the attacks are relentless.

“Obamacare is on a collision course with liberty generally and our first casualty is religious freedom.”

So sayeth a spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation. Before we demolish their arguments, let’s first remember where that comment is coming from and who the Heritage Foundation is.

And let’s also straighten out their logic. The Catholic Church is on a collision course with the needs and desires and legal rights of American citizens who do not hold their beliefs and who, regardless of Catholic beliefs, want access to birth control. That is the correct issue. Now, about Heritage…

The Heritage Foundation was begun in 1973 by Joseph Coors and William Mellon Scaife. Coors is a longtime opponent of unions, gays, civil rights, gun control laws and safety in the workplace. William Mellon Scaife funded most of the attacks on Bill Clinton through the “Arkanasas Project” at his magazine, the American Spectator. He also funded the Mountain States Legal Foundation, dedicated to such policies as oil shale mining in Rocky Mountain National Park.

One of both William Mellon Scaife’s and Joe Coor’s protégés was Gale Norton, who, when she became Secretary of Interior in the Bush Adminsitration, opened up national parks and national monuments to oil, mining and timber exploitation, while cutting funding for maintenance of the parks to practically nothing. After her chief deputy had been tried, convicted and jailed, she resigned and scurried back to Denver before she could be investigated by the Justice Department for some alleged collusive deals with Shell.

The Heritage Foundation’s surface comment is that the new health reform law is in conflict with the religious rights of churches. This is of course, nonsense. The reason for comments like these is the overwhelming opposition to health care by many of the Heritage Foundation’s supporters, such as the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the conservative leaders of global corporations and a segment of the super-rich. (Ones with the same Neo-Fascist approach as Coors and Scaife.)

Let’s overlook for a bit the fact that President Obama’s health care reforms are based on a system of health insurance exchanges. He could have opted for simply extending Medicare to those 55 and under, and then 45 and under and then to everyone over a period of time. Many Democrats feel that this would have been much better.

But he didn’t. To placate the health care establishment, he chose a more moderate approach. That is to say, rather than taking a meat axe to the corrupt health insurance industry, he decided to resurrect an old proposal to bring private health care under control using competitive health insurance exchanges.

This was an idea originally proposed by…are you ready…the Heritage Foundation. That proposal, which of course was not favored by a health insurance industry which quickly figured out what would happen, was adopted by Mitt Romney and the Massachusetts legislature. It was the basis for the Massachusetts universal health care bill. It turned out to be a good idea, so the Obama Administration jumped on it.

Both the Heritage Foundation and Governor Romney, however, are disassociating themselves from any kind of proposal that could have lead to universal health care. And why would that be? Well, it’s pretty simple. They fear the wrath of one of their key supporting groups: the “Big Healthcare” industry: health insurers, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.

Just to give you an idea of the financial clout of the health care industry, during the health care reform debate…in a period of no more than 9 months in 2009 in trying to defeat the bill…they spent $400 million dollars in campaign contributions, direct lobbying efforts and on television commercials. Not only did they spend it in Washington but they also went into the home districts of many of the Congressmen and Senators involved in the various committees taking up the legislation.

The federal law says that every woman who has health insurance must (i.e. the law demands it, therefore the term “mandate,”)–must be allowed to have the means of contraception. In other words, the Catholic Church cannot overrule the Federal Government. The contraception may be provided by an insurer working for the Church, but the Church cannot withhold access.

That is how the law that Governor Romney signed in Massachusetts read also. Romney is once again flip-flopping on an issue to first get the Republican nomination, then he will flop back and say that while he did approve in Massachusetts, he will now repeal health care reform if he is elected.

The Republican Tea Party members, working on behalf of the health insurance industries have said that this new rule under ACA (Obamacare) is a “violation of religious freedom” when it is not only NOT a violation of religious freedom, but also the permitting of these Church groups to deny contraception would be a violation of the Constitution.

Church groups have the right to impose their beliefs on their members, but when they deal with other members of society, they have no right to impose their beliefs. And their own workers would be included in that broader definition of “citizens” who cannot be told what they can or cannot do in civil situations by the Church.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Right Wing so-called ethics organization has said that this new law is wrong because the Church-run organizations must either violate their convictions or get out of the business that they are in. But that is not true. These organizations contract with health insurance companies to provide health care to their employees.

It is the health insurance company that must follow the law and provide contraceptive devices or pills. If the Church decides to do this, then the Church is acting not as a religious organization as far as the government is concerned. It is acting as a health insurance provider and health insurance providers must offer contraception.

This must be made clear. This health care law is the farthest thing from what some call “despotism.” This is typical exaggerated rhetoric on the Right. It is basically a way of telling a lie without seeming to be a liar.

These “ethical” people…who are wrong, and they know it—they can read the law as well as anyone else…deliberately call something a vile, evil act designed to grind down the people (i.e. despotism) when, in fact, it is simply providing a needed service to people who are eligible for it under the law, often desperately need it and overwhelmingly say they want it.

Catholic institutions do not “have to get out of the business of helping the poor or educating people” simply because they have decided that…just as in the case of the children raped by Catholic Priests…they think that they are above the law. The Catholic Church may not like contraception, but if they cannot allow their non-catholic workers to have access to contraception, then they are violating the law.

The People are not at fault here. The great masses of American men and women want birth control. The only reason the American people are involved…in the Church’s words…in “making them violate their principles” is that the Church in this case is denying them their civil rights. It is a current civil right under the law to be able to get birth control. Insurers normally provide it. The only one intruding is the Catholic Church, interrupting that process.

If we were to follow the logic that the Church must not allow society to make them violate their beliefs, then Catholic priests, nuns and bishops should be out invading every pharmacy and trying to steal and destroy birth control pills and devices. They would be blowing up pharmaceutical companies where birth control pills are made.

The Church would like you to believe that they are active in this issue but they are not. A majority…many more than a majority, but a majority at a very minimum, of Catholic women take birth control pills regularly. The Catholic Church knows it, knows that it cannot and will not stop, and yet they do not excommunicate or in any way punish these women…yet they would with hold birth control pills from their employees. It is total lunacy.

There was not, as the Heritage Foundation’s blog presenter suggested a great hue and cry when this was announced. Eighty percent of American families say that they use and want access to birth control. The only hue and cry came from the Catholic Church, and as soon as it began to make noise, the Republican Party apparently on some kind of hari kari suicide mission, decided to join in and support a position that most women find ridiculous.

The logic is pretty simple. If you want birth control to be available to you and if you want the Catholic Church to act like any other legal non-profit in this country, and obey the laws by not intruding into your life and if you want them to enforce the laws within their own religion by turning in their priests to local government authorities when they are discovered to have raped or sodomized a child, then vote DEMOCRATIC.

If you believe that the Catholic Church should be able to tell you, if you work for one of their institutions, how you should handle your sex life and your reproductive situation and if you think that they should handle their problems of rape and sodomy internally and not involve legal authorities…then vote REPUBLICAN.

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