You Americans out there: it’s time. The primaries are approaching, which means you and all your friends have a chance to vote in the only 2014 elections that truly matter… the ones in the spring, not the fall! Tell everyone you know to use this one little trick and we all, as individuals, can help defeat gerrymandering… and thus help de-radicalize American politics. YOU can do it. By getting all your friends to re-register using this one little trick…
== The parties are the same? ==
That is the new mantra being fed to depressed “ostrich republicans,” who can tell that their party has gone insane, but are scratching for any excuse to hold on to their old loyalties… “They’re all corrupt statists… so let’s assume the dems are worse and hold your nose and vote GOP!”
Look, I am conservative enough to prefer a budget that’s close to balanced, and libertarian enough to think government should be very tightly scrutinized and always need to satisfy a burden of proof, that its services would not be better performed by… us. I show such trends — toward a devolution of government activity to tech-empowered citizens — in EXISTENCE. Indeed, anyone who shares those desires… along with wanting a scientific, flat-and-open, just and entrepreneurial and future-looking civilization… would have to be crazy to support the current (hijacked) version of the GOP.
One graphic shows clearly how gullible are all the watchers of Fox News, who actually believe the rant that Democrats are the fiscally irresponsible big-spenders. It starts with the Clinton era surpluses then shows how revenues initially dropped under the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy… without any “supply side” (SS) rebound. (SS has never predicted correctly, even once.)
Watch the the spectacular (9/11/Iraq/Afghanistan) rise in spending – and in taxation (now pounding the middle class) – under republican rule, then even steeper, after they torched the economy and revenues plunged in Bush’s last two years. Then? The chart shows federal spending almost perfectly FLAT under Obama, proving the one truth that should make any fiscal conservative vote democratic. That the 2nd derivative of deficit is always negative under demmies and almost always positive under goppers.
Show this. Remind your crazy uncle that we narrowly avoided a second great depression.
This is not about classic left-right issues. It is about insanity.
== Wisdom from … Osama bin Laden? ==
Anyone — including Buckley-Goldwater conservatives — who believes that the currently constituted Republican Party — the version owned by Rupert Murdoch — with its heritage of Bushite calamity — should ever again be trusted with anything more than a burnt match, should contemplate the following quotation from Osama bin Laden.
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
“This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahedin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”
It’s not that Osama wasn’t our enemy. He deserved to die (note who killed him) and the Taliban who assisted him deserved to fall. But did we have to chase him in exactly the fashion that he wanted us to? In exactly the way that the 9/11 attacks were designed to entice? Plunging — Russia-style — into a futile, absurdly senseless exercise in so-called “nation-building,” into a quagmire attrition of insurgency in Asia? Didn’t we learn that mistake in Vietnam?
Note that my complaint is in no way “leftist.” It is as one who actually thinks rather well of Pax Americana — compared to all other eras across all of human history. As one who believes that PA must remain a strong and calming world leader for at least another decade or two or three. One who knows many generals and admirals, most of whom (at one level or another) have expressed horror over being so badly led during the Bush years.
Frankly, I do not care if this quotation attributed to bin Laden is real or an urban legend. It blatantly expresses what the 9/11 attacks were for. And the Bushites knew this when they plunged us into trillions of dollars of waste and thirteen years of agony, leaving only two victors on the battlefield. One was Iran…. and the other group was Bush family companies like Haliburton and Bechtel.
(See the extremely different ways that (fundamentally) Democrats and Republicans wage war. )
This is not about who’s a pussy. It is about who is competent. Who preserves the reserves and keeps readiness high. Who is smart enough to avoid blatant traps that only overcompensating small-organ twits would fall for. The kind of overcompensating twits who are the opposite of Patriots, no matter how loudly they yell “Yoo Hess Hay!”
== Return of the Feudal Pyramid ===
Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, takes a somewhat radicalized investigative expose of how the corporate world uses tax havens to shirk paying its share of taxes. This costs the United States alone 100 billion dollars in lost revenue each year. As you dive into this subject, the only question that keeps popping up is “am I being insufficiently radical in my anger over this?”
Now we see why the mantra of the new-right and of the hyper-libertarians is “death to all government” as a matter of fundamental principle, instead of the older movement to minimize or reform. It must be absolute war, because only civil servants stand in the way of utter feudal oligarch. Hence civil servants must be “statist” satans… nothing less. Let’s ignore that for 6000 years the enemy of freedom was oligarchic feudalism, whose rebirth is chronicled in books like this… till the lords forbid books like this altogether.
Liberal moderates can fight back by reclaiming “the first liberal” – Adam Smith – as their very own. His call for flat-open-fair-accountabble competitive markets included uplifting all children to a level playing field. A level field whose destruction is the sole and central goal of the New Lords.
TO THE BRINK 