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Jul 31, 2011

The fraud of "equal sacrifice"

 

[NOBAMA]..   The fraud of "equal sacrifice"

Not having had a TV for 5 years is a blessing.  For Obama's speech, I did not have to look into the face of my President as he lied, nor listen to even more lies from House Speaker Boehner.  

Instead, I got the full impact by downloading transcripts soon after, and studied them carefully at my leisure, highlighting their false statements.  There was little white paper left. Both speeches were political frauds at every level.

There is NO Economic Crisis regarding the Debt Ceiling.  This false Crisis was manufactured in order to drive a hole thru the Middle Class of America from which it shall not recover.  Wall $treet Banksters intend that Americans shall be in debt to them now and forevermore, Amen.  DINO Republican President Obama is their tool to accomplish their goal, by pretending this invented Crisis demands it.  Every time Obama said he wanted a "balanced approach", he lied.

Take $100 from someone living on Social Security that they paid for, then balance the effect by taking a million from a multi-millionaire.  Even then, the rich won't feel the loss.

And Boehner's Cut, Cap & Balance is better know as Slash, Choke & Whack.

The "debate" in Washington about the Federal Deficit was rigged in advance. Everyone is supposed to take as Gospel that massive cuts must be made to Federal Safety Net programs that benefit working people of the Middle and Lower Classes.  Working people did not cause this, nor cause either of our 2 Economic Depressions.  But a massive transfer of wealth to our wealthiest Americans did. 

Most guilty are Congressional "Party of the People" Democrats who are selling out the Middle Class, as rapidly as possible.  Obama is holding the majority of Americans hostage while he meets his obligation to repay the Casino Bankers and Out-of-Control Corporations who put him in the White House to serve them.

Swept into the Presidency on the belief that he was the next FDR, Obama has been steadfastly proving that he is a Republican, not a Democrat.  No Democrat would touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other Safety Net programs to justify raising an ersatz Debt Ceiling.  Only a Republican would do this.  Wall $treet could not finish the job under Bush, so they hired Obama to do it.

Obama and the novice freshman tea party majority in the House are using an orchestrated Crisis to create false conditions for an unprecedented attack on the living standards and rights of working people of America.  Make no mistake about it.  This is a Class War, started by the rich 30 years ago, to dismantle the New Deal guarantees made to all Americans, which served us for a half century, keeping in check the excessive wealth that collapsed the Economy during the Great Depression.

There is NO benefit to ordinary Americans outlined anywhere in these 2 speeches.  There is NO connection between raising the Debt Ceiling and cutting Social Programs.  The Debt Ceiling was raised 18 times by Reagan, 7 times by GwB, 10 times in the past 10 years.  And no one was hurt by doing it.

So why is this fraud harming so many?  The former Republican Party became the tea party Conservatives, and Obama was drug to the right by his financial Masters, and became a Republican.  No Democratic Party is represented in the current White House.  Bush's financial engineers still run our economy.

The 2 parties in power represent the American Financial Aristocracy, on the rise since Reagan's Presidency was used to deregulate our Government for Wall $treet's benefit, and more under every President since, defeating Clinton's attempt to bring the excesses of the Healthcare Mafia under control.

The wealth, income and power hoarded by this obscenely corrupt Aristocracy has been built by systematically destroying the Middle Class in America, and blaming it on anything but the real causes:  more Wars for profit of the rich, less Taxes for the rich, and endless Deregulation of Corporations which are robbing America blind, shipping jobs overseas as rapidly as possible.

Obama delivered a speech intended to con Americans, using FEAR, the standard weapon of Rethuglicans.  He hinted at not sending out Social Security checks to frighten seniors, when Obama knows there are several easy solutions to avoid this fake "Crisis" -- without involving a gridlocked Congress -- which he neglected to mention.  

Obama refuses to face this corrupt Attack which demands his adamant protection for Americans.  Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to dismantle FDR's Safety Net, the wet dream of the Wealth Aristocracy, using his false "balanced approach."

Obama's speech was a profound lie, calculated to fool and mislead the American people.  This is no FDR Democrat.  Obama proved beyond any doubt that he is a Wall $treet Republican.

Somehow in his trickle-down mind, Obama thought he could con the American people into supporting spending cuts to social programs which are NOT the problem, driving millions more toward poverty, while leaving the gargantuan riches of the Wealth Aristocracy untouched, financing the deficit fix on the backs of those he is robbing.

Boehner was expected to lie to his tea party base.  But virtually every sentence in Republican Obama's 15-minute address was also a lie.

There is NO "equal sacrifice" proposed.

So what did Obama's 'fireside chat' accomplish?  It was the grease applied to Americans' backsides for the Republican screw job that is about to be delivered to them.

[NOBAMA] 

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Disaster Warning on 'Gang of Six'

By Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News  20 July 11
Disaster Warning: 'Gang of Six' deal sacrifices Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to GOP madness.

he latest idea to emerge in negotiations over a deficit-reduction package came from a group of senators that calls itself the Gang of Six. The proposal would be a disaster, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned. "The plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country. Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations."

"This is an approach that should be rejected by the American people. At a time when the rich are becoming richer and corporate profits are soaring, at least half of any deficit-reduction package must come from upper income people and profitable corporations. We must also take a hard look at military spending, which has tripled since 1997."

Summary of the "Gang of Six Plan"

Provides Major Tax Cuts to the Wealthy and Large Corporations.

  • The Gang of Six plan reduces the top marginal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations from 35 percent to as low as 23 percent (about 34 percent lower than the top tax rates under Bush).

  • Instead of reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax, it abolishes it altogether providing a major tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

  • It reduces the deficit by about $3.7 trillion over 10 years, while providing a net tax cut of $1.5 trillion that will mainly go to the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations.

  • In other words, 100 percent of the deficit reduction achieved by the Gang of Six plan is through spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, child care, Head Start, LIHEAP, the environment, and other programs that the sick, the elderly, the children, and working families need.

  • Any tax revenue that is raised by closing tax loopholes for large corporations must be used to lower tax rates.

  • Revenue raisers cannot be used to increase spending at all. Revenue raisers can only be used to lower tax rates or reduce the deficit.

Reduces the Deficit on the Backs of the Elderly, the Children, the Sick, and Working Families.

  • It imposes undefined spending caps to be in effect until at least 2015 that could only be raised by 67 votes in the Senate.

Immediately Reduces Cost of Living Adjustments for Social Security Benefits.

  • Even though Social Security recipients haven't gotten a COLA for 2 straight years, the Gang of Six believes that the formula for calculating COLAs is too generous.

  • Under their plan, they would ensure that seniors never get a fair COLA by shifting to the Chained-CPI which would significantly understate inflation for seniors.

  • Under the Gang of Six plan, ten years from now the typical 75-year-old will see their Social Security benefits cut by $560 a year, and the average 85-year-old will see a cut of $1,000 a year.

Slashes Medicare.

  • Cuts Medicare by at least $298 billion over 10 years.

Holds Deficit Reduction Hostage to Cutting Social Security Benefits.

  • If the Gang of Six deficit reduction plan receives 60 votes, it will not be sent to the House until and unless the Senate also adopts a plan to reform Social Security so that it is solvent for the next 75 years.

  • If 60 Senators don't vote to approve an undefined 75-year Social Security solvency bill, the deficit reduction plan dies, even if 60 Senators voted to approve it.

  • Social Security is solvent for the next 25 years. No other government program can make that claim.

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A personal observation from having lived thru it:

Once we had a progressive tax code, which served to protect us ordinary folk from criminal excesses caused by obscene accumulations of wealth among those who did not have the wisdom to use it well.

The more you earned, the larger was your fair share paid back to this Great Nation which allowed you to accumulate your wealth, which went as high as 90%.  I grew up with this notion, and it seemed sufficiently fair to me.  If Uncle Sam allowed me to earn a lot, I owed a lot back.

Until the Global meltdown in 2008, which soon took out my 30-year small business, and now forces me to live in poverty on Social Security, I had not noticed, nor had reason to notice, that the filthy rich were rigging the game to pay less and less in taxes, so that now, those who caused the Global Economy to collapse, such as the Derivative & Hedge Fund criminals, pay the leastest on the mostest. 

I had no reason to notice, because I was taught, and I trusted, that my Government had been organized to protect me from criminals.  Which, it had been.  But the criminals kept sneaking thru the cracks and kidnapping the lawmakers.  And what had been built for half a century as a defense to protect me, was stolen, leaving empty shell laws, designed to make rich people richer at the expense of the rest of us.

And now, in this first decade of the 21st century, criminals in Congress are focused on stealing more from me, you, and our working friends of the Middle Class, to make the filthy rich filthier.  Rethugs want the richest to be taxed at 24%, or 15%, or for Corporations, not at all.

All of this is to make them richer, which makes them more dangerous to democracy.

Yes, excessive wealth is an absolute danger to any democracy.

How did the America Dream of my youth get turned on its head while I quietly went about doing my simple task, making folks happy by teaching them how to make thing of glass?

In the package which criminals in the current Congress are demanding for their greed-driven Masters, they want their wealth taxed even less, so they can abscond with more of what they steal here in America, moving more of it off-shore to avoid more taxes.  

Where and when was it ever written that anyone had a right to be a billionaire on a planet with too many people for its finite resources?  How much is a fair share of an ever limited pot?

If it were up to me, I'd balance the budget by taxing everything over a million dollars at 100%.   You get the glory of earning it, but in fairness to the rest of us who make your wealth possible, you do not get to keep it.

And Corporations?  They are legal fictions invented by the Government to serve the Government by providing good employment to people and to pay taxes, and therefore have no right to avoid taxation (like GE having a hundred tax-avoidance attorneys and accountants, all tax deductible).  Nor should legal fictions have any right to influence any vote anywhere at any time.

In a democracy, or Democratic Republic as the Baggers insist on saying, only live human beings can vote, and therefore, only they should be able to contribute money to any Candidate.  No legal fictions allowed.

Sounds more like one person, one vote to me.  

And the first step to accomplish this is to remove a Republican masquerading as a Democrat.

[NOBAMA]

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This is follow up to Israel Shamir's Analysis of Breivik's Ideas...

 

This is follow up to Israel Shamir's Analysis of Breivik's Ideas; the first part can be found on http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Unmanning-II.htm 


The Friday 22 Massacre

Part Two. Breivik Sees Red

By Israel Shamir

 

Breivik hated Reds even more than Muslims. The Pakis should be deported, but the Commies – shot as traitors, he wrote in his 2083. He fumed against communism like Hitler in Mein Kampf, but Hitler had better reasons. Hitler competed against the Communists for the hearts of German workers, AND Hitler competed against the softies within the national-socialist movement in Germany, who (notably the brothers Strasser) were prepared to deal with communists.

A long time has passed since then. Communism won in the titanic struggle of 1945, but suffered a huge setback in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequently, anticommunism has lost its meaning since at least 1991, but probably even earlier. Today, it could possibly mobilise a few old-timers in Washington DC, but maybe not even them.

 

It is with great astonishment we witnesses of Communism's defeat read in 2083 that Communism was victorious:

 

"The US but especially W. Europe lost the Cold War due to the fact that we didn't persecute the Marxists after WW2. If we had executed each and every Marxist and banned Marxist doctrines (not only the economical aspects but the cultural as well – internationalism, extreme feminism, extreme egalitarianism, anti-elitism, anti-nationalism) we would not be in the current situation. Instead, our traitorous and weak minded post-WW2 leaders allowed the Marxists to gradually infiltrate many aspects of society after WW2, especially our universities and the media (see the beginning of book 1 for a complete overview of how this happened). The first ML pioneers (Marxist-Leninists) were allowed to indoctrinate the '68 generation, those who run things today."

 

Breivik arrives at the unexpected conclusion that both the EU and the US are, in our present age, "socialist" or even "communist" states, "EUSSR and USSR" organised in accordance with Marx's teachings. I did not know that Karl Marx envisaged a society with hundreds of billionaires and millions of paupers. One would have to be mad to describe the contemporary US and EU as "communist dictatorships" – these societies are extremely inegalitarian -- workers are on the bottom, while the super-wealthy have an ostentatious lifestyle unheard of even in Medici's Florence.

 

The reason for this unexpected conclusion is that Breivik intentionally confuses Marxism-Leninism as the ruling ideology of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with the neo-Marxist western ideology of Fromm and Adorno, Marcuse and Lukacs. With all due respect, the Cold War was NOT a war with them, but a war against the USSR and its allies, a war with its geopolitical as well as ideological components. Western neo-Marxists were rather the allies of the Capitalist West in that war, and their contribution to the fall of the Eastern citadel of Communism was enormous, as they successfully undermined the Russian elites' belief in their own ideology.

 

Though Breivik quarrels with the Western Marxists, he finds it convenient to connect them with the Gulag and with alleged mass murders in the USSR. This is dishonest: the Western neo-Marxists were against Stalin, and they called their Eastern brethren "Stalinists", at least since the short-sighted Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956.

 

Khrushchev, a crypto-Trotskyite, frogmarched the Communists through an unnecessary and unpopular de-Stalinisation instead of letting bygones be bygones. Nowadays President Medvedev is talking again about de-Stalinisation; probably this talk will prevent his re-election. The people of Russia have differing views about Stalin, but the vast majority were and are against de-Stalinisation, for to them it symbolises the breakdown of the national masculine heroic paradigm.

 

Breivik accuses the Communists of supporting "extreme feminism". This is odd. Joseph Stalin was the ultimate symbol of masculinity: the great Yugoslav director Dushan Makkaveev depicted him in his Mysteries of the Organism in priapic form. De-Stalinisation can be viewed as an attempt to unman the Father-figure of the Communist world. Again, Breivik's ridiculous claim can be explained by his desire to gather all the Reds into one big heap: from grim NKVD commissars to California sociologists to the Norwegian teenagers he shot. He learned this nasty trick from his Neocon teachers: they paint every nationalist by the same brush as Adolf Hitler.

 

We reject it out of hand: not every traditionalist and nationalist is a Breivik or a Hitler; the Communists take differing positions on tradition, with Eastern Stalinists being quite conservative, traditional and mildly nationalist, while Western neo-Marxists rejected the bourgeois nationalism which caused two world wars.

 

Breivik stresses the Communist origins of the Frankfurt school's founders, of Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács – but the neocons, too, were red-diaper babies or even active Trots before switching sides. Gramsci indeed dreamed of cultural hegemony as the means of arriving at socialism. He thought that a new "Communist man" might be created before any political revolution. However, Gramsci was mistaken. This theory of Gramsci was used to preach a reformist, non-revolutionary way, avoiding a violent takeover of banks and factories. The idea was played up by the Euro-Communists and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, disappeared with the Euro-Communist parties.

 

Lenin was right, and Gramsci was wrong: you have to take away from the capitalists both their chequebooks and their factories, their weapons and their newspapers, their parliament and their government, otherwise they will turn every agenda of yours to their benefit. The Frankfurt school and other Western neo-Marxists stood by the West in the Cold War.

 

The Western neo-Marxists behaved like the proverbial man who searched for a lost coin under the lamppost. Though he knew he had lost the coin elsewhere, there was more light under the lamppost. They did not know how to interact with workers, and so preferred to work with minorities, students, feminists. It was easier, but led nowhere, as we now see. The workers of Spain and Greece rose up last month, but the neo-Marxists were nowhere to be found. They did not lead this real popular revolt, as they were only used to their toy revolutions in the field of semantics.

 

The neo-Marxists gave up on revolution, gave up on socialism, gave up on the workers, and instead preferred to work "so no future Holocaust would be possible". Kevin McDonald, from California State University, wrote that they choose to follow their Jewish agenda rather than the Communist one. Breivik had not read McDonald the Terrible, or at least never referred to him, being such a good pupil of Jewish pundits. KMD's explanation was forbidden to him. He just intoned that what these men did IS communism. Actually, many texts in 2083 are old anti-Jewish screeds with find/replace Jews by Marxists.

 

Regretfully Breivik was wrong: the communists did not win. We did not move even one step closer to communism by promoting gay marriages and multiculturalism. Fighting against Christianity and family does not help, either. All these steps were appropriated and used by Capital and against workers. Actually, the objectives of socialist revolution and "no more Holocausts at any cost" are mutually exclusive. For the first objective, we need brave and daring men, for the second, all men must be unmanned, for real men are unpredictable.

 

The proof that Breivik speaks nonsense (even in his own terms) can be found in his2083, where he rates European states according to their acceptance of what he calls "cultural Marxism". Not surprisingly, Russia and other countries of the Communist block are the freest from this dogma, while Germany, Sweden and Norway are the most subservient. Indeed, destructive western neo-Marxist theories were never popular in the East, where capitalism was dismantled in the real sense and there was no need for a make-believe pseudo-communist ideology to paper over a capitalist economy.

 

As for the West, 1968 was not, as Breivik says, V-day for Marxism, but the beginning of a turn towards the Iron Heel. Our freedoms peaked just after the long-gone year of 1968. 1968 was a turning point in America. In 1968, the richest Americans contributed 90% of their income to the state, while now they pay less than 30% (never mind that they do not pay even that much by cleverly exploiting tax shelters, exempt funds and other tricks). It was in 1968 that the American worker's minimum pay peaked in real terms. Looking back, 1968 was the moment in history when mankind was nearest to the stars.

 

As children of the defeated '68 revolution, we were free to love, smoke, think and act. We could travel and fly without being stripped at the airport, and our booze was not confiscated. We could make love and smoke in cafés. Since then, it has been downhill all the way: smoking has been banned, free thought has been incarcerated by Political Correctness, and political action has been reduced to joining a Facebook group.

 

In the US, as Noam Chomsky has told me, the U-turn coincided with the teachers' strike in New York which reminded the Jews that their narrow interests are not necessarily best served by progressive and revolutionary tactics. Accordingly, the revolutionary ideologists of '68 acquiesced in pacifying the masses, and the chances for a new holocaust or even loss of influence were indeed minimised.

 

The masculinity of the Left receded, too. Support of dubious gender politics and retreat from the class struggle changed the Left. While the Left had always pushed for equality between the sexes, this equality leaned rather towards the masculine pole: whether it was a worker building the barricade, sailors storming the Winter Palace, cigar-smoking barbudos of Castro, they were all manly symbols of the Left. During the epic confrontation of the first half of 20th century, the Red Guards were not more feminine than the Stormtroopers, and Ernst Thaelmann was not less masculine than Ernst Roehm.

 

The present misbalance of male/female factors in the developed world was caused by technological developments (man's physical strength is less needed), by ideological shift and by capitalists' desire to maximise profit by employing women. As a result, men are frustrated. Their old traditional role of providers is over; their jobs went away to China, fighting is done by drones. Breivik's massacre bears the mark of a frustrated and marginalized Norwegian man.

 

Breivik felt his manhood threatened by "television, where nearly every major offering has a female 'power figure' and the plots and characters emphasize the inferiority of the male and superiority of the female… by government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use 'sexual harassment' charges to keep men in line, [by] colleges where women's gender studies proliferate and 'affirmative action' is applied in admissions and employment."

 

Yes, the killer is a psychotic man whose vision is hardly adequate, but his point should be considered. Even his hatred towards Muslim immigrants could be traced to the threat to his manhood presented by virile, unencumbered-by-fear-of-harassment-charges Southerners successfully competing for the charms of the Nordic girls. This massacre and its possible follow-ups might well have been averted if this European man did not feel his manhood threatened in so many ways.

 

The massacre is a sign that the Yin/Yang balance of Europe is severely biased; it should be restored and this urgent task can't be delayed – this is an important lesson of the Friday 22 massacre.

Edited by Ken Freeland 

 

 





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Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Start reading DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST in under a minute: http://tinyurl.com/3f8h874

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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