FDR: “Nothing Happens in Politics by Accident, Someone Made It Happen”
In Minnesota, the Democratic governor raised taxes on the top 5 percent to reduce the deficit enough that other things can be done without drastically getting rid of vital government workers. In Wisconsin, the Republican governor gave large tax cuts to corporations as soon as he got in which accounts for much of the deficits it has now is do to this. To make it up, he and the Republican legislature without debate tried to pass laws implementing his plan. The Democrats left Wisconsin so a vote could not be taken without a quorum. See The Ed Show at 10 PM ET and 7 PM PT today.
Here are some articles and comments that may help you understand what is happening in America to enrich the wealthy.
Go to www.hbo.com to see the film by on Reagan. It is the best I have seen based on my extensive reading. In the interview below Noam Chomsky describes the real Ronald Reagan. It depresses me that Obama brings up Reagan so often. Talk about the man, not the myth. Americans did not like Reagan according to polls not well publicized! Polls that contradict the mainstream view goes poof!
Jim Kawakami, Feb 17, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Noam Chomsky: “There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War. After the Second World War, business was terrified about the radicalization of the country during the Depression and then the war, and it started right off—Taft-Hartley was 1947—huge propaganda campaigns to demonize unions. It really—and it continued until you get to the Reagan administration. … “Worker’s Low Pay Equals Profits”
Kawakami: Netflix Film: “Constantine’s Sword,” from the book by James Carroll, retired columnist for the Boston Globe. He grew up at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs where his father was a high ranking General in intelligence. He was the one who delivered the photos of the missiles in Cuba to President Kennedy.
Several days ago I noticed a small news report that some Air Force cadets are suing to stop the evangelical prayer meetings and strong pressures to go to Evangelical churches run by Haggard who resigned after he was found vacationing with a male prostitute. Mikey Weinstein who was at the Air Force Academy who talked about his book on www.booktv.org about forcing Jews to become Evangelical a few years ago was also in the film. The scene of 10,000 people in a frenzy when Haggard talked to them was very frightening. Colorado has become the largest growing Evangelical movement.
Carroll was the oldest in a very large family that when the family visited the Pope John XXIII, the Pope said it was great they had a large family. Pope John looked almost at his death bed was only chosen because they knew he would soon die. But he double-crossed the Cardinals and made marvelous reforms which went through even though he died before it was passed. One of the most important is the church agreed to drop the false made-up story that Jesus was killed by the Jews in the Gospels. Historians have proof that with Judas, the Romans killed Jesus.
Most Jewish scholars consider the Old Testament as made up stories. Christians never had a cross until the Roman Emperor Constantine invented the cross to get Christians in his smaller army to win the war against the Romans ruling the empire. Before that no cross appeared in the Christian history. He also invented the no abortions policy to increase his empire's army which the Christian Church leaders loved too for the same reason.
Carroll also wanted to find the truth about whether Pope Paul IV made a deal with Hitler. He did.German Edith Stein, a Saint, was a Jew converted to Catholicism, wrote that the Nazi Party will kill many Jews if they gain power because they supported this throughout the 1930s. Carroll went to the Vatican to find the letter. The Pope released the letter one year previously so Carroll was the first person to read it. It confirmed what she said. She was murdered at in Auschwitz in 1942. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp
Carroll became a Priest but quit after six years because he noted the many contradictions in the teachings of the Church. He got married and had two children.
His father never spoke to him again after he compared the Vietnam War indiscriminate use of Napalm against civilians similar to the execution of the Jews in the Holocaust. Carroll was often arrested protesting the war in Vietnam.
“Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and liberalism---- 1945-1960 --------” by Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, University of Illinois, 1994
Selling free enterprise: the business assault on labor and ...
| | Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf - 1994 - 307 pages - Preview As Gary Gerstle has observed, much of this struggle turned on the meaning of Americanism. During this period, business sought to construct a vision of Americanism that emphasized social harmony, free enterprise, individual rights, ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library▼ |
Kawakami: From the success of the propaganda by the government and press to get Americans to supporting going to war against Germany, the corporations decided to use it instead of ruffians to control American workers. This is documented in detail in the book by Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf in a marvelous book Selling Free Enterprise.
A friend Allan uses Google Books and highly recommends it to get a good idea about books you intend to purchase so you can decide for yourself by reading some of the text. I buy most books of non-fiction based on talks by the authors on www.booktv.org every weekend. C-Span 2: Three days for Washington’s Birthday this weekend on www.C-Span.org www.booktv.org
Very few know much about the labor movement because it is not in the interest of corporations and the super rich to know how inequality in income occurred because of a huge effort by corporations to get Americans to dislike unions with distorted and false stories about them with frequent classes at work and even propaganda at elementary schools!
As we have seen in the Middle-East, it takes people a long time to get over their fear of the corporate and dictatorial state to revolt to concede anything to the people. America has been complicit and a recent poll not widely distributed shows that Obama is not very popular in the Middle East. Even less popular than Saddam Hussein! Similar polls show that the Arab States are not afraid of Iran, but very afraid of Israel and the USA who they know are their real enemies, not Iran.
Note that some of the other revolts are majority of Shiite Arabs against the Sunni rulers in Yemen next to the oil fields in Saudi Arabian where the workers are Shiite workers drill for oil too! Ditto Bahrain.
Due to the incompetence of the Bush boys in every way, the Shiites are now in charge of Iraq and the bombings in Iraq are by the Sunnis, not Al Qaeda. Don’t they read history? Even the Nazis
Profits Correlates Low Pay Nuke Unions Campaign Wisconsin Middle East Religion
AMY GOODMAN: This month is the 15th anniversary of Democracy Now! on the air, (800 radio and TV stations now!) and it’s a real privilege to have MIT professor, analyst, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, Noam Chomsky with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, and we’ve been together for this whole 15 years, Juan. It’s really been quite an amazing journey.
As we talk about this revolution that’s rolling across the Middle East, we put out to our listeners and viewers on Facebook last night that, Noam, you were going to be in. And so, people were sending in their comments and questions. We asked, on Facebook and Twitter, to send us questions. Here is one of the questions.
RYAN ADSERIAS: Hello, Professor Chomsky. My name is Ryan Adserias, and I’m a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also the child of a long line of working-class union folks. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but we’ve been holding a lot of protests and rallies here in our capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to break collective bargaining rights that Wisconsin workers worked hard for over 50 years ago and have enjoyed ever since. We closed all the schools around here for tomorrow—today and tomorrow, actually. The teaching assistants here at the university are staging teach-outs. The undergraduates are walking out of class to show solidarity. And all of this is because our governor and governors all around the country are proposing legislation that’s going to end collective bargaining and really break the unions. I’ve also been noticing that there’s not a whole lot of national representation of our struggle and our movement, and it’s really been troubling me. So my question to you is, how exactly is it that we can get the attention of our national Democratic and progressive leaders to speak out against these measures and to help end union busting here in the United States?
AMY GOODMAN: That was a question from Ryan Adserias in Madison, Wisconsin, where more than 10,000—some say tens of thousands of people, teachers, students, are protesting in the Capitol building, schools closed, as Ryan said. So, from Manama to Madison, from Manama, Bahrain, to Madison, Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very interesting. The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions. In fact, if you take a look at—take, say, the lame-duck session. The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut. And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax cut for the very rich?
The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think about two to one. There wasn’t even a discussion of it, they just gave it away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn’t called a "tax increase"; it’s called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers. And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically declared an increase in taxes for federal workers at the same time that there’s a tax decrease for the very rich.
And there’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it.
There’s a—to switch attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire. And this is pretty amazing, like right in the middle of the Madison affair, which is critical.
The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, got a $12.5 million bonus, and his base pay was more than tripled. Well, that means he—the rules of corporate governments have been modified in the last 30 years by the U.S. government to allow the chief executive officer to pretty much set their own salaries.
There’s various ways in which this has been done, but it’s government policy. And one of the effects of it is—people talk about inequality, but what’s a little less recognized is that although there is extreme inequality, it’s mostly because of the top tiny fraction of the population, so like a fraction of one percent of the population, their wealth has just shot through the stratosphere. You go down to the—you know, the next 10 percent are doing pretty well, but it’s not off the spectrum. And this is by design. … (Well worth watching this video and more on the internet. http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
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