Time for change's Journal - A Few Words on Wealth Redistribution

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Time for change's Journal

Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Sun Sep 21st 2008, 08:17 PM

The question of how wealth is distributed in our society is a crucially important one because it determines how we will proceed from here. The wealthy, who control most of our telecommunications, would like us to believe that most redistribution of w

Perhaps more than any other developed country in the world today, the United States of America has long harbored an antipathy towards so called “wealth redistribution” from the wealthy to the poor.

That attitude was largely responsible for our nearly half a century Cold War against Communism. The United States spent trillions of dollars on that war, very little of which actually went to defend our country. Rather, the money was spent mostly on building up our military far beyond our needs, and the overthrow of leftist governments throughout the world (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, and so many others), most or all of which we replaced with right wing governments that were far worse for the people they represented than the governments that they replaced. We did this with the excuse that we were trying to spread freedom and democracy and help those countries throw off the yolk of Communism.

Nevertheless, we went through a period beginning in 1933 with the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and ending in 1980, in which it was generally recognized by most Americans that ensuring the opportunity for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all of its citizenry is a legitimate function of government. But with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the era of “small government” and trickle down economics arrived in this country, with the consequent continuous dismantling of FDR’s New Deal, and along with it, the end of the greatest sustained economic boom in American history.

So here we are today, following 38 years of right wing “progress”, with the largest degree of wealth inequality in our history. And following 38 years of what many would call the transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy, the worst and most corrupt President in the history of our nation is proposing that every citizen of our country contribute to the bailout of the U.S. banking system – perhaps the largest redistribution of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy in our history.

What is redistribution of wealth?

In order to assess re-distribution of wealth, one first has to have an idea of where and how wealth originates. Ultimately, wealth is the resources that humans need and want. Food is grown by farmers. Minerals are mined by miners. Other things that we need or want are manufactured by laborers. Those who produce these things exchange them for $$$, which though it has no intrinsic worth, in our system is the primary indicator of wealth, since it can be used to buy virtually anything. But farmers, miners, and other laborers generally are considerably less wealthy than so many other people in our country. Thus, a superficial assessment of our economy would suggest that wealth is primarily transferred from them (i.e. the poor and the middle class) to the wealthy, who rarely directly produce anything. Why then do people generally think of wealth as being transferred from the rich to the poor?

Of course, our economy is much more complicated than that. There are many types of intellectual activity, which involve little or no physical labor, which do in fact improve peoples’ quality of life in one way or another, and therefore deserve to be highly compensated. I myself obtain money almost solely through intellectual activity, requiring virtually no physical labor, so I certainly don’t mean to disparage that kind of work. But when wealth disparity is as extreme as it is in our country today, with the top 1% of our population owning 38 times the wealth as the bottom 40% of our population combined; with 12.6% of Americans living in poverty; and given the fact that the vast majority of Americans who live in poverty are laborers or people who can’t find work, or the children of those people… I think that we should wonder about how fair our economic system really is.

So, how is wealth re-distributed in the United States? Is it more from the rich to the poor or from the poor to the rich? Obviously, that is an extremely complex question. Wealth is distributed in accordance with a vastly complex system of federal, state and local laws, which include tax laws, government programs and subsidies, contract laws, banking and credit laws, etc. It would require many volumes of books to even attempt to accurately answer that question, and still it would be unlikely that much consensus of opinion could be obtained on the subject. So I won’t even attempt to answer that question here.

But I do have a couple of observations on the subject that lead me to the opinion that most wealth distribution goes from poor to rich rather than the other way around. The first is that it is extremely difficult for me to fathom, for example, how the average CEO earns 431 the income of the average worker in his company. And secondly, we all know that the wealthy and the corporations that they represent exert a highly disproportionate influence on our political process. Does anyone believe that corporations spend their billions of dollars in lobbying costs to propose legislation that redistributes income from the rich to the poor?

Beyond that, perhaps consideration of some historical and current day examples of what appears to me to be distribution of wealth from poor to rich would be revealing:

SOME EXAMPLES OF WEALTH TRANSFER FROM THE POOR TO THE WEALTHY

Slavery in the United States

Perhaps the most obvious example is slavery. The slaves supplied the labor, and the plantation owners reaped all the benefits. In retrospect it seems so clear. Yet one would be hard pressed to find a slave owner who believed that slavery was a system for the distribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy – or one who would admit to it. Noam Chomsky explains the psychology of this phenomenon in his book, “What we Say Goes”:

When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have to have a reason. You can’t just say, “I’m a son of a bitch and I want to rob them.” You have to say it’s for their good, they deserve it, or they actually benefit from it. We’re helping them. That was the attitude of slave owners. Most of them didn’t say, “Look, I’m enslaving these people because I want easily exploitable, cheap labor for my own benefit.” They said, “We’re doing them a favor. They need it.”

The bailout of Wall Street by the U.S. government

This issue is much more complex and difficult to assess than slavery. We currently have our economic titans, such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, saying that a bailout of Wall Street is absolutely necessary at this time. I watched Paulson explain his reasoning on Meet the Press this morning. Beyond a bunch of economic jargon, Paulson said that it was “unthinkable” that the U.S. government not bailout Wall Street. Well, if it’s “unthinkable”, I guess that means that there’s no point in thinking about it – which is clearly what Paulson meant to convey.

Since I am not an economist, I certainly am not in a position to dispute the opinion of our Treasury Secretary with technical intelligent argument. But that shouldn’t stop me from being highly suspicious of his ideas.

Asked about the cost of the bailout, Paulson denied that the true cost would be what many are estimating as $700 billion. He explained that the U.S. government is not simply putting out taxpayer money, but rather we are getting something substantial in return. Oh really? Then why isn’t anyone from the private sector willing to buy these failing banks?

And what happened to the right wing ideology that despises socialism and believes that the “free market” should handle everything without government interference? Why not let the “free market” take care of this? Why is socialism suddenly acceptable to our radical right wing government when it involves socializing the risks of the wealthy, to be paid for by the poor and the middle class?

And isn’t it funny that the people who are being saved, including the investors in and managers of these banks, are generally much more prosperous than the average American taxpayer. Whenever someone proposes something like a national health care program to ensure that all Americans get the health care that they need, they’re intensively questioned by our corporate news media as to where we will find the money for it. But now we’re told by the U.S. Treasury Secretary simply that it’s “unthinkable” not to bail out these banks. In other words, it’s “unthinkable” that banks and their investors will lose a heap of money, but it’s not unthinkable that 43 million Americans lack any health insurance whatsoever. Why is that?

This sounds to me like a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.

The privatization of water in Bolivia

Antonia Juhasz, in her book, “The Bush Agenda – Invading the World One Economy at a Time”, describes many instances of how force and violence are used by third world governments, with the support of the United States or international institutions largely controlled by the United States, to protect corporate interests. One of her examples involved the privatization of water in Bolivia:

Cochabamba is the 3rd largest city in Bolivia… In late 1999, the World Bank required that Bolivia privatize Cochabamba’s water in return for reduction of its debts. Bechtel – one of the top ten water privatization companies in the world – won the contract.

Immediately after Bechtel took over the Cochabamba water system, and before any of the promised investments in infrastructure were made to improve or expand services, the company raised the price of water… by 100%... Many were simply forced to do without running water… The same law that privatized the water system also privatized any collected water, including rainwater collected in barrels…

The majority of the people voted for the cancellation of the contract with Bechtel. When this demand was met with silence from government officials, the citizens went on a citywide strike… the Bolivian government defended Bechtel’s right to privatize by sending armed military troops into the streets to disperse the crowds. At least one 17-year-old boy was shot and killed and hundreds more were injured…

Does that constitute wealth transfer from the rich to the poor?

“Trade liberalization” in Iraq

Juhasz also discusses in her book the economic plans imposed by the Bush administration upon Iraq following our invasion of their country in 2003. One of the first actions of L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was to impose his “Trade Liberalization Policy” upon Iraq, which immediately suspended tariffs, subsidies, and other measures designed to protect the Iraqi economy and people, thus devastating local industries and businesses. Juhasz describes Bremer’s thinking on the issue:

In a November 2001 paper entitled “New Risks in International Business,” Bremer outlined the risks to multinational corporations associated with the implementation of corporate globalization policies. Every policy Bremer describes in this paper was among those he himself implemented in Iraq a year and a half later. Bremer walks through the devastating impacts of each policy on the local population – the same impacts that his policies would inflict on Iraq. Bremer warns companies that “the painful consequences of globalization are felt long before its benefits are clear” (translation: long before the corporate profits have time to trickle down to the local population). Bremer cites several specific globalization policies, such as privatization of state enterprises, deregulation of controlled industries, and reductions of tariffs and nontariff barriers to open up trade in goods and services. In the paper, Bremer explains that “privatization of basic services, for example, almost always leads to price increases for those services, which in turn often lead to protests or even physical violence against the operator.” As for economic equality, Bremer says, “the process of globalization has a disparate impact on incomes,”
which in turn causes “political and social tensions.” The harmful impact… on local producers causes “enormous pressure on… trade monopolies” when “opening markets to foreign trade…

Bremer was therefore well aware that his policies would, at a minimum, reduce access to basic services and support for local businesses in favor of foreign businesses. He also knew the policies would increase inequality and political and social tension. However, he believed that he knew how to protect U.S. multinationals from the impact of these policies and therefore the policies went forward, ever clear on who the intended beneficiaries were…

Another example of wealth re-distribution?

Oil pipeline in Ecuador

John Perkins, in “The Secret History of the American Empire - Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth”, talks about the destruction of vast areas of Ecuador’s rain forests, the transformation of rivers into cesspools, and the disappearance of several animal species in Ecuador as the result of a $1.3 billion oil pipeline constructed there. He notes that for every $100 of oil taken from the Amazon forests, $75 goes to the oil companies, $18 goes to pay off the debt, and only $3 goes to the people who need the money the most. Since 1968, the nation’s debt grew from a quarter billion dollars to $16 billion, poverty level grew from 50% to 70%, and under- or unemployment grew from 15% to 70%.

In 2003, Perkins came back to Ecuador to try to prevent a war that he held himself partially responsible for provoking. This would be a war fought against indigenous Ecuadorians by the Ecuadorian Army assisted by U.S. Special Forces advisors, on behalf of oil companies who accused an indigenous community of taking its workers hostage, as an excuse for war. Lawyers who represented the indigenous community in an effort to get the oil companies off their land had recently died in a plane crash.

Deregulation in the United States

Since the onset of the Progressive Era in the United States, numerous federal and state statutes have been enacted and institutions developed to protect the citizens of our country against corporate abuse. These have included: laws for the protection of labor; the Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of our foods and drugs; the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ensure the safety of other consumer products; anti-trust laws to ensure fair competition; the Communications Act of 1934 to ensure fair access for our citizens to radio communications; the Security and Exchange Commission to ensure the fairness of a wide variety of economic transactions; and many many more.

Most Americans have traditionally seen these statutes and institutions as a necessary means for government to protect the vulnerable (that is, just about all of us) against the powerful. I like what Chris Weigant recently had to say about the need for government regulation, so I’ll repeat an excerpt from his post here:

Does everyone know how to play basketball? Good! You see, basketball is a game that has certain rules. Players have to follow the rules, or else there's a penalty. Now imagine playing a die-hard game of basketball without any rules or penalties. You know what happens if you play basketball -- or any sport, really -- without any rules? Somebody usually winds up getting hurt. That's why we have the rules in the first place -- to allow for hard play but not dangerous play. And to keep the game fair for everyone.

What is happening now on Wall Street is the result of basic Republican dogma, which is to "deregulate" everything in sight. Now, the word "deregulate" is just a fancy way of saying "playing without rules." Regulations are the rules which governments lay down for businesses to follow. These rules are there for a reason -- to avoid injury, and to keep the game fair for everyone. But the Republican way of thinking has always been to just throw out the rulebook. That's right -- just chuck it out!

Right wing Republicans have always been very hostile to corporate regulation because they see that as an infringement upon the freedom of the wealthy to make unlimited profits. Especially with the onset of the “Reagan Revolution” in 1981, the right wing view that these programs constitute “big government” and impinge upon the “free market” began to gain traction, and consequently we have seen a gradual but almost continuous wave of deregulation since then. One major consequence of that deregulation was the Savings and Loan scandal and bailout of the late 1980s, which cost U.S. taxpayers several hundred billion dollars. But the deregulation just kept on coming, though with a substantial slow down during Bill Clintons Presidency.

John McCain has always been an avid deregulator, except when it has been politically inconvenient to be so – like right now. Obviously, he is not about to admit that his consistent advocacy of deregulation over his whole Senate career has anything to do with our current financial crisis.

CONCLUSION

The question of how wealth is distributed in our society is a crucially important one because it determines how we will proceed from here. The wealthy, who control most of our telecommunications, would like us to believe that most redistribution of wealth in our country is from rich to poor. To the extent that Americans believe that, they are likely to passively accept the status quo or even to demand cuts in social programs that benefit the poor and the working and middle class at the expense of the wealthy. On the other hand, I suspect that if most Americans knew how much our system works to benefit the wealthy they would demand countermeasures be taken to distribute wealth more fairly in our country.

Since FDR, perhaps more than any other U.S. President (with the possible exception of Lincoln) recognized, gave voice to, and developed policies to counteract the redistribution of wealth from the poor and working and middle class to the wealthy, I’ll end this post with some excerpts from his great speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1936, which is just as relevant today as it was then:

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the fathers-the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer…

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor-these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age-other people's money-these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities. Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living-a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike…

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude….Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference….

Here in America we are waging a great and successful war (FDR is not talking here of WW II, which had not yet started, but rather the war against our own “Economic Royalists”, as he called them – the forerunners of today’s Republican Party). It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

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A summary of my DU posts

Time for change

The good majority of my DU posts consist of one of six general subjects: The need to remove from office the current cancer upon our nation; election fraud; the tragedy of the Bush administration; my ideas on the liberal values that we all hope will some day replace the values that our current government runs on; historical events that I believe cast light upon our current situation; and other political ideas.

The need to remove Bush and Cheney from office

In 2006, John Conyers wrote a 198 page report, documented with 1,401 references, titled “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”. The title of his report reflected the primary reasons why George Bush and Dick Cheney must be removed from office: They have made a mockery of our Constitution – the foundation for the rule of law in our nation – by consistently violating it. Our Constitution, if we can keep it in fact and not just in name, makes our nation much more than just a democracy. By providing protections for minorities and the powerless, our Constitution adds civility, humanity, and decency to what could otherwise be a barbaric nation – democratic or not.

Aside from the continuing damage that Bush and Cheney can do to our country in their remaining time in office, including their potential to involve us in ever expanding new wars, failing to remove from office the most lawless presidential administration in our history will set an awful precedent in our nation – a precedent for doing away with our Constitution. Providing in our Constitution a mechanism for impeachment and removal from office was of utmost priority to our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “When once a republic is corrupted there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles…”

Many arguments have been put forward against impeachment. This post answers those arguments. Some opponents of impeachment mistakenly advocate the view that the impeachment of public officials requires evidence of the commitment of an actual crime – and would not be justified by such things as gross violation of the public trust, corruption, negligence, or incompetence. Leaving aside the fact that such an interpretation would leave our nation subject to rule by people who would do great and possibly irreparable harm to it, the preponderance of evidence flatly contradicts that interpretation.

Others claim that we don’t have enough evidence to proceed with impeachment. I argue here that the current evidence for impeachment is so abundant, arguing that we need more sets the impeachment bar at an absurdly high level.

Others argue we don’t have the votes for impeachment – which implies that we must not bring individuals to trial until we have counted the votes, rather the using the trial to get the votes. Such an argument ignores the likelihood that votes will accumulate as Americans watch the impeachment trial and become intensely exposed for the first time to the many outrageous crimes of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it also ignores the fact that Senators who refuse to vote for conviction will probably be putting their seats in jeopardy.

But perhaps the most urgent reason for moving to impeach Bush and Cheney as soon as possible is that their continuing refusal to be bound by the laws and the Constitution of our nation raises the spectacle that they may be planning a coup d’etat. Why else would they go to such lengths to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law in our nation? We must preempt them by moving as quickly as possible on this.

Election fraud

The DU apparently was born as a result of the 2000 November-December election fraud that began the long nightmare that is the George W. Bush administration.

I went to bed on Election Day 2000, shortly after Bush was announced as our new President, feeling as if the end of world civilization was near at hand. My wife woke me up a couple hours later to tell me the good news that the announcement of Bush’s Presidency had been temporarily cancelled. Thus began a period of 36 days that I followed more intensely than any other news event of my life – ending in the infamous and disastrous Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of our long road to dictatorship.

My son (EOTE) joined DU in January 2001, a few days after it began, but I did not, for reasons that now escape me. I did, however, do a lot of writing about the 2000 election, including a desperate plea to my Maryland Senators, to please demand a real recount of the 2000 Florida vote. And I also contributed an article to DU on that subject, in my son’s name (I did not use my own name because I was a federal employee and I was afraid that I could get into trouble for writing such an article), in the spring of 2001.

The fraudulent 2004 Presidential election is what brought me into DU. I had worked as a volunteer in the Kerry/Edwards campaign, I had followed the presidential polls obsessively, and by Election Day 2004 I was about as confident as I could be that John Kerry would be our next President. Thus, the reported results of that election were both profoundly disappointing and difficult for me to believe, as they were for the great majority of DUers.

I immediately began an effort to acquire as many election statistics as I could, in a feverish and desperate attempt to prove that the election was a fraud, which I hoped would aid in its overturning. In late November I had my son post an analysis that I did of the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results (Note: My son supplied the title, which I feel is too strong, which you can see if you read the article). And finding that it was awkward to have my son post my articles, I joined DU a few days later.

Since then I have posted dozens of election fraud related threads, a small number of the most important of which I have included in my journal.

In particular, I have come to believe that the main mechanism by which the 2004 election was stolen was the massive and illegal targeted purging of Democratic voters in Ohio, especially in Cleveland. This thread contains a great amount of evidence to support that contention.

In addition, I believe that there is good evidence that says that large numbers of votes in Cuyahoga County were deleted by its central tabulator, as explained in this thread, which also discusses an early 2006 partial audit of Cuyahoga County. And, I think that the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Clint Curtis’ sworn allegations of vote switching computer programs, was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, is extremely suspicious to say the least. Here is my explanation of the controversy over the discrepancy between the 2004 exit polls and the official 2004 vote count. And here is a summary of several reasons I have written about for believing that the 2004 election was stolen.

Finally, here are my ideas for preventing another stolen election in 2006 and 2008.

The tragedy of the Bush administration

The fake war on terrorism

I believe that a crucial requirement for a good understanding of the Bush administration’s actions since September 11, 2001, is the realization that its “War on Terrorism” is nothing but a colossal fake. Only with that realization do numerous Bush administration characteristics and actions make sense, including: Its disinterest in Osama bin Laden; its great urge to rush into a war with Iraq at any cost; its utter contempt for international law and the rest of the world; its succession of no-bid contracts for its wealthy friends; its lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest of our citizens and corporations during ‘time of war’; the Dubai port deals; and, its attempt to turn our democracy into a dictatorship.

With that in mind, I wrote in this post about the main reasons why I believe that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9-11 attacks. There are many reasons why I believe that now, but the initial and still most important reason is the utter failure of our military, the mightiest military that the world has ever known, despite repeated warnings and more than ample time on 9-11 itself, to protect its own capital city.

Abuse of the human rights of prisoners for no apparent purpose

To me, the most sickening and disgraceful aspect of the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” is its complete lack of concern for human rights, demonstrated among other ways by the indefinite confinement, without trial or even bringing of charges, of thousands of prisoners of war, and its frequent use of torture. I have discussed this issue in several OPs, starting with this one. Here I describe the issue as seen through the eyes of a U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain who had ministerial responsibilities for hundreds of our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who witnessed the severe and daily abuse of his charges over a period of several months, and who eventually was imprisoned himself when it was felt that he was making too many waves over what he had seen. Here is my summary of what the great journalist Seymour Hersh had to say on this subject, based on his numerous high level sources. Jimmy Carter felt so strongly about this issue that he broke the unwritten rule against ex-Presidents criticizing sitting Presidents, with one of the most scathing attacks on this policy that I have ever seen. And Senator Richard Durbin was the victim of continued public verbal abuse from the right for daring to make public how our government was treating its prisoners.

Lying us into war

It is evident to most informed people that one of the biggest motivations for Bush's "War on Terror" was to provide a justification for the invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh’s excellent account of how the Bush administration manipulated and twisted intelligence in order justify a preemptive war against Iraq is a must read for anyone who still supports this administration and thinks that the Iraq war was necessary. And as for Bush's excuse that we are now fighting that war for the benefit of the Iraqi people, Democrats should start talking about how the Iraqi people actually feel about us being in their country.

Just how bad are Bush and his cronies and how much danger do they pose to American democracy?

George w. Bush and his administration and fellow travellers in today's Republican Party are about as bad as they come. They are anti-science ignoramuses. They are chicken hawks. They have no consciences. They are torturers. They are cowards. They are evil. And I doubt that there are any moral boundaries beyond which they will not go to get their way.

I think that in the interest of preserving our democracy, we should be aware of the similarities between the Bush administration and Hitler’s Nazis (which I wrote about even before the revelations about Bush’s warantless wiretapping), and understand that if we aren’t vigilant, yes it CAN happen here too.

Moral values that separate us from today’s Republicans

It makes me so mad to hear people ridicule what they consider to be “liberal values” and compare them unfavorably to the wonderful moral values of George W. Bush and his Republicans friends. In the vast majority of cases these people don’t even have a vague idea about what liberal values really are. They have simply been conditioned by our corporate media over several years or decades to believe that liberals encourage irresponsibility, are ‘soft’ on national defense and ‘law and order’, and are wild spenders. These ridiculous myths about liberals have in turn encouraged the Democratic Party to disavow the liberal label and in some cases to veer way to the right. I submit that, rather than running away from the liberal label we should be proud of it, and we should challenge those that seek to disparage it. And to further make this point I posted a tribute to several historical and current political leaders who have been unafraid to speak out loudly for what they believe in, and I suggested an answer to those Republican morons who accuse liberals of hating America.

Let's take a look at some of the specific moral values that separate Democrats from Republicans:

Republicans like to pretend that they're more moral than us because they're more "religious"

Many of those who disparage liberals are fundamentalist Christians who repeatedly invoke the name of Jesus Christ, and who believe that the superiority of their moral values to those of liberals and Democrats is proven by their repeated references to Jesus. Don’t these people understand that Jesus was a liberal, whose moral values were much closer to those of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party, with whom they align themselves and vote for? Isn't it an astounding paradox that the Republican Party has usurped for their own purposes one of the most liberal religious leaders in world history, while at the same time showing nothing but contempt for liberals and liberal principles?

The movement for privatization of government functions

One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the privatization movement. In the name of “freedom” and “self-reliance”, the leaders of this movement advocate the freedom of powerful corporations to destroy our environment and to run our elections, our schools, our social safety net programs, and our prison system, as well as every other program which has long been considered a legitimate function of government. The fact that government is elected by the people to serve public functions, whereas the purpose of private corporations is to make profits for their investors, is either totally lost on these people, or else they simply feel that the above mentioned programs should be run for profit rather than for service.

Al Gore alluded to this issue in his great film, "An Inconvenient Truth", where he discussed the unholy alliance between government, private industry, and the press, whereby a corrupt government, in exchange for legal bribes from the industries they are supposed to control, propagates false information and policies that are favorable to those industries instead of the public that they are elected to serve. I discuss my own personal experience with that unholy alliance, where the FDA withdrew an about to be published scientific article I had written, under pressure from a manufacturer who stood to be economically hurt by the information in that article.

The need for a free and independent press

Another great threat to our democracy is the ownership of our country’s news media by a very small group of wealthy individuals who have strong ties to the Republican Party, and whose motivation in providing “news” is to maintain satisfaction with the status quo, rather than to report what is important and true. Two prime examples of corporate media shills and pseudo-journalists who pretend to be real journalists are Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. Bill Moyers explains how this situation threatens to destroy our democracy, and how this came about through the dismantling of rules and regulations which were meant to prevent the monopolization of our news. And Robert Parry explains why he started his web site to help combat the misinformation we get from our corporate media.

Health care

Liberals, and most other decent people, believe that people should be entitled to decent health care. That is why, prior to the "pro-life" administration of George W. Bush, infant mortality rate in the United States had been steadily declining for several decades. But shortly into the Bush administration, due to the starving of women and infant health programs for federal funds, infant mortality rate began a steady rise. Nor do Republicans care much about veterans' health, as indicated by the rejecting of this much needed veteran's health bill in the U.S. Senate by virtually a strict party line vote.

An enquiring mind

One of the many tricks that our corporate media uses to squelch alternative viewpoints is to label anyone who substantially disagrees with their “correct” version of the news as “conspiracy theorists”. Well, I have news for them. The views of us “conspiracy theorists” are usually much more closely aligned with reality than is most of the trash that we hear from the corporate news media these days, such as the stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which were used to justify our illegal preemptive invasion of that country. We “conspiracy theorists” believe that it is not only the right of American citizens to challenge the corporate news media story lines, but it is our responsibility as well, as good citizens who care about our country.

The dignity of all human beings

Perhaps the most important value held by liberals is a belief in the dignity of all human beings – hence the 19th century movement by liberals to abolish slavery. Here is one of my favorite stories on that subject.

A summary

And here is a post where I talk about all the major values that separate Democrats from Republicans.

Historical events that help us understand our present

Though there is little doubt that George W. Bush is by far the worst president we’ve ever had, our past history is at least partly responsible for preparing the way for this tragedy. The history of our nation is full of examples of failures to live up to our ideals. In addition to our long history of slavery and our near extermination of the Native American population of our present day country, we began a long history of overseas imperialism beginning in the late 19th Century. The long standing history of extreme hostility to socialism by the elites of our country has been responsible for much of this imperialism, as well as domestic repression against labor unions and others who would speak out against the status quo. The usurpation by our Executive Branch of the war making powers given to Congress by our Founding Fathers did not originate with George W. Bush. And the attitudes fostered by our long history of slavery are still with us today, especially in the areas of our country where slavery thrived for so long.

Today, as the transgressions of George Bush and Dick Cheney threaten the existence of our nation as we know it, we would do well to recall how the German nation was led into tyranny more than six decades ago. The parallels between Hitler’s war on terror and George Bush’s war on terror are extraordinarily striking in my opinion. And the better able we are to recognize the danger, the more likely we are to take steps to prevent a similar fate.

Political ideas

Republicans have 3 great advantages in elections against Democrats, whereas the only advantage that the Democratic Party has is that its policies are meant to serve all Americans, rather than just the select few. In addition to electoral fraud and huge sums of money donated to the GOP by their corporate masters as legalized bribery, Democrats have to contend with a multitude of news media whores.

But those advantages are not sufficient for a Party that has nothing of value to offer to our country. So, when we suggest investigation of their corrupt deeds they call us conspiracy theorists. When we suggest policies such as making basic affordable health care available to all Americans they accuse us of class warfare. And when we criticize the rampant corruption at the highest levels of government they accuse us of "hating America". And when none of that works they try to scare us by telling us that if we don't give them unlimited power over us we risk being killed by terrorists.

If there was ever a presidential administration that needed to be impeached, this is it. Grass roots efforts are under way to accomplish this, and we can all help. Our Democratic leaders need to seriously consider and talk about this. And they must be united and avoid inter-party warfare.

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Time for change

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