Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Mason Missile, July 2, 2011

Greetings, freedom fighters!
I hope you all voted in the last election and in every other election. Nothing freaks me out worse than people not voting, a right people died for. I recall mile-long lines of people voting in South Africa, after the fall of the apartheid regime. In this past election, I heard election workers say that the possibility of rain kept some people from voting. For the right to vote, people were shot at, sprayed with fire hoses, mauled by attack dogs, firebombed, and other things. On the other hand, the quality of candidates for office can be pretty low.
As you noticed, I had to change my e-mail server to Comcast, since I was having billing problems with Verizon. To me, one capitalist corporation is just as bad as the next.
I tip my hat to Navy Seal Team Six, for their work in taking out Osama bin Laden. Of course, this does not end all terrorism -- there are several groups naming themselves Al-Qaeda, and they’re not organized in the classical military chain of command, squads, platoons, companies, etc.
What gets me is how Fox “News” and the rest of the rightist propaganda community act like George DUH Bush, who is NOT in office, had something to do with bin Laden’s demise. Bush had the opportunity to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan, but he declared war on Iraq instead. I don’t think Bush had ANY intention to get bin Laden, just use him as a boogieman to scare us when Bush’s poll numbers dipped; also there are connection between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family and other wealthy Saudi families, including the bin Ladens. This has been written about in the book by Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud.
This raises another question -- since bin Laden is dead, do our forces have to remain in Afghanistan? I originally supported the military action, and I thought it would lead to a better day for the Afghans. But Afghanistan’s “government” is corrupt to the gills, thus fueling the Taliban.
Plus--the Pakistani government is supposed to be our ally in the Afghanistan conflict, but the ties between the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus to al Qaeda is still strong; how could they not know bin Laden lived in that mansion next to a military academy, in a city populated with military retirees? Pardon the cliché, but we have some rethinking of strategy to do.
Please forgive me that I take so much time in preparing the Missiles, I want to get my facts straight, now be like Rush Limbaugh popping off the first line of BS that pops into his wasteland of a mind.
The Republicans in Congress have made such a big thing lately of cutting government spending and closing the deficit. That’s been the line for over thirty years. However, that has just been proven to cut into such social programs as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, programs that have benefited people struggling to get by -- like yours truly.
Under the leadership of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chair of the House Budget Committee, the Republicans have voted to cut Medicare and continue tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while the “middle class” -- euphemism-speak for those not of the highest faction of the highest one percent of the population -- those of us not wealthy enough to buy a senator -- have the entire tax burden placed on us. It’s like the old premise of “supply side economics,” give the corporations everything they ask for, and the economy will blossom.
Where were these Republican budget balancers during the Bush II era, when a surplus was turned into a deficit, and when we’re fighting wars, at least one of which was based on fraud and manipulation of our citizen’s anger and fear? Like I said, it’s NOT AT ALL about deficit, it’s all about satisfying the corporate elite. But the public has gotten its message out, and saying NO to all this.
Paul Ryan once said he got into public life because of the teachings and writings of Ayn Rand, the prophetess of the “Virtue of Selfishness,” whose fantasies were of heroic entrepreneurs at war with government bureaucrats and “the mob.” (Rather odd -- Ryan goes into public life, where the issues of people are collectively addressed, due to Ayn Rand and her “individualistic” ideas.) Now we see a revival of Rand’s books, and the film version of Atlas Shrugged released, which did terrible box office the weekend it came out. This is the fantasy world the right-wing and its minions live in, not at all connected with reality. In spite of the “individualistic” rap of Rand and her disciples, this is a form of (Yes, I WILL say it) Fascism, where the Great Leader and his Elite Vanguard Party rule over us, due to their very superiority, and we cheer them.
Alas, I shall have to say a few things about the Anthony Weiner thing, so here I go:
He was pretty damn stupid to put his tweeter out on Twitter.
The Democratic party leadership wimped out on him, while a Republican in a similar situation--say, David Vitter after his diaper fetish, or Rush Limbaugh with his drug addiction -- retained support.
Weiner’s constituents backed him up, showing greater leadership than the Democratic party leadership.
The commercial news media’s idea of “news” is a lot of soft porn and scandal, rather than intelligent discussion of what really touches on people, like unemployment and the economy.
The same commercial media, the so called “left-liberal slanted” news media, gives in readily to the right-wing movement, whether it’s conceding the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, who got the lesser number of votes,, thus caving to Fox “News”; going along with Andrew Breitbart’s super-doctored video of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official, to “prove” she hated discriminated against white farmers; and James O’Keefe, Breitbart’s pet boy, who played the pimp daddy to destroy ACORN (can you say "racial stereotype" and "secret fantasy"?), and the media and courts went along with it, even though the video was SO a fraud.
We in this country are still “shocked, shocked, I tell you” that people engage in Sex, and members of Congress, being human beings, are no exception; but the Republican Right keeps harping on traditional family values, while engaging in the very Sex acts they condemn; reference again David Vitter, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker.
I am SO disgusted with the spinelessness of our political and media establishment, constantly deferring to their “superiors” on the right-wing of the political spectrum, a movement hell-bent on restoring a plutocratic regime in this country. They would take us back to those ways of yesteryear, when children went to the mines rather then school for their education as to their place in society; when work days could be sixteen hours long, giving you time enough to drag yourself home and back to work again the next day, not spending time with your family or friends or your own mind; when at the work site you breathed more coal dust, chemical fumes, or textile lint then oxygen, killing you before you reached forty; where one ethnic or racial group was pitted against the other, this being encouraged by the bosses to prevent working-class solidarity and finding out who the REAL enemy is; where women had next to NO options for advancement.
I was delighted when Rich Trumka, President of the national AFL-CIO, proclaimed the Labor movement’s independence from the Democratic party, stating at the meeting of National Nurses United, “For too long, we have been left after Election Day holding a canceled check waving it about, (saying) ‘Remember us? Remember us?’--asking someone to pay a little attention to us...I had a snootful of this shit!”
Me too! The Democratic party has prided itself as the party of the New Deal and Great Society, government programs that strove to benefit working and poor people for a change as opposed to the corporate elite -- even as the party copped out on us, cutting deals with the Republicans to cut down, or out, these programs; and the Democratic party still tells us to vote for them, or we’ll hand the government over to the Republicans. No more of that, I say. I continue to advocate an independent and viable Labor-Socialist-Social Democratic party in the US of A, and take some of the Democratic party system with us to form it, from the humblest ward leaders and committee members to state organizations.
This is the food for thought for now, and more WILL come. Bye!