08/29/08 Wall Street Journal - Potomac Watch by Kimberley A. Strassel
http://easyopinions.blogspot.com/2008/08/leading-people.html#Blog1
"If today's liberal storyline were correct, a proud "progressive" candidate should win voter acclaim with promises of higher taxes, government regulation, an encompassing health-care entitlement, protectionism and corporate-bashing. We can't know if that's the case, since the "progressive" Mr. Obama is doing such an excellent job of hiding those policies behind the conservative rhetoric of "choice," "tax cuts," "free trade" and "freedom."
Tequila Kid's reply: “Today's liberal storyline”, as you put it, is indeed accurate. You claim there's no way of telling whether voters prefer statist solutions or individualistic solutions. That claim is clearly false, and constitutes part of a mendacious conservative narrative intended to obscure the facts of America’s recent history.
In 2000 Al Gore won “voter acclaim with promises of higher taxes, government regulation, an[d] encompassing health-care entitlement”. More voters voted for liberal Gore than for ”conservative” Bush, despite an intense and ruthless campaign by the conservative mainstream media (especially The NY Times and The Washington Post) in favor of Bush. However the conservative élite – by resorting to Byzantine intrigues culminating in a judicial coup d'état -- overruled voters' preferences.
In my view freedom of collective choice is just as worth striving for as freedom of individual choice. But conservatives, who dominate the media -- thanks to the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few plutocrats, enabled in turn by pro-monopoly Republican legislation of the 1990s -- are opposed to freedom of collective choice. Their opposition takes the form of denying that such a freedom exists. The flimsy theoretical basis for this claim is to deny – within the sphere of economic theory -- the existence of public goods and of market failure.
If Obama disguises his collectivist policies as individualistic ones, that is because the politically correct conservative establishment has conducted a hysterical, decades-long witch hunt against collective decision-making by the majority through free elections. Thus Obama wishes to elude the opprobrium regularly meted out to those who challenge the cretinous free-market twaddle that in the United States has become a folk religion. The right wing denounces choices freely made by the electorate as the doings of sinister bureaucratic insiders. Conservatives wish to preserve the current system in which collective decisions are made in secret by a handful of plutocrats to further their own class interests.
It is a well-known fact that Americans overwhelmingly prefer a universal single-payer health care system. The economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow conducted theoretical research into the economics of health care and concluded that a free market in health care is incompatible with inborn human values and is instinctively rejected by almost everybody.
Right-wing insistence on a private health care system is done principally pro forma, i.e. for show – since they know perfectly well that it is a chimera -- because it is required by their ideological cover story.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Not the Eliot Spitzer scandal but the Banana Republican Party scandal
Indignant retort to the scribbler and régime apologist David Carr [1]
Apologists of totalitarianism can be easily identified by their habit of making mountains out of molehills while remaining conspicuously silent in the face of the most outrageously arbitrary and anti-constitutional shenanigans on the part of the state.
The true scandal is not that Mr. Spitzer hired the services of a prostitute -- which should not be illegal in the first place – but that Mr. Spitzer’ peccadilloes only came to light as a result of blatantly anti-constitutional persecution of Mr. Spitzer by the notorious Bush II régime, of odious memory, as a pretext for hounding Spitzer out of office.
That corrupt Republican potentate sicked the FBI on Mr. Spitzer, illegally and unjustly breaching his bank secrecy rights, as an act of retaliation for Mr. Spitzer’s revelation in the pages of the Washington Post that the Bush mob had been instrumental in blocking any federal or state law enforcement action to nip the mortgage crisis in the bud. [2] I will prudently refrain from speculating on the magnitude of the swag thereby plundered by the Bush mob.
As revealed by Mr. Spitzer, the corrupt Banana Republican régime around 2003 not only signally failed to prevent, but actually egged on the fraudulent schemes of Wall Street swindler outfits like Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros, Bank of America, etc. in amassing vast illegal profits from granting and then securitizing fraudulent mortgages.
Thanks to the protection granted by the Bush mob and the festering corruption of the Banana Republican Party, swindler mortgages fueled a huge speculative boom that led to the present financial crisis, which threatens to blight the lives of a whole generation of human beings.
The issue is not “Client number nine”, as David Carr, the cynical scribbler and régime apologist of the NY Times, calls the then governor of New York. The problem is the domination of government by an infamous and parasitical financial oligarchy that uses shit-heel politicos like the nepo-oligarch Bush II as accomplices in its frenzied quest for boundless filthy lucre, come hell or high water.
Mr. Spitzer, as the victim of political persecution by the Banana Republican Party in its capacity as a tool of the parasitical financial oligarchy, which he courageously combated for many years in his capacity as New York Attorney General and consequently ex officio overseer of the fetid Wall Street swamp, should be spared as a matter of principle the indignity of being taunted with names like “Client number nine” by the scribblers of the now neoconservative NY Times.
Mr. Spitzer is a political dissident who has been illegally persecuted by our corrupt masters, and hence deserves the support, respect and admiration of all. He is the American Sinyavsky, the American Solzhenytsin, who denounced to the world the bottomless pit of corruption that is synonymous with the odious tyranny exercised by the oligarchy through its tools like the Banana Republican gangsters.
To join the meretricious rabble taunting Mr. Spitzer is to support the totalitarian rule of the parasitical financial oligarchy. It is to become an accomplice of the countless crimes of the ruling caste.
[1] Client 9 and Other Interested Parties, by David Carr, October 22, 2010, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/movies/24client.html?WT.mc_id=MO-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M173b-ROS-1010-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click&ei=5087&en=a06e98735e1656b6&ex=1303790400&pagewanted=print
[2] Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime. How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers, by Eliot Spitzer, New York governor, Washington Post, Thursday, February 14, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html
Apologists of totalitarianism can be easily identified by their habit of making mountains out of molehills while remaining conspicuously silent in the face of the most outrageously arbitrary and anti-constitutional shenanigans on the part of the state.
The true scandal is not that Mr. Spitzer hired the services of a prostitute -- which should not be illegal in the first place – but that Mr. Spitzer’ peccadilloes only came to light as a result of blatantly anti-constitutional persecution of Mr. Spitzer by the notorious Bush II régime, of odious memory, as a pretext for hounding Spitzer out of office.
That corrupt Republican potentate sicked the FBI on Mr. Spitzer, illegally and unjustly breaching his bank secrecy rights, as an act of retaliation for Mr. Spitzer’s revelation in the pages of the Washington Post that the Bush mob had been instrumental in blocking any federal or state law enforcement action to nip the mortgage crisis in the bud. [2] I will prudently refrain from speculating on the magnitude of the swag thereby plundered by the Bush mob.
As revealed by Mr. Spitzer, the corrupt Banana Republican régime around 2003 not only signally failed to prevent, but actually egged on the fraudulent schemes of Wall Street swindler outfits like Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros, Bank of America, etc. in amassing vast illegal profits from granting and then securitizing fraudulent mortgages.
Thanks to the protection granted by the Bush mob and the festering corruption of the Banana Republican Party, swindler mortgages fueled a huge speculative boom that led to the present financial crisis, which threatens to blight the lives of a whole generation of human beings.
The issue is not “Client number nine”, as David Carr, the cynical scribbler and régime apologist of the NY Times, calls the then governor of New York. The problem is the domination of government by an infamous and parasitical financial oligarchy that uses shit-heel politicos like the nepo-oligarch Bush II as accomplices in its frenzied quest for boundless filthy lucre, come hell or high water.
Mr. Spitzer, as the victim of political persecution by the Banana Republican Party in its capacity as a tool of the parasitical financial oligarchy, which he courageously combated for many years in his capacity as New York Attorney General and consequently ex officio overseer of the fetid Wall Street swamp, should be spared as a matter of principle the indignity of being taunted with names like “Client number nine” by the scribblers of the now neoconservative NY Times.
Mr. Spitzer is a political dissident who has been illegally persecuted by our corrupt masters, and hence deserves the support, respect and admiration of all. He is the American Sinyavsky, the American Solzhenytsin, who denounced to the world the bottomless pit of corruption that is synonymous with the odious tyranny exercised by the oligarchy through its tools like the Banana Republican gangsters.
To join the meretricious rabble taunting Mr. Spitzer is to support the totalitarian rule of the parasitical financial oligarchy. It is to become an accomplice of the countless crimes of the ruling caste.
[1] Client 9 and Other Interested Parties, by David Carr, October 22, 2010, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/movies/24client.html?WT.mc_id=MO-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M173b-ROS-1010-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click&ei=5087&en=a06e98735e1656b6&ex=1303790400&pagewanted=print
[2] Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime. How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers, by Eliot Spitzer, New York governor, Washington Post, Thursday, February 14, 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html
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