"Voters who don't want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the tea party and the Republican Party as one and the same."
Hopefully the tea party caucus will begin to educate Americans as to the Lockean foundation on which the nation's success rests and why Social Security and the United Nations are impediments to further success. In the meantime, the extremists of both parties, the socialists, have grabbed ever more power with support of media, which they control.
When advocates of failed socialist ideas, such as the Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans, use the word "extremist", they utilize a propaganda tactic. The extremists are in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, not in the Tea Party. The extremists in power, the Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans, advocate the use of state violence to transfer wealth to Wall Street, government employees and commercial banks, and to steal private homes on behalf of corrupt developers.
RNC Opposes Tea Party
The article points out, then, that the extremists in the GOP, who control the Republican National Committee, fear the ascendency of the Tea Party moderates:
"Former Senate majority leaderTrent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. 'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,' Lott said in an interview. 'As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them."
It thus has become imperative to view the RNC as in league with the Democrats. It is also important to understand that the motives of the extremists in the GOP are not just to win elections but also to serve the special interests to which both parties have cater: Wall Street, commercial banking, large industrial concerns and government employees.
The most interesting part of the article concerns the above billboard. I had posted a similar series of photos on April 18. DNC Executive Director Jennifer O'Malley Dillon said "Republicans keep saying that they aren't extremists -- but they keep doing things like this." But it is Dillon who is the extremist.
The Democrats advocate an irresponsible and failed view, socialism. Socialism was the philosophy of both Stalin and Hitler. There is nothing extreme about comparing people like Obama and Dillon to Hitler and Stalin. They advocate comparable policies.
My friend Candace de Russy makes interesting points on Big Journalism.com. De Russy observers that former Justice Department attorney Christian Adams has repeatedly brought to the media's attention shocking revelations that the Obama administration has instructed lawyers to disregard cases involving white victims and black perpetrators; has insisted that the DOJ's election law division NOT enforce voter fraud laws particulary concerning fraudulent voting by non-citizens; and "is now considering a submission by Ike Brown, a Democratic Party Chairman in Mississippi, to run elections in Mississippi, even though a federal court already stripped him of that authority after he victimized minority white voters and otherwise prevented people from voting based on their party loyalties."
All of this smacks of racism in the Obama administration, which is not news. Obama's followers are left wing brownshirts. But the story had some synchronicity with a book I'm reading, Book One of St. Augustine's City of God.
Augustine, originally from North Africa, wrote in the last years of the Roman Empire. His arguments in Book One oppose the claim that Rome's adoption of Christianity led to Alaric's sacking of the city and the Empire's ultimate fall. Augustine argues that self indulgence led to Rome's fall. Here and now we have a president elected on the basis of public whim and hysteria who adopts socialist policies that repeatedly have been associated with decline. America's self indulgent prosperity sounds something like the prosperity that Augustine argues led to Rome's fall (Book I, chapter 31):
"And greed and sensuality in a people is the result of that prosperity which the great Nascia in his wisdom maintained should be guarded against when he opposed the removal of a great and strong and wealthy enemy state. His intention was that lust should be restrained by fear, and should not issue in debauchery, and that the check on debauchery should stop greed from running riot. With those vices kept under restraint, the morality which supports a country flourished and increased, and permanence was given to the liberty which goes hand-in-hand with such morality."
While the construction of theaters, one of Augustine's concerns, does not trouble me the decline in American morality does. The nation no longer takes democracy or the moral principles on which democracy depends seriously. Part of the problem is the decline of public debate because of the poor quality of the most popular media outlets. Just as with Rome, American decline is a long process. It began more than a century ago and is accelerating.
Mr. Obama is hardly of interest to me at this point. I do not doubt that his administration is ugly, corrupt and stupid, nor do I doubt that the media that whisked him into office is dysfunctional and destructive. None of these institutions are worth worrrying about because they are not worth saving. America must be reconstructed from the bottom up. We are living in the days of American democracy's well-deserved collapse.
I just sent the following letter to the Olive Press, our local penny saver. Paul Smart, the editor, published two letters for me this issue as he had forgotten to publish both Gus Murphy's and my letter in the last issue:
Gus Murphy is right that government is a nessary evil. Mr. Murphy is also right that the ideas of Hamilton, Madison and Jay in the Federalist emphasized centralization. But while the anti-Federalists, who opposed the Constitution, lost the argument, they won key battles. The best part of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, was due to the anti-Federalists. Even today most Americans believe that freedom of speech, enshrined in the First Amendment, is the most important right.
As Charles Beard pointed out a century ago in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United Statesthe authors of the Constitution, who favored centralization and Federalism, were bankers and merchants. Alexander Hamilton, co-founder of the Bank of New York, was the most intellectually important Federalist. The centralizing party was always the party of the rich. Following the Federalists, the Whigs were formed to fight Andrew Jackson, the president of the working man, who abolished the equivalent of the Fed. The Republicans were formed to stop the South from seceding and to fight for higher tariffs, public works and the Fed.
In the late 1890s the Republican Party adopted Progressivism, another way to argue for centralization and the Fed. The final step was the creation of conservatism and the transformation of the two party system into a single Federalist Party. First, there was a conflict between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt over whether the US economy should be socialist and regulated, which Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican) favored, or whether anti-trust enforcement should be the responsibility of the Justice Department, which Taft favored. As president, Taft ignored Roosevelt. This made Taft the first "conservative". Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate in the Bull Moose or Progressive Party, and helped Woodrow Wilson defeat Taft. This made Roosevelt the first "liberal". The debate between "liberals" and "conservatives" is between two kinds of Progressives. Both liberals and conservatives today would have been Federalists in 1786, Whigs in 1836 and Progressives in 1904. We have a one party Federalist system just like in 1788 when Washington was elected.
Franklin Roosevelt took the fake liberal-conservative distinction further. He realized that support for big business would be more effective if cloaked in rhetoric that sounded like it was supportive of labor. The Democrats became super-Federalists, even more aggressively supportive of centralization of power into the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank and Wall Street, by using the rhetoic of helping the poor. The supposed help was through ineffective programs like Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. None of these laws cost big business very much and and involved wealth transfers from lower to middle income taxpayers. Progressivism created inner cities characterized by drug addiction and dependency. The welfare-dependent lumpen proletariat became a political bargaining chip, just like the Roman proletariat in the days of Augustus Caesar.
Has America been getting greater and greater since the Federalists/Progressives took power in 1904? Do increasing income inequality, the Depression, the Stagflation of the 1970s, the mismanagement of the oil spill, the banking crisis, inflation, the massive increase in big business power, the massive increase in Wall Street's power, the stagnating real hourly wage and the exodus of manufacturing tell us that the one party Federalist system has succeeded?
While Mr. Murphy is right that government is a necessary evil, is Berndt Leifeld's giving Olive's school teachers a six percent raise when everyone else is not getting a raise a necessary evil? Is it necessary to spend 45% of your income on wortheless government "services"? Is providing Medicaid to non-residents who arrive in New York and whose first stop is the Medicaid office a necessary evil? Was seeing 500,000 jobs exodus the state during the Cuomo administration a necessary evil?
PALADINO FORCES REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR PRIMARY
WITH LOBBYIST LAZIO Paladino Files Double Legal Requirement of GOP Signatures for Governor Race
(BUFFALO, NY) - Buffalo businessman Carl Paladino, Republican candidate for Governor of New York, today announced that his campaign, after the hard work of thousands of volunteers across the state, will this afternoon file 28,000 Republican signatures on petitions with triple the requirement spread across 21 Congressional districts and 62 counties. This petition submission will successfully place businessman Carl Paladino in a Republican primary for New York State Governor against lobbyist Rick Lazio.
"Today we will file a bullet proof package of 28,000 Republican petitions to place Carl Paladino on the Republican primary ballot," said Michael R. Caputo, campaign manager, Paladino for the People. "With tens of thousands of Republicans calling for Carl Paladino to be in the Republican primary, only one thing could explain why Rick Lazio would decide to challenge our petitions; fear. Rick Lazio can not beat Carl Paladino in a primary so he wants to knock him out of the process."
Carl Paladino, a successful Western New York real estate developer and attorney, declared his candidacy for Governor of New York in Buffalo in April. He and Tom Ognibene have submitted for approval enough petitions for the Republican primary and are now collecting petitions for the Taxpayer line. For more information on where Carl Paladino stands on the issues, please visit www.paladinoforthepeople.com.
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Dear Friend,
I just had one of the most incredible experiences of my life- and I want to share it with you.
For weeks I had been promised that I would be allowed to speak as a candidate for Governor at the New York State Republican Convention in New York City.
When I arrived at the convention I learned that the Republican leadership had slipped in a convention rule that said candidates for Governor would be allowed to speak after the voting to select the Republican candidate and only those candidates who received 25% would be allowed to speak!
Have you ever heard of anything so backwards and undemocratic?
This so typical of the New York political situation where both parties have contributed to the dysfunction in Albany.
After a motion to move candidate speeches before the voting failed, and some quick thinking by Erie County Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy who was my convention floor manager, I was given a proxy so I could address the convention- by nominating myself! I had ten minutes to lay out our agenda for radical reform in Albany.
I never expected to be the choice of the Republican party bosses who have so much invested in the current system in Albany. I have always vowed to take my fight to the voters in the Republican Party primary. I know I will win the Republican Primary against former liberal Republican Congressman Rick Lazio whose days in Washington were marked by his strong support for the big-government style, sub-prime mortgage program push by Andrew Cuomo when he was the Secretary of Housing. Together Lazio and Cuomo cost US taxpayers $2.4 Billion in failed mortgages.
I have no illusions- just getting my name on the ballot will take a super-human effort to collect more than the 15,000 valid Republican voter signatures- which could cost our campaign more than $500,000. I have no choice.
If you want to volunteer to collect valid Republican voter signatures in your community please contact me by clicking here. Unless we press our people's campaign to clean up Albany- I am convinced that nothing will change under political insiders Rick Lazio or Andrew Cuomo. When I see the lobbyists and other special interests shoveling money into Cuomo and covering their bet with token contributions to Lazio you can see they are both members of the political elite that are destroying this state.
The political establishment will stop at nothing to stop real reform that erodes their power and riches.
I have a very specific and comprehensive plan to revive New York's economy to:
cut taxes 10%.
cut spending by 20% by eliminating waste, fraud and government programs that aren't working.
cancel pension benefits and free health care for state legislators.
impose 8 year term limits for all state elected offices including the legislature.
institute a one-year residency requirement before anyone can receive welfare payments.
re-negotiate the fat public employee pension deals that have literally driven us to the brink of bankruptcy.
appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute corruption in the State Legislature and give him the subpoena power to get at the facts.
I have no illusions about how difficult it will be to force this package of reforms through the famously dysfunctional and corrupt New York State legislature. The people of New York must demand these reforms so that our legislators understand that there will be consequences for their inaction.
I can't do it alone. Democrat Andrew Cuomo has $20 Million dollars in special interest campaign contributions filling his war chest. Observers expect him to raise another $30 Million from the lobbyist, bankers, investment houses, Wall Street insiders, law firms, insurance companies and all those interested in maintaining the status quo in Albany.
While I have pledged to spend up to $10 Million of my own money, it will take far more if we are going to defeat the entrenched liberal special interests who have a stranglehold on our government.
Together you and I can rally those New Yorkers who are fed-up and ready for radical reform. My campaign must raise an additional $200,000 in the next two weeks to keep our campaign plan on schedule.
I did not expect to be a candidate of the Republican Party bosses when they meet at their convention the first week of June. As I said, I intend to take my case directly to the Republican primary voters by collecting the 30,000 signatures that would ensure that my name appears on the September Republican Primary ballot. This effort alone could cost my campaign as much as $500,000.
If you want to help my campaign gather valid voter signatures as a volunteer please e-mail me by clicking here.
Because the New York State Conservative Party has also been co-opted by deal making, patronage hungry career politicians, I will also petition my way onto the November ballot on a Tea Party-oriented line. I believe this will create a vehicle to attract the votes of conservative Democrats and Independents who agree with us on the issues but are not comfortable voting Republican.
You can use your Visa or Mastercard to make a contribution now. Won't you send $200, $100, $75 or $50? Even a contribution of $25 would be a big help.
Together we can defeat the bosses of the Republican establishment in their attempt to saddle our party with a weak nominee and defeat Andrew Cuomo and the liberal special interests who hope to make him Governor.
I will be checking for your response online. Thank you. Please let me hear from you today.
Carl P. Paladino
Candidate for Governor
PS - Don't let the attacks on me by the liberal media and political insiders distract you. The real obscenity is Albany and what they are doing with our money, not to mention the succession of corrupt politicians representing us. It seems like a new one is arrested every day. We can turn Albany upside down and take out the trash. Please go to https://www.paladinoforthepeople.com/donate.php and rush me your answer today.
I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.
