Obama's Hidden Arizona Agenda

H/t Contrairimairi.

Poster Tells it Like It Is

Shailagh Murray published a story about Rand Paul's proposal for a tea party caucus in the Washington Post today. Murray reports that the extremist wing of the Republican Party fears the caucus because:

"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.

Candace de Russy and St. Augustine on American Decline

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.

Evolution of America's One Party System

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 States the 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?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert