Saturday, July 08, 2006
Political Semantics
With the viciousness of the GOP infecting every nook and cranny of our society like a flesh-eating bacterial infection, there is an important issue that every progressive must pummel constantly. It shouldn't have to be a neverending job, but the Karl Roves of the GOP are making it so. So here goes:
Progressives must claim their language and not let the GOP hijack it, demonize it, or act like pots calling kettles black. Examples:
Liberal - We all know this one and we all know it's a canard. Fortunately most Americans are catching on.
Waffling / Flip-flopping - Everytime the GOP accuses legislators or candidates of "flip-flopping," be prepared to counter with the flip-flopping of the GOP. More Liberals and Progressives are doing this and focusing appropriately on the fundamental ideology of Conservatism: Conserving the economy, keeping government size manageable and budgetable, protecting our infrastructure for the benefit of all (per the Constitution), using the Constitution as it was written, and conserving our natural resources. Tax cuts, pre-emptive wars of aggression, no-bid contracting that fails to use the Federal Acquistion Regs, destroying the parts of the government that work very efficiently (e.g, Social Security and Medicare), allowing special interests to write legislation (e.g, Medicare Part D was written by Big Pharma), and having an administration that ignores our Constitution and our environment are the biggest FLIP-FLOPs of all, they are violations of BOTH Conservative and Liberal values.
Socialism/Communism - Communism is a failed political system because in practice it became tyranny. In theory, it is neither bad nor good. The reason we started a Cold War was not Communism per se, but the way in which the extraordinarily brutal dictator Joseph Stalin applied it in the USSR (following in the footsteps of the almost-as-brutal Lenin), while posturing with nuclear weapons. It was a real threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis reminds us just how scary it was.
That said, we don't know if a communally based political system would work democratically, because no one has tried it without creating a top-down dictatorship. (Which is why we went to Vietnam, because we were afraid of the domino effect. As it turns out, the effect has not been as scary as we thought.)
Socialism is the economic program used by Communists, and it also failed in that context because Communism failed. Socialism (created in part by philosopher Karl Marx) is not a dirty word. Nor is it inconsistent with democracy. Most of western Europe have socialist democracies. This is simply the recognition that the natural resources and the common needs of the People must be managed by government (hence, national health care that has bulk negotiating power) for the common good.
The common good - This is not inconsistent with a marketplace, it just recognizes that a fully deregulated marketplace will work for the corporate good, not for the common good. Profit is the market's motive, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it does not prevent the People from having access to those things that are necessary to attain the inalienable rights defined in the Declaration: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. So the government must provide for, assist, or protect: Sustainability in food, water, shelter, clothing, a living wage, education, transportation, health care, energy, fair trade (not free trade), and the common defense (NOT offense and not black-budget foreign policy run by the CIA or other wrong-headed or wasteful programs). Furthermore, to ensure the protection of liberty, the Constitution must be defended and upheld, which is why every elected and civil servant and member of the armed forces swears an oath to it.
Market forces and market gaps - Market forces do not automatically make everything fall in line. Market forces are driven by profits. Where profit cannot be easily attained, there exists a market gap. It may come as no shock that most infrastructure, and other features of the kind of economy we seek, like one that creates high value jobs (which are always created by small businesses, not by corporate bureaucratic behemoths) is swiss-cheese holey with market gaps. That's why we have a government to help level the playing field. And, for any of you conservatives out there reading this, I learned this term when I was studying economics from none other than Milton Friedman, a conservative economist just this side of laissez-faire. If MF could understand the importance of using policy to address market gaps, than so should we, regardless of our political inclinations.
Regulation - Regulation is NOT a bad thing. It is necessary to protect the common good. For example, Big Pharma and the Energy Industry were deregulated during the Reagan Administration, and now health care has become virtually unaffordable by some 70 percent of Americans, largely due to the marketing excesses of Big Pharma and its cozy relationship to the FDA. (I favor Medicare for all, but if we can't have that, I'd be pleased to see Big Pharma back in chains. The cost of drugs is a huge slice of the health-care cost pie, and a regulated pharmaceutical industry would help correct a significant piece of the problem.)
And consider the energy problem. We already see how unregulated companies have made anti-trust statutes a joke (Wal-Mart, who holds a monopsony on an entire supply chain from China to the U.S.), and how executives are now at a compensation ratio of 430:1 with their average floor employee. (The obligations of wealth are to remember that it is our economy and our workers that allow one to attain wealth. Therefore the wealthy bear ethical responsibility to ensure that redistribution is reasonable. Rewards for positive performance are fine, but not in the hundreds of millions of dollars when your employees and customers have to choose between a tank of gas or getting groceries.)
We saw what happened to Enron, and yet the oil companies are getting away with the same stupid shit. (Same shit, different year.) When oil supply is somehow curtailed, it affects the the supplier and everyone in the supply chain down to the end user. Suppliers ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE PROFITS DURING PERIODS OF SHORT SUPPLY. When they do, it is illegal and it is called price gouging. Don't you believe for a minute that Congress has settled this matter. Their special interests want them to settle it, but it must be pounded in to them that we will stand for weasel-talk that tries to justify illegal price gouging. Before deregulation, oil companies DID NOT make a profit during periods of scarcity because the government was doing it's job protecting the infrastructure.
Media Consolidation - In the 1970s we had several hundred media companies. Now we have about 50. The result - Major corporations control the message, and since major corporations tend to get what they want from the GOP, that means the GOP controls the message. (The old Quid Pro Quo principle hard at work.) To the extent that we can stop it, we must. Just listen to Clear Channel radio (which WILL make you want to throw up after about ten minutes). Or watch the idiocy on the 24-hour news channels (Fox being a particularly obnoxious example, but none of them are great). Those channels are there to sell advertising, and if they can squeeze in some GOP propaganda at the same time, even better.
Special Interests - These are corporate lobbyists and campaign contributors, and for all intents and purposes, as long as they are allowed to persist in their ugly Abramoff activities, they are making our democracy an oligarghy. With Mr. It-Would-Be-Easier-If-I-Was-Dictator as president.
Money and Speech - Money DOES NOT EQUAL Speech in a democracy. Just like the precedent that made it seem like corporations could be treated like the Sovereign People (see my other blog for more on this), a similar precedent is used to try to pull this canard off. It's convenient for the elite special interests if they think their money equals speech, but in reality, if money equalled speech only those with money could talk, and the First Amendment prohibits that. The Constitution trumps misinterpreted SCOTUS precedents everytime. (As for the corporations as persons thing, that's trumped by Article I.)
Speaking of special interests - There's a term called "framing," that takes a corporate-interest issue and tries to make it sound populist. You have to watch out for these like a hawk. They pop up all the time when votes of perceived importance by the GOP are coming up in the House or Senate. Right now the big issue is Media Consolidation and Net Neutrality. I addressed Media Consolidation, but let's consider Net Neutrality. There's an organization advertising right now that calls itself "Hands off the Internet." This is a special interest that tries to portray itself as "Net Neutrality" because it wants us to support legislation that does not regulate how the internet is used by private corporations. Theoretically, the internet could be privatized (again, we're talking infrastructure, and infrastructure cannot be privatized without regulation), so that end users pay up the wazoo to attain any kind of decent access. They claim that it will still be free because it will provide nominal, low-bandwidth access for those who don't pay.
Real Net Neutrality - Keeps the internet free of corporate interference. Corporations would still act as ISPs, but that would be it. To learn more, and to encourage your Senators to support Net Neutrality, visit Save the Internet.
It probably has a fancy name, but the tactic is grade-school simple. It's called Pot Calling the Kettle Black (PKtKB). Psychologists call it Projection.
PCtKB - Inevitably, when faced with a shortcoming, the GOP will project it back onto the opponent. George Bush, AWOL Draft Dodger becomes John Kerry, Swift Boat Coward. (Unfortunately, Mr. Kerry was trying to be "nice," so he failed to share with voters that Mr. Bush was indeed an AWOL draft dodger, while he earned several medals for heroism on one of the deadliest deployments in Vietnam.) Bush used it on McCain during the 2000 primaries, James Baker used it on Warren Christopher during the 2000 Florida Debacle, and it has been used constantly ever since. There's a school of thought that one should ignore such acts of schoolyard bullying, but when your bullies are wingnuts, that don't fly. The voters must be given the truth - which is readily available in documents for the sharing, provided the individuals involved are willing to have their staff do a bit of research.
And speaking of research, ALL OF US MUST READ THE CONSTITUTION. The boy king likes to be the decider regarding what is Constitutional and what isn't, but that isn't his place and it says so IN THE CONSTITUTION. I doubt seriously that he has even READ the Constitution. It is not hard reading, so make like Nike and JUST DO IT. You will find that every time some in the GOP claims that they're concerned about something being Consitutional, or they made sure it was Constitutional, IT WAS NOT CONSTITUTIONAL. They live behind the Looking Glass where saying it's so makes it so. (Psychologists call this childish magical thinking.)
You boys can say it's so and hope to make it so to your heart's content, but if it does not fit with the facts, I'm not listening, because I know you're trying to pull a fast one. Unfortunately a few too many of us listened to you rather than the weapons inspectors and insider whistleblowers like Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill (who informed us that the administration was obsessed with Iraq from Jan. 21, 2001), and now we're in a mess of a war. A few too many of us listened again to your campaign lies in 2004. I think the majority of us have finally figured out that you live in Wonderland and the rest of us live in the REAL WORLD.
Finally, one of my particular bugbears:
Conspiracy theories - If you don't believe there are conspiracies out there, you are not a proper steward of your country. Any time more than one person in power lies to accomplish a goal without the knowledge of the People, and after comparing notes with another person in power, that is a conspiracy. Cheney and Rummy conspire constantly. Now there are some who think all the conspiracies are interrelated and make one mass conspiracy. I don't subscribe to that view, I think pure ideology and plain ol' greed do a lot of the work some think is conspiracy. Steven Kinzer for example, describes beautifully how greed got us into this routine of interventionist foreign policy in his book Conquest. But if you don't think there are people who have worked in small groups to exploit that interventionist foreign policy for secret gain, you are too naive for words. If you don't think there's a shadow government, you need to get out more. Cheney-Rummy and the rest of the PNAC gang are a perfect example of the kinds of shadows that can run government without our knowledge. These shadows may not take the form of the hellish underground that some describe, but there are groups of people (like the PNAC gang) working secretly (often in the intelligence agencies, where secrecy is King) to use the government to accomplish goals that usually involve greed and economic domination of the world through bad trade policy and privatization of infrastructure. (The IMF and the World Fund have their shadows too, which is why Wolfowitz of PNAC was installed there.) The Plame outing has been revealed as a conspiracy, and there's even been an indictment. And finally, Why do you think the FAR has been tossed out so Halliburton and friends could get no-bid contracts in Iraq?
So when you hear people refer to themselves as conspiracy theorists, don't assume they wear tinfoil. When people attain power and money, they get greedy for more, and they start to set class and race against each other (divide and conquer - the time-honored strategy of white male elites for thousands of years) and that is the soil in which the seeds of conspiracy are planted. Citizens who take responsibility for their country pay attention and do what they can to stop these kinds of conspiracies. We're not kooks.
Our government has many fine attributes but its failing is that our framers could not foresee this problem. Corporations were not then what they are now, and let's face it, the framers themselves were mostly well-off landowners. (Business entrepreneur Ben Franklin was the closest thing they had to a reality check.) So they had no frame of reference to see the potential problems of money affecting those in power. (They did create check and balances, and they did intend for those in power to share it and pass it on, but in practice, these ideals have been hard for the political elite to follow. Once you get power it tends to intoxicate you.) Nor had they been introduced to La Cosa Nostra, which is a perfect example of a very real, ongoing conspiracy.
It's too bad they didn't revisit the story of Julius Caesar. Because, that my friends, is the epitome of conspiracy. Good intentions, perhaps, but Brutus did conspire in secret with his cousin and a few high-placed friends to assassinate Caesar.
As for a real conspiracies today, there are a ton of 'em because this administration lies to us every damn day. Some of us are trying to keep up. But if there's one on which our country depends, it's the 911Truth Movement, started by the families of those who died. If you're not familiar, start with a web search for 911Truth. Or start here:
911Truth.org
This is not an unprecedented event. In 1956, a report released by a German Press Officer pretty much confirmed what the world had suspected for 20 years. The communists that were supposed to have set the 1933 Reichstag fire were actually SS Officers working on orders from the Nazi command who were then shot. But blaming the fire on "communists" (we actually weren't the first to demonize communists) started the ball rolling: The Enabling Act, the coup that made Hitler Chancellor, and the gradual turning of the population into vicious anti-Semites with propaganda.
And it was none other than Prescott Bush himself, he of Union Banking fame (he and Averill Harriman were found to be trading with the Nazis in 1942), who managed to use his S&B pedigree to get out of a conviction for treason (Union Banking was shut down for the duration of the war and never did get back off the ground), and ultimately won a bid for the Senate from Connecticut. He then used his position to help push Project PAPERCLIP, which gave Nazi scientists immunity if they would work on secret projects for this country. Sidney Gottleib of MK-ULTRA fame was a PAPERCLIP man. And Prescott is the grandfather of the boy king.
All of this is documented and easy to find, part of the public domain. So check it out. And once you do, I dare you to tell me there are no conspiracy theories and that those of us who keep track are tinfoil kooks.
And that brings me to my final point about semantics. The GOP will try to make anything good or decent or reasonable about their opposition seem evil, when they themselves are evil for doing so. They have made terms like "liberal," "socialist democracy," and "conspiracy theory" all seem like bad things when they are good things. It's up to us to RE-frame the words back into the definitions that belong to them and to tell the GOP to STOP LYING.
Those who don't (and that would be about half of the Democrats in Congress) are failing their country and should be ashamed of themselves.
Progressives must claim their language and not let the GOP hijack it, demonize it, or act like pots calling kettles black. Examples:
Liberal - We all know this one and we all know it's a canard. Fortunately most Americans are catching on.
Waffling / Flip-flopping - Everytime the GOP accuses legislators or candidates of "flip-flopping," be prepared to counter with the flip-flopping of the GOP. More Liberals and Progressives are doing this and focusing appropriately on the fundamental ideology of Conservatism: Conserving the economy, keeping government size manageable and budgetable, protecting our infrastructure for the benefit of all (per the Constitution), using the Constitution as it was written, and conserving our natural resources. Tax cuts, pre-emptive wars of aggression, no-bid contracting that fails to use the Federal Acquistion Regs, destroying the parts of the government that work very efficiently (e.g, Social Security and Medicare), allowing special interests to write legislation (e.g, Medicare Part D was written by Big Pharma), and having an administration that ignores our Constitution and our environment are the biggest FLIP-FLOPs of all, they are violations of BOTH Conservative and Liberal values.
Socialism/Communism - Communism is a failed political system because in practice it became tyranny. In theory, it is neither bad nor good. The reason we started a Cold War was not Communism per se, but the way in which the extraordinarily brutal dictator Joseph Stalin applied it in the USSR (following in the footsteps of the almost-as-brutal Lenin), while posturing with nuclear weapons. It was a real threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis reminds us just how scary it was.
That said, we don't know if a communally based political system would work democratically, because no one has tried it without creating a top-down dictatorship. (Which is why we went to Vietnam, because we were afraid of the domino effect. As it turns out, the effect has not been as scary as we thought.)
Socialism is the economic program used by Communists, and it also failed in that context because Communism failed. Socialism (created in part by philosopher Karl Marx) is not a dirty word. Nor is it inconsistent with democracy. Most of western Europe have socialist democracies. This is simply the recognition that the natural resources and the common needs of the People must be managed by government (hence, national health care that has bulk negotiating power) for the common good.
The common good - This is not inconsistent with a marketplace, it just recognizes that a fully deregulated marketplace will work for the corporate good, not for the common good. Profit is the market's motive, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it does not prevent the People from having access to those things that are necessary to attain the inalienable rights defined in the Declaration: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. So the government must provide for, assist, or protect: Sustainability in food, water, shelter, clothing, a living wage, education, transportation, health care, energy, fair trade (not free trade), and the common defense (NOT offense and not black-budget foreign policy run by the CIA or other wrong-headed or wasteful programs). Furthermore, to ensure the protection of liberty, the Constitution must be defended and upheld, which is why every elected and civil servant and member of the armed forces swears an oath to it.
Market forces and market gaps - Market forces do not automatically make everything fall in line. Market forces are driven by profits. Where profit cannot be easily attained, there exists a market gap. It may come as no shock that most infrastructure, and other features of the kind of economy we seek, like one that creates high value jobs (which are always created by small businesses, not by corporate bureaucratic behemoths) is swiss-cheese holey with market gaps. That's why we have a government to help level the playing field. And, for any of you conservatives out there reading this, I learned this term when I was studying economics from none other than Milton Friedman, a conservative economist just this side of laissez-faire. If MF could understand the importance of using policy to address market gaps, than so should we, regardless of our political inclinations.
Regulation - Regulation is NOT a bad thing. It is necessary to protect the common good. For example, Big Pharma and the Energy Industry were deregulated during the Reagan Administration, and now health care has become virtually unaffordable by some 70 percent of Americans, largely due to the marketing excesses of Big Pharma and its cozy relationship to the FDA. (I favor Medicare for all, but if we can't have that, I'd be pleased to see Big Pharma back in chains. The cost of drugs is a huge slice of the health-care cost pie, and a regulated pharmaceutical industry would help correct a significant piece of the problem.)
And consider the energy problem. We already see how unregulated companies have made anti-trust statutes a joke (Wal-Mart, who holds a monopsony on an entire supply chain from China to the U.S.), and how executives are now at a compensation ratio of 430:1 with their average floor employee. (The obligations of wealth are to remember that it is our economy and our workers that allow one to attain wealth. Therefore the wealthy bear ethical responsibility to ensure that redistribution is reasonable. Rewards for positive performance are fine, but not in the hundreds of millions of dollars when your employees and customers have to choose between a tank of gas or getting groceries.)
We saw what happened to Enron, and yet the oil companies are getting away with the same stupid shit. (Same shit, different year.) When oil supply is somehow curtailed, it affects the the supplier and everyone in the supply chain down to the end user. Suppliers ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE PROFITS DURING PERIODS OF SHORT SUPPLY. When they do, it is illegal and it is called price gouging. Don't you believe for a minute that Congress has settled this matter. Their special interests want them to settle it, but it must be pounded in to them that we will stand for weasel-talk that tries to justify illegal price gouging. Before deregulation, oil companies DID NOT make a profit during periods of scarcity because the government was doing it's job protecting the infrastructure.
Media Consolidation - In the 1970s we had several hundred media companies. Now we have about 50. The result - Major corporations control the message, and since major corporations tend to get what they want from the GOP, that means the GOP controls the message. (The old Quid Pro Quo principle hard at work.) To the extent that we can stop it, we must. Just listen to Clear Channel radio (which WILL make you want to throw up after about ten minutes). Or watch the idiocy on the 24-hour news channels (Fox being a particularly obnoxious example, but none of them are great). Those channels are there to sell advertising, and if they can squeeze in some GOP propaganda at the same time, even better.
Special Interests - These are corporate lobbyists and campaign contributors, and for all intents and purposes, as long as they are allowed to persist in their ugly Abramoff activities, they are making our democracy an oligarghy. With Mr. It-Would-Be-Easier-If-I-Was-Dictator as president.
Money and Speech - Money DOES NOT EQUAL Speech in a democracy. Just like the precedent that made it seem like corporations could be treated like the Sovereign People (see my other blog for more on this), a similar precedent is used to try to pull this canard off. It's convenient for the elite special interests if they think their money equals speech, but in reality, if money equalled speech only those with money could talk, and the First Amendment prohibits that. The Constitution trumps misinterpreted SCOTUS precedents everytime. (As for the corporations as persons thing, that's trumped by Article I.)
Speaking of special interests - There's a term called "framing," that takes a corporate-interest issue and tries to make it sound populist. You have to watch out for these like a hawk. They pop up all the time when votes of perceived importance by the GOP are coming up in the House or Senate. Right now the big issue is Media Consolidation and Net Neutrality. I addressed Media Consolidation, but let's consider Net Neutrality. There's an organization advertising right now that calls itself "Hands off the Internet." This is a special interest that tries to portray itself as "Net Neutrality" because it wants us to support legislation that does not regulate how the internet is used by private corporations. Theoretically, the internet could be privatized (again, we're talking infrastructure, and infrastructure cannot be privatized without regulation), so that end users pay up the wazoo to attain any kind of decent access. They claim that it will still be free because it will provide nominal, low-bandwidth access for those who don't pay.
Real Net Neutrality - Keeps the internet free of corporate interference. Corporations would still act as ISPs, but that would be it. To learn more, and to encourage your Senators to support Net Neutrality, visit Save the Internet.
It probably has a fancy name, but the tactic is grade-school simple. It's called Pot Calling the Kettle Black (PKtKB). Psychologists call it Projection.
PCtKB - Inevitably, when faced with a shortcoming, the GOP will project it back onto the opponent. George Bush, AWOL Draft Dodger becomes John Kerry, Swift Boat Coward. (Unfortunately, Mr. Kerry was trying to be "nice," so he failed to share with voters that Mr. Bush was indeed an AWOL draft dodger, while he earned several medals for heroism on one of the deadliest deployments in Vietnam.) Bush used it on McCain during the 2000 primaries, James Baker used it on Warren Christopher during the 2000 Florida Debacle, and it has been used constantly ever since. There's a school of thought that one should ignore such acts of schoolyard bullying, but when your bullies are wingnuts, that don't fly. The voters must be given the truth - which is readily available in documents for the sharing, provided the individuals involved are willing to have their staff do a bit of research.
And speaking of research, ALL OF US MUST READ THE CONSTITUTION. The boy king likes to be the decider regarding what is Constitutional and what isn't, but that isn't his place and it says so IN THE CONSTITUTION. I doubt seriously that he has even READ the Constitution. It is not hard reading, so make like Nike and JUST DO IT. You will find that every time some in the GOP claims that they're concerned about something being Consitutional, or they made sure it was Constitutional, IT WAS NOT CONSTITUTIONAL. They live behind the Looking Glass where saying it's so makes it so. (Psychologists call this childish magical thinking.)
You boys can say it's so and hope to make it so to your heart's content, but if it does not fit with the facts, I'm not listening, because I know you're trying to pull a fast one. Unfortunately a few too many of us listened to you rather than the weapons inspectors and insider whistleblowers like Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill (who informed us that the administration was obsessed with Iraq from Jan. 21, 2001), and now we're in a mess of a war. A few too many of us listened again to your campaign lies in 2004. I think the majority of us have finally figured out that you live in Wonderland and the rest of us live in the REAL WORLD.
Finally, one of my particular bugbears:
Conspiracy theories - If you don't believe there are conspiracies out there, you are not a proper steward of your country. Any time more than one person in power lies to accomplish a goal without the knowledge of the People, and after comparing notes with another person in power, that is a conspiracy. Cheney and Rummy conspire constantly. Now there are some who think all the conspiracies are interrelated and make one mass conspiracy. I don't subscribe to that view, I think pure ideology and plain ol' greed do a lot of the work some think is conspiracy. Steven Kinzer for example, describes beautifully how greed got us into this routine of interventionist foreign policy in his book Conquest. But if you don't think there are people who have worked in small groups to exploit that interventionist foreign policy for secret gain, you are too naive for words. If you don't think there's a shadow government, you need to get out more. Cheney-Rummy and the rest of the PNAC gang are a perfect example of the kinds of shadows that can run government without our knowledge. These shadows may not take the form of the hellish underground that some describe, but there are groups of people (like the PNAC gang) working secretly (often in the intelligence agencies, where secrecy is King) to use the government to accomplish goals that usually involve greed and economic domination of the world through bad trade policy and privatization of infrastructure. (The IMF and the World Fund have their shadows too, which is why Wolfowitz of PNAC was installed there.) The Plame outing has been revealed as a conspiracy, and there's even been an indictment. And finally, Why do you think the FAR has been tossed out so Halliburton and friends could get no-bid contracts in Iraq?
So when you hear people refer to themselves as conspiracy theorists, don't assume they wear tinfoil. When people attain power and money, they get greedy for more, and they start to set class and race against each other (divide and conquer - the time-honored strategy of white male elites for thousands of years) and that is the soil in which the seeds of conspiracy are planted. Citizens who take responsibility for their country pay attention and do what they can to stop these kinds of conspiracies. We're not kooks.
Our government has many fine attributes but its failing is that our framers could not foresee this problem. Corporations were not then what they are now, and let's face it, the framers themselves were mostly well-off landowners. (Business entrepreneur Ben Franklin was the closest thing they had to a reality check.) So they had no frame of reference to see the potential problems of money affecting those in power. (They did create check and balances, and they did intend for those in power to share it and pass it on, but in practice, these ideals have been hard for the political elite to follow. Once you get power it tends to intoxicate you.) Nor had they been introduced to La Cosa Nostra, which is a perfect example of a very real, ongoing conspiracy.
It's too bad they didn't revisit the story of Julius Caesar. Because, that my friends, is the epitome of conspiracy. Good intentions, perhaps, but Brutus did conspire in secret with his cousin and a few high-placed friends to assassinate Caesar.
As for a real conspiracies today, there are a ton of 'em because this administration lies to us every damn day. Some of us are trying to keep up. But if there's one on which our country depends, it's the 911Truth Movement, started by the families of those who died. If you're not familiar, start with a web search for 911Truth. Or start here:
911Truth.org
This is not an unprecedented event. In 1956, a report released by a German Press Officer pretty much confirmed what the world had suspected for 20 years. The communists that were supposed to have set the 1933 Reichstag fire were actually SS Officers working on orders from the Nazi command who were then shot. But blaming the fire on "communists" (we actually weren't the first to demonize communists) started the ball rolling: The Enabling Act, the coup that made Hitler Chancellor, and the gradual turning of the population into vicious anti-Semites with propaganda.
And it was none other than Prescott Bush himself, he of Union Banking fame (he and Averill Harriman were found to be trading with the Nazis in 1942), who managed to use his S&B pedigree to get out of a conviction for treason (Union Banking was shut down for the duration of the war and never did get back off the ground), and ultimately won a bid for the Senate from Connecticut. He then used his position to help push Project PAPERCLIP, which gave Nazi scientists immunity if they would work on secret projects for this country. Sidney Gottleib of MK-ULTRA fame was a PAPERCLIP man. And Prescott is the grandfather of the boy king.
All of this is documented and easy to find, part of the public domain. So check it out. And once you do, I dare you to tell me there are no conspiracy theories and that those of us who keep track are tinfoil kooks.
And that brings me to my final point about semantics. The GOP will try to make anything good or decent or reasonable about their opposition seem evil, when they themselves are evil for doing so. They have made terms like "liberal," "socialist democracy," and "conspiracy theory" all seem like bad things when they are good things. It's up to us to RE-frame the words back into the definitions that belong to them and to tell the GOP to STOP LYING.
Those who don't (and that would be about half of the Democrats in Congress) are failing their country and should be ashamed of themselves.
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