To the "spoilers" crowd: I was right, you're always wrong

WWW--Face the facts: you lost the election for Ralph Nader by voting for an unknown quantity, Barack Obama, a kiss-ass corporate lawyer. He was never going to do the right thing, unless you mean right-wing, meaning in the service of money and power. Ten year olds saw this shit coming, it wasn't hard to miss. No, you fucked up, all of you, because you go for the name brand first rather than looking at someone for what they really are. He's like Lincoln alright, not FDR.

But none of this really matters. The system is going to keep crashing, again and again, dragging your asses firmly down to earth, grounding you whether you like it or not. I'm the kind of person who's going to get a lot of entertainment value out of this, watching smarmy, spoiled assholes suffer for a change. God knows it's going to have been earned.

To my delight, you're going to learn the hard way: what the the social contract means; what a society is for; why we must work civilly through the legal system; that the free market system was always a tottering mess that was poised for eventual extinction; what "dumbshow" means; how "conventional wisdom" tends to be utter bullshit; why civic duty is supposed to be non-negotiable; how greedy and empty you are; how stupid you are; why you suck; how conceited you are; how you have almost no intellect whatsoever; why Johnny can't read; how you don't even know the very short history of your own country; what it takes to get you off your lazy asses.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of so-called conservatives fit this bill, but so do most mainstream Democratic voters. So you hated George W. Bush? Welcome to the club, but that doesn't mean you're not the same kind of slob, the same kind of drooling asshole. Nope, you are the same kind of asshole, quit fooling yourself.

Nader voters didn't spoil anything, it was assholes like you who think you can just pull a switch and everything's fine, fixed. History never, ever works that way, it's an endless struggle between the majority and concentrated power. There are no breaks in this, no respite, it's eternal, hence the term "eternal vigilance" coming from people like Thomas Jefferson and Paine, but not James Madison. Democracy isn't a microwaveable pizza. You spoiled the elections, not us. You should have voted for Ralph Nader, the best deal on-offer in the realm of third parties, since voting for Ron Paul is completely batshit crazy.

The health care "debate"

Washington D.C.--There isn't one. As a friend recently said to me (I'm paraphrasing him), "It's all political theater in Washington. This is a plutocracy. It's just fighting over who gets money from the lobbyists, the perks." I'd agree. With a solid 70% of the American public behind a single-payer health care system, the rest is just a game, show.

Some half-assed version of reform will make it through, the whole "blue dog democrats" issue is just another smokescreen, a diversion from the real power in the party in people like Rahm Emanuel (a creep and a corporate gangster if ever there was one), and while they're going to keep costs down for a time, it's not going to help fix the economy anytime soon. These morons are going to keep wrecking the system as their kind did in the 19th century when there was a depression ever few years. Then what? The economy--as we have come to think of it--is going to have that final crash where we really-and-truly do need another F.D.R. and there won't be one.

That's likely to come sooner, rather than later. This is a matter of Madisonian democracy versus Jeffersonian. Rule by a plutocratic elite, or actual democracy by the public. The new president is with the Madisonians.

While we keep watching the news turn into puerile entertainment at our expense, and we watch America becoming something unrecognizable, there is always another way: We the People. It's up to us to stop all the yammering over garbage issues like abortion, "9/11 was an inside job,""they're gonna take my guns away," and to recognize that no strong man is going to fix things and save (it never worked that way, not even with F.D.R.), look at what we all generally agree on that actually affects us directly, and push these idiots in Washington into a corner on health care, defense spending, the wars in the Middle East, global warming, and a host of pressing issues that can no longer wait for our attention. In other words, it's time to hit the streets, it's time to organize now and to demand very loudly that business-as-usual isn't going to cut it and that the party's over for the nihilistic clowns running our country into the ground.

A groundswell and widespread striking can do this.

The choice is ours and the time is now. To fail in these endeavors is to fail ourselves--and without putting America on some kind of pedestal--to fail humanity and to take the path towards doom and oblivion. That's it, there is no more left to say after that. The majority don't want the policies they're getting from Washington. To do nothing about this knowing you're hardly alone is completely irresponsible. If you want to convince yourself that because a few yammering morons are shouting down their fellow citizens at town hall meetings as evidence that you're isolated and alone on the issue(s), fine, you didn't need very much reason to cop-out. Your problem after that will be having to live with yourself, and rest assured, that problem will be your own. The time has come for America to grow-up as a nation.

The rest is just window-dressing to confuse and overwhelm you with a bunch of empty statistics and rhetorical flourishes that were skewed before the polling was ever conducted. The debate is a false one. There is no health care debate, it's one of the big lies.

Bert Szymanski (1921-2009)

South Bend, Indiana--This week, our friend and neighbor Bert Szymanski. He was 87 years old and is one of the last surviving people in Indiana (besides his widow) who saw John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson in life. Bert was also a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather who was loved by many. Bert was a trucker who helped build the Alaskan highway during WWII. Like many of his generation in South Bend, he worked at the Studebaker plant for several years and was laid-off when it closed in 1963.

Bert told me in January of this year some interesting details that are corroborated by Dillinger's lawyer's (Louis Picquett) book regarding the gang's hideout--a safe house--here in South Bend during the 1933-34 crime wave.

Details told to me by Bert fit Picquett's account of their staying in-hiding in South Bend like a glove. There were other Dillinger gang hideouts in this are, one at Koontz Lake that's long gone, destroyed by a freak tornado in the 1960s (my father showed us the remaining steps and foundation during the 1980s).

Dillinger was chased just down the road of our current residence by Indiana State Highway Police on old S.R. 6, just ten miles down the road from our home in Walkerton, Indiana. This was his stomping ground. Bert and his wife Sally saw Dillinger inside the Biograph just minutes before his murder by FBI agents in the alleyway of the theater, but fled the scene out of fear. They were just kids, no more than 13. Amazingly, I don't think Bert ever told his children about this, but then, I don't think he and Sallie were supposed to be in East Chicago on that hot summer day in 1934 either.

We're losing these stories to mortality every day, and it's a shame that we don't take more care in preserving our history. Sounds like a job for the federal government and a new W.P.A. oral history program.

Bert was a good man who loved his family, his children, his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and his neighbors. He was a good friend of my late grandparents and he will be missed. Bert and I reflected that he lived to see two Great Depressions in his lifetime, but he was pleased that Barack Obama had won the election and was hopeful that he could be our FDR. He was a smart man, a working man. I helped Bert from the floor of his garage twice--which contributed to a hernia! I will never regret helping my neighbor, he was quite a man. He was buried this morning, and hundreds attended his viewing yesterday. I'm going to miss taking him vegetables from our garden. Sleep well, the neighborhood isn't going to be the same without you.

"It's a coup!": Some more reflections on the Wall Street bailout reactions

"When small men begin to cast big shadows,
it means that the sun is about to set."
--Lin Yutang

WWW--It was coming from Michael Moore, Naomi Wolf, and from all-points-in-between on the political spectrum back at the end of this last September and October: the bailout of Wall Street was a coup because "we're all being robbed," case closed. That we're all being robbed is a certainty, but a coup? I still keep hearing this weird contention, yet I'm not seeing any proof that any of the players being bailed-out are different ones.

Why should we care if it's the same people? Because that's one of the main preconditions of a coup--someone else has to be in-charge, replacing the last group. What coup? It doesn't fit the definition, yet you have progressives and conservatives screaming one has occurred all over the place. Was there one? Well, yes, ages ago, and they missed it. They're making strange sounds over this, and I wanted to know why, and I've given it a lot of thought and reached a few tentative conclusions.

My belief: people like Michael Moore have had major investments on Wall Street like many of us have had (not me, however!), and that includes folks like Arianna Huffington, Al Franken, much of the wider society, and maybe even a few investigative journalists and media-outlet owners out there. But aren't they begging the question? That was my feeling back in September, and it still is, with a few more historical reflections.

Now, if you lost your ass on Wall Street and you heard that others were being bailed-out--and you weren't--wouldn't you be freaking-out and yelling too? Sure you would, and if you had a soapbox bigger than everyone else's, you'd use it, right? Perhaps. This shouting that the first bailout of the banks was a "coup" by some of these celebrities across the political spectrum reminded me of someone from our past: Father Charles E. Coughlin, the radio priest.

Today, most Americans have no idea who Coughlin was, but you could say that he was one-part Rush Limbaugh, one-part Michael Moore, and one-part Joseph Goebbels. Yes, this is about the 1930s and the Great Depression, what else would it be about? Coughlin was originally from Ontario, Canada and had confronted a group of the KKK who had tried to burn his church in an act of anti-Catholic hate, so he began with "progressive" and populist credentials. At the dawn of the Great Depression, Coughlin sounded like a voice of reason to many, and they supported him with money and activism. He went as far as founding a short-lived political party, the NUSJ (The National Union for Social Justice), and was most popular with Irish-Catholics during the 1930s, but had a much wider appeal.

Incredibly, he and Gerald L.K. Smith (a lieutenant of Huey Long) could be fairly credited with creating the white supremacist movement. How did it end up that way? From frustrated populist aspirations and a deep disdain for Western-style capitalism. Some people react dysfunctionally to social injustice because they're terminal racists. Where did it all begin for the "radio priest"?

Father Coughlin's American parish in Royal Oak, Michigan began doing radio broadcasts of his sermons sometime in 1926 out of Detroit's radio station WJR, the beginning of the radio age. It has been calculated that Coughlin had a listenership-peak of as many as 40 million, an incredible number for its time. Coughlin was radically populist one moment in his speeches, backing Roosevelt completely one day, and then making remarks totally against the New Deal the next depending on which way the political winds were blowing at the moment. For him--as with Limbaugh--it was all about ratings. In this respect, little has changed since the 1930s, but he accidentally pushed FDR further to the left, so he had some value.

While Coughlin was railing against Wall Street, he was heavily invested in it at a time when almost nobody in the general population was. Who had money then? Demagogues like Charles Coughlin, that's who; the radio priest was getting rich slamming Wall Street, from his appeals for donations, and his weekly radio program's advertising revenue. Unbeknownst to most Americans, by the mid-1930s, Father Coughlin was one of the largest holders of silver in America. In other words, he was a hypocrite in most respects, and vanity assured his fall. Coughlin began with very enthusiastic support of FDR's New Deal programs, but by 1934 he started having political aspirations of his own and began bitterly attacking Roosevelt and his policies. He also began broadcasting and writing anti-Semitic remarks and began his love affair with Continental fascism and the Nazi State.

By 1938, he reprinted the Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his own newsletter, "Social Justice," and was witnessed at a Bronx speaking- engagement doing the fascist salute. It was all downhill after that, as radio stations stopped carrying his programs and the Roosevelt administration moved on him to curb his ability to disseminate first his radio programs, then his newspaper and related literature through the postal system. By 1942, with his support of Nazism all-but-complete, Coughlin became a marginalized laughingstock, and went back to his tiny Royal Oak parish to live out the rest of his life in relative obscurity.

Interstingly, he had connections with a domestic fascist group called the "Christian Front," who plotted to overthrow the government of the United States. He never renounced his connection to them.

I don't think Michael Moore is exactly the same kind of creature as Coughlin, and this isn't some attempt to smear him with the same brush at all, because it's not accurate or fair. But there are a lot of parallels between his life and that of Coughlin, and he's not alone. New communications media have empowered many individuals in the last two decades like never before, and with that access comes the same kinds of issues that arose during the 1930s, a time when radio was first emerging as a force. But the cries of "coup" smack of similar hypocrisies that people like Coughlin once engaged in. One might ask such celebrities like Limbaugh and Moore (or even "conspiracy" writers/activists like Alex Jones) what their holdings on Wall Street are today. You might get a very surprising answer indeed, even with the contemporary prevalence of investment.

Now is definitely a time of demagogues, but the question is: "Who are they exactly? Who are the demagogues?" Rush Limbaugh and most of the right-wing noise machine certainly fit that bill, but there are others out there, right now, waiting for their time. Intellectual honesty is as good an inoculation as you're likely to get, a proactive solution for the ages.

The joy of watching the politicians (and pundits) frightened

Washington D.C.--Yes, the bailout is utter bullshit. Yes, we've all been had. No, it's not a "coup d'etat," but that's the message I'm getting from much of the reactionary left as well as the right.

A message to you all: you couldn't me more off-the-mark, but that's because of your ignorance of American history, a result of our wonderful consumer culture where we only fixate on one thing at a time, living in an eternal present without any past or future. How many times do I and others have to tell you that this economic system doesn't work? But on to other irrational notions held by those who should know better...

This absolutely idiotic, baseless notion that we're experiencing a "coup" (too late! that was 2000, you seem to have missed it) is more than a little belated. What it has to do with the fact that the GOP, the White House, and congressional Democrats have wrecked the economy because they could and now don't know how to fix it without giving the public something in-return, escapes me. When you see those in power losing control of things and you start shouting "coup," it obvious you get nothing about our history or the political situation anywhere. It suggests no viable framework of thinking, assuming there's one there.

One thing is certain--most of you out there just don't get it at all. This--I believe--comes from buying into various hollow values that come with having some kind of a stake or a perceived share in this irrational mess of an economy. Luckily, I don't share in this, and have never wanted a stake in what can only be described as a festering pile of bullshit and lies. Fine, continue lying to yourselves that "they're taking over" and that you don't own a share of this stinking-mess. You do. Panicking: It's not going to change anything or what happens next. It will only make matters worse. There are alternatives...

The first is to admit that the free market system doesn't work anymore and that a new day is dawning in America where "business as usual" won't cut it. This means a new work ethic where work is meaningful, not wasteful, and has some logical use for people. It means "ownership" of commodities, agricultural-tracts, mineral wealth, and all the others means of production in America, need to truly be owned by the "little guy," not corporations. It means an end to letting corporations exist legally as "private individuals."

Additionally, it's time that Americans were finally paid a living-wage, had a single-payer health care system, progressive taxation where the rich finally pay their share (or get out), and a nationalization of the major business, banking, and financial industries who cannot be trusted any longer in the same role in our economy. They have all been irresponsible for too long, and it's over. Reform is coming if you want it. If not, panic with the rest of the morons out there and accomplish nothing, be demoralized, give-up. You must be used to it, so why change now?

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't be bailing-out home owners--we should be, and it should be the first and tallest of orders in Washington right now. As we know, the Republicans are damned if they do and damned if they don't on this, and will vigorously fight any social agenda or social dividend. If they bailout the banks and the financial institutions, they get stuck with the socialism label. If they bailout home owners, their ostensible backers, bitter boot-straps conservatives, and the rest of the wacko right-fringe will hit them over abandoning conservatism.

Actually, in both cases, the GOP's representatives are going to be accused of abandoning conservatism, which is more than appropriate. They literally don't know what to do except to hand the windfalls of a bailout to the private sector...except that the public isn't having it, not even their normally supplicant voting base.

What they're up against in Washington--and everywhere in America--is something they haven't seen in 100 years: a broad-based Populism that knows no ideological boundaries rather than the usual division Washington's political elites are used to manipulating. The game has changed radically, and overnight. Thanks George, thanks GOP. Those of us on the genuine progressive-tip couldn't have done it without you.

A coup? They cannot agree on Capitol Hill exactly what the bailout is even going to look like. If it's anything, we're seeing the collapse of a political culture under it's own weight and paradoxes. At no point has anyone shown me anything of the remotest credibility to show that this current order is anything but on-the-ropes right now. Give me a break. Honestly, if you're that frightened, move to Sweden or Australian (somewhere soft), they've beaten you down with fear so much that you don't know any other reaction these days. There's only one word for this kind of thinking, and that's cowardice in the face of victory for the average person. You really do fear real liberty, and it's sad.

Yet, today, I'm watching the Republican minority leader surrounded by his posse, having their press conference on the Hill--and there's that same look of fear in their eyes. OK, the wackos are shitting themselves that "There's a coup, there's a coup!" and then we have these very frightened politicians who have that deer in the headlights countenance, saying that "The Democratic leaders ganged-up on us at the White House meeting [over the bailout agreement]," and you see that they're all part of the same cowardly American mindset.

This stance is reactionary, cowardly, irresponsible, and not constructive. At its core it's childish, as one would expect from the average pampered American asshole.

But I have to love it all too. Watching the congressional GOP's incumbents eying those used car lots that they're all going to be returning to is going to be worth 100,000 Hoovervilles. If you saw the potential of their return to permanent minority-status for another five decades as I and others do, you wouldn't be so "scared." I don't think it's going to end there, though.

Both major parties could take a major-hit over this, which offers an opening for third parties to come in. To waste that opportunity would be irresponsible, but it appears more of us are getting this point. Ralph Nader's popularity is constantly growing, and other third party candidates are going to benefit from the current political climate. This climate isn't going to end anytime soon. The real losers will be the Republicans.

What I'm saying is that the Republican Party is going to be destroyed by this economic crash. The best part is that they're going to take several notable Democratic Party incumbents who were involved with this extraordinary corruption down with them. We almost got this with "Hookergate" and the Palfrey scandal, but this time it's going to stick (and Palfrrey is going to continue to deliver from the grave). Why is that?

Because not one plan that they float out there is going to work. Why? Neither party wants the public to experience a real windfall from any of this, and that's what all of us are poised to do if they bailout the American homeowner. That would mean a very real "New Deal," which is the opposite of their and their wealthy backers' agenda.

There will be some minor-bailouts of homeowners and some judicial and exectuive revisions of mortgages statutes to buy them some more time. That's not going to be enough either. The only answer will be giving these homes to people and creating a new generation of American homeowners. That can only be good for the economy. Otherwise, there's no "disposable income," just a mass population of people who not only cannot fill their tanks to get to work, but tens of millions of them without any income at all. Sound sustainable?

The politicians know this. They know that no matter what they do, the public will benefit in some way from it. This is why the GOP won't commit to any version of the bailout legislation yet. Conversely, they have no real choice and have lost one of their most powerful rhetorical-weapons in the legislative process: that the Democrats are dragging the process out. We all know it's the GOP, they can't hide this fact anymore.

If you don't see the mess that the people with power and privilege are in right now, you cannot see the opportunities that are there, waiting to be exploited by a steady, committed, informed, and reasonable populace. My feeling is that this reactionary crowd who are crowing that "it's a coup" are in-the-minority. We had better hope so, because without cooperation, trust, and solidarity, we're lost. These folks will shoulder a lot of the blame of any failure. Democracy: it's not for cowards.

Why the financial institution bailouts don't matter

OpEd News--That Ukrainian-born Larisa Alexandrovna is doing more of her defeatist ranting over at Rob Kall's defeatist-o'-rama site this week, this time over the bailouts being "part of the plan." What plan would that be exactly?

What we're seeing the results of short-sighted economic-philosophies with the crashing of various banking and financial institutions. That's right, the business mentality transplanted into the halls of the federal bureaucracy once again, with the predictable results.

The pathetic-part of it all is how the public, investors, and the like are all massing around former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, current Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson, and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke as though they were Mesopotamian Priests, the guys "with the answers." All they have are short-term answers.

Just as in the 1920s, the Republicans and Democrats gave the business and lending sectors what they wanted, and the results have been predictable. How is this "a plan," when it's really about profoundly corrupt and ignorant businesspeople and politicians repeating history? You don't plan to do that, especially when you're repeating history to save an already dying power structure. It's semantics, word games.

In her editorial, "Welcome to the Final Stages of the Coup," Alexandrovna tells us what most of us already know about "the Business plot" from the 1930s when various members of Wall Street (including a Senator Prescott Bush, though behind the scenes) attempted to seize power by paying-off WWI veterans and military leaders to take Washington by force and to make a puppet of executive branch.

Sure, it's relevant to now...but?

Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell to you (or Sarah Palin does anyway). This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands. ("Welcome to the Final Stages of the Coup...," OpEd News, 09.20.2008)

Congress has done all of that willingly and now they're all just trying to survive this whole debacle politically, if not legally. It's just my opinion, but I think Alexandrovna's characterization of the bailout is wrong, and that what we have here is a system that--no matter which way it turns-out--has nowhere left to go except towards substantial reform or a collapse that would take the rest of the developed world with it. Sure, we're all being ripped-off. How is this new?

That's right, even Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Australia, Canada, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, The European Union, the UK, all of it, all fall down as a result of an American economic collapse.

That's not Alexandrovna's take, however. For her, this is all going to work and it was all calculated and not a matter of gross-incompetence, negligence, greed, and short-sighted stupidity. That's a common misreading of American history that I believe will be proven wrong in the next few years. What we already know is that this was all facilitated by both parties in Congress, and that it comes out of a culture of corruption. Much of this is due to the inaction of the citizenry--the voting and non-voting public--though it took a lot of beating-down to get them to the point of apathy they now inhabit. Remember that for her argument to be true, the bailout has to "work," whatever that means. By-all-appearances, it's not going to work for very long, if at all.

What will all that bailout money be worth then? Why put worthless paper in an offshore account? Where will the guilty (the CEOs, bankers, lobbyists, the White House, and Congress) have to run? Nowhere, that's where, and that's why this is really about their survival, not a power-grab. Political and economic elites have had almost unchallenged power for decades domestically and on the world stage, just to bring Ms. Alexandrovna up-to-date.

Alexandrovna and others contend that this all puts more power into the hands of the executive branch than ever before. Sound familiar? That's exactly what was being yelled from the mountaintops when FDR was "handed" unprecedented power to intervene in the economy during the Great Depression, but holders of the "coup" viewpoint ignore the fact that these are very real emergency measures done out of desperation, albeit advocated and authored by those who created the current "man-made" economic-mess.

The administration proposal would be the biggest government intervention since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would dole out huge sums of money to financial firms to purchase their holdings of bad mortgage-backed securities so that these firms can resume normal lending operations. The bad mortgage debt has been at the heart of the current credit crisis which hit more than a year ago but erupted with special ferocity in the past two weeks forcing extraordinary government actions.

Two weeks ago, the government seized control of the nation's two largest mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then last week, it took control of the country's largest insurance company, American International Group Inc.

The measure that the administration sent up to Congress on Saturday is a mere three pages in length. ("Paulson resists calls for added help in bailout," AP , 09.21.2008)

And this is all great as well--create a situation where the runaway borrowing can commence again, unhindered. How long can that last? Not very long, because it was borrowing that got us into the mess we're in right now. Admittedly, economics is a quicksilver that often eludes the understanding of the brightest among us, though this writer contends that nobody truly understands its real machinations due to the limitations of human perception and comprehension. That's right, the rest is bullshit and polish.

While it's true that Ms. Alexandrovna was raised much of her life in the United States, she should understand that our history isn't the Ukraine's. Are there troubling-aspects in America's history that tend towards violence? Yes, but not that of Europe or Asia's tendencies towards outright bloodbaths. That's not to say that it "can't happen here"...

Alexandrovna and others should look to the period that led to the collapse of Tsarist Russia for some answers: this is what happens when a system is ending, when it is collapsing. There is repression. There are police state measures passed. Rights become tenuous and are rolled-back, and then, after a time, it ends and things tend to quiet down and "normalize" as much as they can and a new order emerges. Without a sincere solidarity and restraint, you get the Soviet Union, you get tyranny. Sometimes they occur regardless of what we do.

Yet these systems inevitably end, and nobody can do anything about this. But we have options as players on the historical stage. The shape of future orders is determined by how we act now and when things begin falling-apart. Strong-relationships are the glue of any viable society. Go make a friend, a real friend. It will be up to the American public to decide whether we end-up with chaos or community. Resorting to senseless and wanton violence will never build a better society. We have to use our heads and do what's constructive. That doesn't rule-out self-defense against repression.

I don't personally believe that there was some kind of a real "master plan" here--that's overestimating the intelligence of the members of the Bush administration and their allies, famous for their delusions of adequacy. No, they're corrupt and they and the interests they represent would have sank-into-oblivion sooner rather than later without their war on terror and their bizarre economic policies.

What we have are hollow economic arguments hitting-up-against cold, hard reality, it's that simple. They aren't alone in failed-theories and constructs, as we have creatures like Alex Jones and Larisa Alexandrovna telling us that all is lost. What's really happening is that the obvious limitations of their own theories and historical perspectives have also played-out, just as those of the neoconservatives. What will they all do without each other when a coin needs two-sides? At best, all these so-called "progressives" accomplish is the demoralization of the rest of us into either a wild panic or an apathetic resignation to the great events of our time when they should be making constructive suggestions as to what to do next. That's exactly what the powerful want, and it's time for Americans to start thinking for themselves, my own humble suggestion.

The sky is falling, but it doesn't have to mean a total catastrophe. That's up to us within certain parameters. If handled with a cool resolve, constructive-thinking and action, and a dedication to cherished values of friendship and solidarity, it could mean a very real move towards democracy unlike ever before witness in human history. The opportunities are there, and they're being missed and/or ignored by the likes of everyone from the totally irresponsible Alex Jones to the sad Larisa Alexandrovna.

Believe in yourselves, think before you act, and do what's right for yourself, your families, and your country. There's no reason to stop there--people throughout the world need a better life, and they're out there waiting to take our hands as brothers and sisters in troubled times. Friends are everywhere, but beware, and use your head. Alexandrovna strikes me as a would-be power broker who fears the voice of the people. She can speak for herself and leave the rest of us out of it.

"Welcome to the Final Stages of the Coup...," OpEd News, 09.20.2008: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Welcome-to-the-final-stage-by-Larisa-Alexandrovn-080920-541.html

"Paulson resists calls for added help in bailout," AP, 09.21.2008: http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20080921/48d5c6c0_3421_1334520080921173871715

The 1980s: "You're just jealous."

1980s A'murka--The only thing to miss about the 1980s is that the nightmare had only begun, that Reagan's policies wouldn't hit us until right before he left office in 1987, around the time of that other stock market crash.

Then, there was the lurid-spectacle of Iran-Contra going on in the backdrop of all of this, where Reagan and his group in the basement of the White House ran a secret government to pay for an illegal war in Nicaragua that involved gun-running and maybe even some drug trafficking. Who said any of it ever ended? Look at how much heroin is flowing out of Afghanistan since we got there. It was virtually extinct under the Taliban.

When we accuse Venezuela of "not cooperating in the [our] war on drugs," we're only underlining our own "extralegal" (illegal) activities. Why do you think there are so many banks in Panama capital city? That darned Chavez, I tell ya.'

Yet, Chavez is really just jealous, so we won't trouble our minds with him.

By the end, Reagan looked as empty, haggard, and intellectually vacant as the current system does today. That's because he was--as writer Paul Slansky put it--"An actor was playing the president." Little has changed since then, except for the observation that in-retrospect, Reagan faked it better as a former Hollywood actor. By the end, Reagan looked like he did when he first entered office: a washed-up, sad little man who also happened to be senile. Regardless of how much Reagan comforted us with his grandfatherly voice of authority, he wasn't FDR, and his time in office was a disaster. Like now, it was an embarrassing time to be an American.

When you criticized the way things were in the 1980s you were either called a communist, being "political" (whatever that meant), and the catch-all, "You're just jealous."

That's right. You're...just...jealous.

It has an incredible ring of intelligence, no? I didn't think so either. "I'm just jealous," I would say to myself as a mantra for yucks, walking home from high school hoping I wouldn't be mugged. There was an incredible logic to the phrase that still escapes me, but I think sometime in the 1990s I figured out what all those smart people were trying to tell me: "Matt, sell your soul for some poorly-made petrochemical consumer products that are going to be out of fashion in ten years like us, you're making us look bad." No thanks, I'm full.

Therefore: "You're just jealous." Got it? Me either! OK, so the other part I figured out was that if you have a lot of money, people become jealous of you and want to be exactly like you. That's right, even that balding problem and your inability to achieve an erection. Or, you know, things like holding the opinion that "Top Gun" was the best movie of all time, ever. I mean ever. And they also say that Randy "Duke" Cunningham was "framed." These accusers were just jealous, especially when the Dukester man proclaimed that "I never smoked marijuana," so how bad could he be for taking bribes and demanding hookers as payment for defense contract earmarks? You're...just...jealous. Got it now? See how easy that works?

It's really simple--if you criticize the way things are in America, you're just jealous and we're going to keep stonewalling you with this yammering catch-phrase until you say 'uncle.' Yeah, that was the eighties, just a smothering conformism that choked-out all light. Somehow, there were still good movies and really original underground music then. I don't know how, but these cultural sparks did a good job of hiding themselves until I heard the Butthole Surfers one fateful night in the fall of 1986 (their cover of "American Woman").

Don't get me wrong, I'd already heard PiL, DEVO, Killing Joke, and the Talking Heads by that point. As you can imagine, all this countercultural stuff...well, it made me feel--jealous. I was as confused as one of those screw-ups in a Jack T. Chick comic book.

Jealous? Today? No-no-no, we're not jealous. Alright, maybe just a tad, but we'll get over it and pull-up our bootstraps...shit, no, that's not going to work any more. We must nationalize our banks and scrap our speech on the economy that had all that "free market" B.S. peppering it, and our conservative smokescreen just isn't cutting it these days, so it's spent. Welcome to the inevitability of Socialism.

Poor, you don't need to be jealous no more, we'll all be equal in the leveling. They're gonna be playing "St. James Infirmary" in the streets of America again, and we'll all be jealous together. America has gone too long without a spectacularly public tarring-and-feathering. That time has come because we're obviously just that jealous.

The Forgotten Genocide: Stalin's Purges

Russia/Central Asia--Why don't we hear about this more often? Why are we constantly inundated about the Shoah/Holocaust, but not the liquidation of tens-of-millions of ethnic and dissident groups and individuals under Stalinism?

The answer should be pretty obvious, and saddening: they don't have advocacy groups with the resources, they are history's losers without any voice because they were powerless then and are today.

In this world, the weak are to be scorned, if remembered at all. During the Cold War, our government used these victims of Stalin as propaganda, a secondary abuse and exploitation of their lives (and deaths). Did we ever care? Of course not, the State Department of the United States of America didn't care at all, and welcomed the rise of a 'strong man' in Russia just as they did in Germany around the very same time.

Historians estimate--though we will never truly know--that somewhere around 20 million human beings were murdered under Stalin's orders by the NKVD/KGB. Today, we're hearing that it was all about "ideology," which is partly true, but what it was really just a human disaster. The West not only didn't care, but was responsible for some of the depredations and couldn't be bothered to intervene (there are no humanitarian invasions), let alone to stop the slaughter indirectly.

Yes, today, we're being told it all began in 1937, but it's not true. The slaughter's beginnings were significantly earlier if one considers Lenin's and Trotsky's use of 'the terror' against all enemies of Bolshevism--even the Soviet councils in the cities, as they were the first to be targeted by Lenin and his gangsters. The terror began during the Russian Civil War in which millions died, and even more would perish during the collectivization programs in the Ukraine during 1932-1933.

Grain was taken from the peasants and sold on the international market to pay for a disastrous process of rapid industrialization. Western nations had no problem accepting the transactions of grain for equipment and other resources. Estimates for this particular period are six-to-seven million dead alone, and it was most certainly "systematic."

The murdering would continue, with entire villages disappearing into the night until the invasion June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Some of these victims are finally being discovered, sometimes in mass graves in public parks, with the numbers in the tens-of-thousands at just one location. By now, any fool should know that this happened, but few care or want to learn from it. FDR's attitude towards the Soviet Union merely echoed that of the rest of political and economic class he was a part of. Rhetoric is meant to be deceiving.

Even after 1933 (the year of Soviet Russia's recognition by the US State Department) there would be a continuation of mass murder during the years of Stalin's reign of terror. Was it all on Stalin and his accomplices? Yes and no. WWI devastated the Russian Empire, and Tsar Nicholas II's decision to command the army during the war--and subsequently losing it--left a power vacuum in the region. The legitimacy of the Tsar was forever tarnished, and what infrastructure there had been in Russia was destroyed and social networks were fragmented. Chaos ruled. This created a very fertile soil indeed for anyone who claimed to have answers and who showed sureness, decisiveness, and who offered order and certainty.

But once you make extreme violence part of your approach, it's almost impossible to end it, it continues-on and spreads like a plague. Weep for the dead, they were like us.

Because of the ubiquitous uncertainty gripping Russia, and the divisiveness of the Civil War, few people trusted each other. A culture of informing on one another began to catch like a wildfire, and one's loyalty to the State under the control of the Bolsheviks became the central contention: did you support order or not? A chain reaction took-hold. History isn't simply about "bad guys" and "good guys," and people do terrible things when they're desperate. If you want a good analogy, imagine a society eating itself from the inside out, just as Germany was also doing at the same time. Both nations were socially and economically devastated thanks to WWI, the war that ruined the 20th century. Our options become radically limited once we have unleashed extreme violence on others. Consider this when reflecting on our current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Great Purge' of 1937-38 (with the subsequent "show trials") was a purging of the Communist Party's inner circles. Stalin was finishing the job of his consolidation of power, and like Hitler, he enjoyed pitting others against each other. What's unfortunate is that this purge is probably going to be confused as being the overall purge that continued unabated from Lenin and Trotsky, into Stalin's bloody-hands. Stalin was just following in their footsteps, and it's not hard to fathom that many of the millions-of-deaths also occurred simply because he was incompetent and had no idea how to rule a nation at all.

Lenin surely didn't know how to rule either, and as crazy as it sounds, he probably died of stroke brought-on by too much paperwork. We focus too much on these acts of destruction as being a sign of "power," when more often they're a sign that a Stalin's or a Hitler's reign are really bumbling tragedies of those clearly unfit to rule. Strong leaders avoid such calamities, and understand the art of compromise, the give-and-take. Destruction doesn't always mean power, but it can mean the avoidable deaths of millions. At least Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this.