
Homeland Security Prepares for Civil War August 28, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Economic Crisis, Revolution.Tags: civil revolt, civil unrest, civil war, dhs, doug haggman, hollow point bullets, Homeland Security, jack swint, madison ruppert, revolution, roger hollander, tea party
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Roger’s note: I have no idea how reliable is the author of this article. If the facts are correct, then we have good reason to fear massive repression of civil unrest. The article suggests that it is more likely to come from the right (tea party) than the left. In either case the notion of economic disaster leading to civilian rioting being confronted by agencies armed with lethal weapons is truly frightening.

Only Ron Paul Warns Of Emerging Fascist State February 27, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, Right Wing, War.Tags: fascism, foreign policy, indifinite detention, militarism, military detentiion, ndaa, patriot act, presidential power, republicans, right wing, roger hollander, ron paul, sherwood ross, tea party, war on drugs
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Roger’s note: Please don’t get me wrong, I am no fan or supporter of Ron Paul with his Social Darwinian Ayn Rand Libertarian philosophy that makes a fetish of the sacred concept of individual liberty (as if it were possible to separate the individual from the community). Nevertheless, Paul’s positions on war and empire coincide with that of the left in general and the Occupy Movement in specific. It is also easy to see why his persona, which reeks of sincerity and honest indignation, appeals to youthful idealism. His association with the extreme right and some alleged policy statements that sound like white supremacism, are disturbing. But his position of militarism and fascism, as outlined in the article below, begs the question of why he is a part of the Republican Party in the first place; and why, if he sees the connection between authoritarian government and mega corporations, his domestic policy coincides with the interests of those same corporations.
Republican Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate of either party to tell the truth that America is “slipping into a fascist system.”
That is unquestionably the critical issue of the hour for the United States of America and one that Paul’s Republican fellow candidates and their Democratic opponent President Obama choose to ignore.
Hand in hand with this existential crisis is that a nation that goes fascist at home invariably becomes a tyrant abroad. Thus, the Congressman from Galveston is right on the mark when he calls for the predatory U.S. to pull its troops out of the Middle East and Africa and close down its foreign bases. The U.S., indisputably, with its 1,000 military bases at home and a thousand more abroad, is now the most awesome military power ever.
“We’ve slipped away from a true Republic,” Paul told a cheering crowd of followers at a Feb. 18th rally in Kansas City, Mo. “Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.”
According to the Associated Press reporter who covered his speech, “Paul repeatedly denounced President Barack Obama’s recent enactment of a law requiring military custody of anyone suspected to be associated with al-Qaida and involved in planning an attack on the U.S.” (Note: Paul is a consistent defender of individual rights. He also opposed that previous horrific piece of totalitarian legislation mislabeled as the Patriot Act.)
Ralph Munyan, a Republican committeeman who attended the Paul rally, told AP he agreed with Paul’s warnings of a “fascist system” and Paul’s pledges to end the War on Drugs as well as U.S. involvement in wars overseas. By contrast, candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich are all hawks spoiling for a fight with Iran and who leave peace-minded Republican voters no one to turn to save Paul.
An article on Paul published in the Feb. 27th issue of “The New Yorker” quotes him as saying, “We thought Obama might help us and get us out of some of these messes. But now we’re in more countries than ever—we can’t even keep track of how many places our troops are!”
In the evaluation of “New Yorker” reporter Kelefa Sanneh, “So far, the Paul campaign is neither a groundswell nor a failure. He is slowly collecting delegates…” which could impact the final selection of the nominee even if they do not have the strength to nominate Paul.
Overall, Paul’s message appears to be “doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008,” Sanneh writes, but “he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate.”
“People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican,” Sanneh continues.
To date, Paul’s shining contribution to the 2012 campaign is educational—even if the major networks and cable powerhouse Fox News downplay his candidacy in their primary night election coverage. Some of what he says gets through to the public, particularly youthful voters. On the grave issues of totalitarianism at home and tyranny abroad, Paul is the last truth-teller. As such, Paul is a dove fighting for survival among a flock of hawks, and his chances are not bright.
(Sherwood Ross heads a public relations firm for political candidates who favor peace and prosperity.)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Tennessee Tea Party to Children: What Slaves? January 24, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Education, History, Racism, Right Wing.Tags: abby zimet, christian bigotry, education, evangelical bigotry, founding fathers, genocide, history, moral majority, phyllis schafly, racism, right wing, roger hollander, slavery, tea party, tennessee
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Showing a marked aversity for anything remotely resembling the truth, Tennessee Tea Party leaders have issued “demands” to state legislators that schools stop teaching - through “neglect and outright ill-will” – all that bad stuff about our fine Founding Fathers like the “made-up criticism” that maybe they owned slaves or killed Indians or did other icky things, and that, “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens.” This, after Texas approved 100 revisions to textbooks for its almost five million kids that would rename slave trade “Atlantic triangular trade,” explore the “unintended consequences” of affirmative action,” emphasize the role of the Christian Chuch in the nation’s founding, call for studying iconic conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and The Moral Majority, and otherwise twist “history” to their liking.
“We seek to compel the teaching (of) the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”
Freedom Tea Party Style August 16, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties.Tags: abortion, atheism, censorship, first amendment, freedom, gay marriage, religion, roger hollander, tea party
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What else do these freedom lovers want the government to prohibit?
Thereuptic abortion
Mariajuana
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and other authors
Atheism
Peace
Feel free to add to the list.
How Abortion Caused the Debt Crisis August 1, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Economic Crisis, Racism, Right Wing, Women.Tags: 1960s, abortion, abortion rights, amanda marcotte, anti-abortion, Civil Rights, debt ceiling, debt crisis, desegregation, feminism, racism, Republican Party, right wing, right-wing populism, roe v. wade, roger hollander, sexual liberation, sexual revolution, tea party
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Last night, right before the fatal deadline, the U.S. Congress finally came to a deal that allows us to raise the debt ceiling, without which the federal government would basically shut down completely and start to default on its loans, creating a cascade of economic disasters. Congress came to a deal before we had to learn those Depression-era money-saving skills (sadly, we don’t have flour sacks to make clothes from any longer). Now it’s time to reflect on how our country has gone so far off track that we can’t even handle the basic responsibility of keeping the country from plunging into a manufactured crisis that nearly led to economic collapse. There are multiple causes, but one that hasn’t been discussed much is abortion.
Yes, abortion. Or, more specifically, the sustained sex panic that has been going on in this country since the sixties and seventies, when the sexual revolution occurred and women secured their reproductive rights. If it seems a little strange to argue that sex panic helped bring us to the verge of economic collapse, well, that’s the nature of the circuitous, ever-evolving world of politics. But it’s sex panic that helped create the modern right-wing populist, and it’s the modern right-wing populist that created the current crisis.
Despite the recent coinage of the term “Tea Party,” what we call the Tea Party has been around under different names forever. It’s basically right-wing populism, and has been the thorn in the side of democracies for at least the past century. The modern form of it in the United States really formed in the sixties, in response to two major social changes: desegregation and the sexual revolution/feminism. (Yes, I realize feminism and the sexual revolution are separate things, but for the right-wing, they may as well be one thing, since it’s women’s sexual liberation that really gets them going.) You had this huge group of socially conservative people who were wound up about these social changes, but not a lot of direction for their anger and hate. Outside of glowering at Gloria Steinem and Martin Luther King Jr., what are you supposed to do to stop widespread social change? They needed direction.
The genius of conservative leadership was that they were able to take all this anger about sexual freedom and desegregation and put the blame on two enemies: Democrats and the federal government. Democrats were blamed for society getting “out of control” and the federal government’s role in enforcing women’s rights and desegregation made them an easy target. Once these villains were established, all this right-wing populist anger could be pointed towards generic goals of big business Republicans. If you hate the federal government for enforcing the Civil Rights Act, it’s easy enough to start hating them for levying taxes, especially if you can be convinced those taxes are going to welfare to pay for what you believe is immoral behavior, such as single motherhood. If you hate the Supreme Court for Roe v. Wade, it’s easy to get you to support putting more conservative justices up there who will routinely vote for business interests.
The theory is that the Republican Party basically exploited right-wing populist anger and used it towards their economic, corporatist ends. This is a non-controversial statement, and is the thesis behind Thomas Frank’s famous book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which he wrote:
“Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically-correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”
A lot of people, including myself, have been critical of Frank’s cynicism in this formulation, arguing that the leadership actually delivers more on right-wing populist demands than Frank gives them credit for doing.
But what we didn’t argue with was the basic premise that there’s two kinds of conservatives: right-wing populists and country club Republicans, and while liberals may not much like the latter, we at least had the reassurance that they’re not crazy. Country club Republicans may want less regulation and lower taxes, but they don’t actually believe that federal power is illegitimate, or that liberals are motivated by Satanic forces and therefore can be treated as always wrong. For the past few decades, the leadership of the Republican Party was able to work with Democrats on commonsense governance such as raising the debt ceiling, precisely because they didn’t believe the wild-eyed rantings from right wing talk radio about how Democrats and the federal government are pure evil. (And the legality of abortion is example #1 in the right wing pantheon of reasons to believe the federal government is evil.)
What I think Frank and those of us who were mildly critical of him failed to grasp is the right-wing populist beast may not be within the control of the Republican Party forever, and that the populists may become a large enough group of people that they could take over the party and make their obsessions—the evils of sexual liberation, the end of the federal government as we know it—the actual priorities of the Republican Party. They very nearly brought a real end to our country as we know it, defying what what Wall Street wanted, and a major reason is that the populist caucus in the party is more interested in ideological purity than doing simply following the lead of Wall Street.
I suppose it should have been easy enough to see coming: for decades, a constant stream of propaganda about the evils of federal power, abortion rights, affirmative action, social spending, multi-culturalism, gay rights and other right wing bogeymen has energized the base to keep voting and giving money and running for office. At a certain point, the populists would have enough power to change the rules of the game. This crisis was averted, but we should not forget the important lesson learned here. The constant feeding of the paranoid, sexually and racially panicked right wing extremist imagination does not come without consequences. In the past, the mainstream media could downplay this because the major victims didn’t have a lot of privilege or power. But increasingly, it looks like the victims could be all of us.
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Amanda Marcotte blogs every day at Pandagon.net, and contributes a weekly podcast to RH Reality Check. She lives in Austin, TX with her two cats, boyfriend, and environmentally correct commuter bicycle.
The Kabuki Play On Capitol Hill Comes Right Before The Deal July 31, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Uncategorized.Tags: Boehner, congress, danny schechter, debt ceiling, debt criisis, debt crisis, Obama, roger hollander, tea party, Wall Street
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Oh, the gnashing of the teeth, Oh, the flamboyant tactics. Oh, all the breaking news excitement on cable news as the debt ceiling countdown saga went down to the wire with an intense political confrontation of a kind we haven’t seen before …
Or maybe we had—in the TARP debate and so-called Obamacare vote, to cite but two moments of high political drama. Once again, all the key players knew the outcome but wanted to keep us guessing because it served everyone’s interests.
For Boehner and the boys on the GOP side it was the great leadership test subplot. He would prove how tough he was, demonstrate his leadership mettle, get equal time with the president, and even look presidential. The orange tan was gone. His moment had in the sunlight had come as he roped the Tea party kids into the politically correct corral. The Congressman from Ohio was now a national force to be reckoned with,
Let’s not forget that he had become Wall Street’s butt boy, had been put on their financial slush fund, had many of the big money lobbyists on his side even as the financiers whined and complained about exaggerated threats to the world economy.
They made some noise but not too much. They well remember the wit and wisdom of ex-White House aide and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel about a crisis being a terrible opportunity to waste.
The Wall Street powercrats are high stakes poker players and this was one game they knew they would win in a political arena dependent on their beneficence.
At the same time, as the media compared the charade to the uncertainty of who would be chosen as this week’s Bachelorette reality TV Show. The Tea Party even got Charles Schumer and Jon Stewart going by reaching into the home video collections for sound bite from Ben Affleck’s flick, The Town, a bank robbery shoot em’ up set in Charlestown MA.
Only the pols on the hill had their eyes set on slightly bigger banks as they served bigger banksters.
Some analysts put their tactics down to “lunacy.” Others to irrationality but this gambit was far more rational than most commentators realized. It reminded me of Richard Nixon’s well-concocted madman strategy to make the Vietnamese think he was crazy enough to blow up their dykes or even drop the big one. It was a well-calculated fear tactic, a shrewd maneuver in a game of psychological warfare.
Paul Krugman understood what was going on, seconding my own analysis of the kamikaze tactics the right was using. He wrote what most of the media obfuscated about:
“The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats – who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether – have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.”
And, oh yes, the President had some big skin in the game. It gave him the posturing moment he needed to show how “balanced” he was, and how centrist he could become.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) argued that Obama talked left to move right, as the Washington Post explained:
Forget about “winning the future”–Barack Obama wants to win the center. That’s what the Washington Post is telling readers (7/25/11):
Obama ‘Big Deal’ on Debt a Gamble to Win the Center
Advisers think securing his plan would ensure general-election victory
The Post’s Zachary A. Goldfarb (who can’t be held responsible for the headline) explained that Obama was making Republicans an offer they couldn’t refuse….
He added:
“Obama’s political advisers have long believed that securing such an agreement would provide an enormous boost to his 2012 campaign, according to people familiar with White House thinking. In particular, they want to preserve and improve the president’s standing among independents.”
FAIR dipped into their own archive to reminds of us of an article from September 2009 which showed the President was under pressure even then to drop a focus on jobs to concentrate on the deficit.
In other words, this whole strategy is not new but years in the making:
“Parroting the Republican Party, corporate media have recently devoted much energy to deploring the federal deficit and chastising President Barack Obama for not focusing enough on balancing the budget. Very soon, media warn, either spending must be cut or taxes will need to be raised across the board—an argument that rests on the assumption that deficit reduction is, indeed, the top economic priority”
And, so, White House priorities shifted subtly to please the plutocrats and try to neutralize the Tea Party fanatics by co-opting their program the way Bill Clinton did in 1996, It was called “triangulation” then. Obama’s own supporters call it “betrayal” now; Obama’s pro-Wall Street economic team assured they wouldn’t give the men on The Street too much to worry about.
And so what happens now? The Republicans get their bill, unify their ranks even though it’s just more show and tell. As Reuters explains, its all a prelude to coming back to the bargaining table at the 11th hour to make a deal that both sides can use to political advantage.
Read this and as you do, read between the lines;
“The House of Representatives approved a Republican deficit plan on Friday that has no chance of becoming law but could pave the way for a last-ditch bid for bipartisan compromise to avert a crippling national default.”
This was the scenario—more akin to a Kabuki play than a real political fight. It’s more like professional wrestling of the kind they perform at the Capitol Arena not far from Capitol Hill.
The audience is hyped. The wrestlers pretend to hate each other, and arouse the crowd with acts of physical aggression. The match looks fierce, but, as everyone knows, it is fixed and scripted.
They musclemen throw each other around the ring, sometimes even gushing blood. The big bruisers denounce each other until it’s over to the count of 1-2-3; the bad guy always goes down.
The match ends, imagine that, just in time for a commercial break. Here it will end at the debt ceiling deadline. Each side will claim victory.
There is no ceiling on these political shenanigans. It’s just part of fast-paced game designed to keep the public on the sidelines and on the edge of uncertainly while the media keeps the politicians in the spotlight and excites the base in both parties,
In the end, the media will salute both sides for putting country above party. The only deficit here is one of political morality and honesty.
You tell me: am I too cynical, or is this the way what some call politricks has become?
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Mediachannel’s News Dissector Danny Schechter investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo Books via Amazon). Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
US Supreme Court Deals Mortal Blow to Privacy June 5, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice.Tags: bill of rights, civil liberties, constitution, fourth amendment, john adams, judicial warrants, michael mears, patrick henry, personal liberties, privacy, right to privacy, roger hollander, ruth bader ginsberg, searches ande seizures, supreme court, tea party
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Last month, the United States Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision in the case of Kentucky v. King, told the police in our nation that they may break into a home without a warrant if they believe that the occupants might be in the act of destroying evidence.
Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg realized that this might be the last nail in the coffin of one of the most important personal protections left for Americans. While the politicians in Washington are fiddling away our economic security, the Supreme Court has lit a match that will burn up what is left of the right of privacy and the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
While the tax-avoiding patriots were dumping taxable tea in the harbor at Boston, men like Patrick Henry and John Adams were more concerned, and rightly so, with the loss of personal liberties in the Colonies.
Perhaps none of the “protective” amendments to the U.S. Constitution has as much connection with the events leading up to the American Revolution against England and its king than does the Fourth Amendment.
This amendment, more than all of the other “Bill of Rights,” is directly associated with specific acts that led, ultimately, to the call for a complete break from England and for the establishment of a separate nation.
Perhaps the most succinct observation about the dichotomy between those who see a continuing erosion of the Fourth Amendment and those who see it as an impediment to law enforcement officers and prosecutors can be found in a more reasoned Supreme Court decision from 1948. In that opinion, the court stated:
“The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence … [it demands that] the right of privacy must reasonably yield to the right of search is, as a rule, to be decided by a judicial officer, not by a policeman or government enforcement agent.”
In February 1761 in Boston, there was a widely publicized debate over the issuance of general, limitless search warrants called Writs of Assistance. James Otis, a lawyer in Colonial Massachusetts, in a famous 1761 debate, condemned the use of these general search warrants, declaring them to be untenable in a land of free men.
But he did make a suggestion that later formed the basis for part of the Fourth Amendment. He suggested that any lawful searches be made only pursuant to warrants that contained explicit restrictions as to where the search was to take place and to the objects of the search, and that the warrants be issued only upon the making of specific oaths by the person seeking to carry out the search.
Patrick Henry followed the news reports of the debate over the use of these general search warrants (those authorizing searches at any time the holder of the search warrant deemed it necessary to search someone’s home or business) and he also argued against the abuses of such writs of assistance.
In 1778, during the constitutional debates before passage of the Bill of Rights, he argued for congressional consideration of a series of amendments to the constitution, one of which guaranteed the security of the citizenry against unreasonable government searches. This proposed amendment quite clearly presupposed that an “unreasonable” search could be avoided only by use of a warrant, and only if that warrant met certain standards.
After the adoption of the Fourth Amendment there appeared to be a general understanding of the nature and extent of the protections afforded citizens from searches without proper judicial warrants.
Up until the Supreme Court’s decision in Kentucky v. King, there was a general acknowledgment that the Fourth Amendment is a living creation with the ability to adapt its protections to new and ever-changing technology. Despite some erosion of the historical protections found in the Bill of Rights, there has been the hope that the Supreme Court would continue to regard the Fourth Amendment as necessary to protect citizens from the government.
Unfortunately, eight members of the present Supreme Court have decided that the Fourth Amendment is nothing more than a historical relic that has outlived its welcome in our “free” society.
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They weren’t slaves, it’s just that, back then, the penalty for illegal immigration was a lifetime at hard labor. Obviously, to be like the founding fathers, we need to reimpose the original sentence.
So this is what the descendants of the illegal “immigrants”- genocidal slavers look like and it looks like they may have found their messiah in the overtly racist Professor of Revisionist History running for President. This has echoes of what was done to the children of the First Nations through the same racist “educational” system of “killing the Indian”. A storm is coming…