Concerning Anti-Sematism being on the rise, racism and the billionaires looting the treasury

[PatrickforB]

My father was in the Pacific Theater in WWII.

He was in the Battle for New Guinea on Morotai.

It took the world upwards of sixty million lives and years of economic ruin to get rid of the Axis powers.

Dad had a friend, Herb, who was in Patton's Third Army and he had stories about liberating Buchenwald. Other stories, too. Patton really did tell his soldiers to grease the boogie wheels of their tanks with German blood and guts.

Hitler awakened nationalism, blew the ember of anti-Sematism into a raging fire and loosed the 'dogs of war' upon us all.

How in the world did WE here in America get to this almost exact parallel to Germany in the 30s?

Oh, that's right.
- The 1971 Powell Manifesto
- Death of the Fairness Doctrine
- Nixon's Southern Strategy
- AM hate-talk radio
- Growth of the Republican news (propaganda) machine (Fox, Sinclair, others)
- Sarah Palin waking up the ugly, stupid, ignorant, racist base of the GOP
- Trump and the 'good people' at Charlottesville
- Rise in right-wing militias (the American Stahlhelm and Sturmabteilung)
- Moscow Mitch packing the Supreme Court with Dominionist Christians

In the meantime Wall Street roars:
- The Espionage Act that put Eugene Debs in prison
- The legal doctrine of Shareholder Primacy in 1919
- The Taft-Hartley Act which made general strikes illegal
- Systematic union busting with little support for workers in the US Congress (1950-1990s and even later)
- Supply-side Chicago School economics (trickle down) calling for taxes for corporations and billionaires to be cut, cut, cut in order to transfer the burden of paying for the Federal Government to individual taxpayers, who now shoulder 86% of that burden while corporations are only paying in 6.8%.
- Supreme court rulings easing corporate corruption of elected officials, culminating in Citizens United
- The constant drumbeat about how government is bad, bad, bad
- The constant drumbeat about the national debt (only when Dems are in power - OK for GOP wars, though)
- The discipline of GOP talking points - right now, the words 'far left agenda' are being put forth in ads all over the US
- Immediate condemnation of anything that would materially help Americans and their families as SOSH-A-LIZM
- The neoliberal mantra of 'privatize, deregulate, and gut social programs'
- Bush trying to privatize Social Security in 2004

You get the idea. Lots of money behind creating a system THAT FUNNELS TAX MONEY FROM THE US TREASURY TO BILLIONAIRES AND CORPORATIONS. Make no mistake, please, EVER. This is and has always been about money, and more money for the uber-wealthy and corporations - from the days of the rise of Hitler to these unhappy days we're living through now. The racism and anti-Semitism is incidental in that DEMOCRACY IS NOT SUPPORTIVE OF OLIGARCHS.

It is far easier for oligarchs to steal money from taxpayers in a fascist state, after all. Trouble is the fascists tend to war and genocide, and the oligarchs ALWAYS foolishly think they can be controlled.

This, people, is why I call them BILLIONAIRE PARASITES.

This is a CLASS WAR and has been since the first time the people rebelled against aristocrats. Silly us, eh? Wanting better lives and all!

[KPN]

1. Epic piece Patrick! As you noted ... it all started, aside from the roaring 20s holdovers,

with the self-serving notion that capitalism must be saved from democracy. Powell and the Kochs are at the heart of everything that followed. And all the "I-want-mine's" who came after are and have been laser focused on amassing personal wealth over absolutely every fucking thing else ever since. The hatred and racism are just tools in their toolbox ... though no doubt, some if not many are racists and misogynists as well.

Bookmarking this one!

[Just A Box Of Rain]

2. Nah. Populism is the problem, not the solution.

States that go fascist always polarize into populist extremist camps first, with both sides attacking liberal democracy.

As liberal Democrats we should not be advocating for class warfare.

My dad also fought in the Pacific. To preserve liberal democracy.

[PatrickforB]

3. Let's talk about this a moment. The things I have cited here involve the class warfare being

waged against liberal democracy BY the billionaire oligarchs. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that I am advocating 'hitting the streets' like the German left did in the Blutmai demonstrations in 1929. Nope, or as you say, "Nah."

And yet a class war IS being waged against us. What I am saying is that in a liberal democracy, the battlefield is the ballot box, and the subsequent enactment of legislation that reverses the policies put in place by those waging the class war against us.

I am an economist, and as such I am a student of the effects of policies being put in place by elected officials. Policies may sound beneign when someone on talk radio is touting them, but when implemented have far reaching effects.

Take the Chicago school of Economics brand of supply-side (trickle-down) tax policy. In a nutshell the policy being advocated is that by cutting taxes for corporations, and keeping the capital gains tax down, so many new jobs will be created that the payroll taxes paid by the newly hired workers will more than offset the shortfall in tax revenue generated from corporations due to the cuts.

Sounds great, right? But think it through. This is essentially a systematic transfer of wealth (in the form of tax cuts) to corporations and billionaires, and, as Grover Norquist so quaintly put it, "to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

So how does a policy like this look on the ground? Our government regularly spends in the red. Such spending is considered acceptable by oligarchs only if the spending increases shareholder profits in publicly held defense, aerospace, and prison firms. But if we want to expand Social Security or strengthen or even expand Medicare, the red lights and warning sirens go on. This is the origin of the Tea Party, which was rapidly co-opted by the Koch brothers.

Surely you know all of this. I could (and am) writing extensively about this and other examples of GOP/Oligarchic policies and what they do to us. I could, and will if you wish, go line by line down what the 1919 MI Supreme Court ruling that created the legal precedent of Shareholder Primacy has done to us.

This, Just a Box of Rain, is policy. This is the form of the class war that began with the real Boston Tea Party, which was about taxation supporting the East India Company at the expense of merchants in the colonies. I could talk about monetary policy and how Lincoln financed the Civil War with greenbacks and how the British banks nearly came out on the side of the Confederacy because it was hurting the British Empire's 'business interests.' So many different policies over so many years.

So how do we fight back? We have to demonstrate, but we also much educate ourselves. Our biggest weapon in this class struggle is our eyes and our minds. We must delve into history and objectively behold the fruits of policies that have been foisted off on us so that we can elect officials that will ENACT LEGISLATION THAT CREATES NEW POLICIES THAT BENEFIT EVERYONE AS OPPOSED TO THE VERY FEW.

That, Just, is what I am saying. Demonstration, yes. And because our demonstrations will originate with the desire of the people for policies that benefit us, such as better policing (BLM) and less economic violence (Occupy Wall Street), they will be put down brutally. Yes. This is how Wall Street and the billionaires roll. Blood in the streets. Look at the Haymarket riots. We enjoy a 40 hour rather than a 72 hour work week because those workers bled in the streets.

And we will have to be very vigilant not to allow the oligarchs and their huge propaganda apparatus to drive wedges between us using their 'divide and conquer' strategy. For example, when Bernie was painted with the brush of racism because he was winning primaries and his economic policies would have literally turned this country around. But he lost because of the wedge (social justice VERSUS economic justice, as opposed to social AND economic justice) that was driven between us. Note that this is my own opinion - I do not wish to offend anyone on here who thinks differently, but I 'calls it how I sees it.'

And, when we successfully elect people, we need to keep their feet to the fire so they will enact REAL reforms and not just pay lip service to what they think we want to hear.

This is not populism.

Please do not even think that. Because by applying that label, you run the risk of minimizing the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy capitalism on this very liberal democracy that is the Republic of the United States of America.

A last point - a state that rules its populace through theocracy while allowing oligarchs to run the economy is called FASCISM. It is. This is what happened in Germany, and it is very much what is happening here with the Nationalist (Dominionist) Christians, and right wing think-tanks like the Federalist Society, ALEC and the Heritage Foundation.

I know you know this.