Notice to Freepers

[salinen]

Look, you must admit that this present administration isn't doing anything in your interest. They should be almost more troubling to you than us. Government has grown like a mushroom cloud. Wars hurt the economy. Big business is running the show, and they are thieves to any denomination. Granting legal status to illegals is not what you voted for. Halliburton doesn't give a shit about what you think. Having worldwide disrespect for this regime does not serve us well. Weather we like it or not, we are neighbors, co-workers, and sit in traffic jams together. This WH is crumbling from the weight of it's dirty deals.

When we fight, they win. This divide needs to be healed so that this country can regain some respectability. The people who work to divide us are rolling in $ by fueling the fight. It distracts all of us from reality.

I don't know what the solutions are. But this current administration should be fired.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[salinen]

2. Rolling

Washington needs to have it's mouth washed out with soap.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[camero]

4. We may have to throw all the bums out

And I do mean all of them. With very few exceptions.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

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[0rganism]

5. Why this is a waste of effort

Above all, the soul of the current republican party and the administration standing as its figurehead has ONE goal: starve the beast.

By making the federal government UNABLE to pay for anything besides defense programs and prior debt, one can do away with all those annoying little symptoms of "socialism", like welfare and national parks and medicare and AFDC and so on. Along the way, one widens the divide between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, eliminating the potentially troublesome transitional class.

Now this is maybe not what a lot of republican supporters think they want, so you have to give them something else to keep the impoverished tools voting GOP. This is easily accomplished by (1)outlawing abortion, (2)reintroducing Christian prayers into schools, (3)attacking any remnants of affirmative action, and (4)waving the flag a lot, perhaps invading the occasional oil-rich nation as a booster. Additionally, if you can convince the peons that federal services are a secular rip-off, you can get a bennie in the beast-starving department by packaging a huge capital gains cut inside a minor across-the-board deduction.

Thus, the bizarre GOP duality of the corporate capitalists (and capitalist wannabes) who make off like bandits with republican assistance, and the not-so-bright blue-collar fundamentalists who get patriotism and the occasional religious treat in compensation for their unbending allegiance.

[Bundbuster]

7. Organism - I bow to you

I've been trying to get this message of "starving the beast" out to both Dems & Repugs for the last 3 years. In a few shorts paragraphs you have summed it up best! It is bookmarked for posterity.

To fellow DUers: I urge you to reveal & expose this core of reichwing ideology 'till it hurts. It amazes me how many angry Dems are not aware of the "starve the beast" priority, and years from now it will stand as the single most socially destructive Repuke legacy.

[salinen]

8. Rolling

"(I think studies have proven that people with lower IQs and less education do vote democrat). This is exactly what I mean. Don't allow yourself to be fooooled. I encourage you to stick around and read some of the fine minds around du. Then decide.

[0rganism]

10. Bow not to me, for Paul Krugman deserves this honor

Krugman's "Great Unravelling" should be considered a primary source for DUers. All I did was condense a small part of his chapter one.

It took a long time for me to figure out what was going on, why there were apparently two republican parties that played at completely unrelated, and often inconsistent, political games. Last year, I read "Great Unravelling", and the veils fell from my eyes. I saw The Plan in all its hideous diamond-hard strength. Suddenly that which was amorphous and confusing about the republicans attained a crystalline clarity.

Krugman brings enlightenment.

[Bundbuster]

11. Thanks, Organism

Ironically, I've been meaning to read Krugman but haven't yet. The syndrome started appearing to me when I read Cheney's Congressional voting record when chosen by AWOL in August 2000. It was virtually identical to Strom Thurmond's, and when combined with chimp's debating buffoonery I dismissed the pair as eminently unelectible. When they got close enough to steal it, and then appointed such cabinet members as Asscroft, Rummy, Linda Chavez, Condi, Thompson, and Norton, I realized that bigtime social devolution money/power was behind the play.

Newt proved that you cannot argue, before the American public, for shreddding most social programs - even to many 'murkins that seems too amoral. Thus the current "starve the beast" ploy - "Oops, sorry, can't continue those costly social/environmental programs. No money left in Treasury, we spent it all on defending America & fighting terraism." The absolute pinnacle of elitist/classist/racist/corporate moral bankruptcy. dick cheney stands as the most destructive force on American society in my lifetime, which goes clear back to Joe McCarthy. cheney is the oozing hemorrhoid on mankind - I live for his downfall & imprisonment.

[0rganism]

13. Once you connect the dots, there's no going back

It took me a long time, and I was getting bits and pieces to fit together, but I disliked Newt and Norquist so much I could never bring myself to read their source material. I was forever trying to see the connection between the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the republican party, without ever seeing the big picture.

And then those words: "starve the beast". It's the key to the puzzle, everything falls into place, like solving a murder mystery -- and that's really what it is, on a large scale, where the murder event is spread out over a decade and millions are hurt all the way to dead. Understanding the metaphor is like the sword of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot.

I understand now that of the two types of republicans, only the conscience of the capitalists can be swayed by reason; for they're the ones who arrived at their positions through reason. The capitalists can see for themselves the ruin their policies bring on the overwhelming majority, so they must be made to care, to answer their higher nature. The others, the fools and dupes and tools, are already acting in a way grossly contrary to their own interests, willfully and fanatically. Only serious and prolonged discomfort caused by their own stupidity can disillusion them, I fear.

Oh well. The important thing now is not to give up hope. Despair is our enemies' greatest weapon.

[Bundbuster]

14. But the capitalists' "conscience" is GREED

There must come a time when the destruction of the middle and lower classes - and their SPENDING/consuming power - forces the capitalists to reverse at least some of the reactionary policies of ruin, simply to fuel the fires of consumption and spending, no? Must it come to that?

[0rganism]

15. Greed is a lower form of self interest, inward-focused

The remedy for Greed is to expand the notion of self to include one's community, one's nation, one's species, and eventually the entire biosphere. Ultimately, one can grow to realise that the highest form of self interest is that which elevates one's complete world, without artificial exclusions.

If it comes to the point you speak of, and I do think we could be there within ten years of continued republican dominance, the capitalists will have reached a point of wealth accumulation where the spending power of the peasants is minimal. It's not uncommon, just look at Guatemala or Honduras. The rich will live in exclusive, gated, guarded estate communities and "trickle down" a portion of their wealth through their servants. In turn, those servants will pay every cent back into the aristocracy for the essentials they need to serve -- clothing, food, some kind of shelter, tools they need to serve the masters. And they'll be grateful to get it.

Many of our fellows already live in these conditions. It is the middle class that makes transition possible, that allows small-scale prosperity to flourish, that creates a market for the inexpensive toys of small disposable incomes. But this is unnecessary if one's goal is a feudal society: the mercantile class can be extremely tiny, or even subsumed entirely by the capitalists. If one doesn't care whether one's servants live or die, then the economy becomes much simpler.

Imagine, if you will, a globalized techno-feudalism composed not of nation-states, which exist in name only, as placebos for the patriotic, but of corporations and their loyal, globally-distributed serfs. That is the eventual destination of starve-the-beast capitalism.

[Bundbuster]

16. Corporate globalized techno-fuedalism - no imagination needed

Organism, you certainly deal in the harsh realities, no blinders or cushions up at all. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, so do I. This reality which you describe has been unravelling since the Nixon era, quickened by today's techno-globalization, fall of the competitive Red Menace, and Raygun's "I will do everything I can to undo LBJ's Great Society programs" (actual quote). The world is truly now for the corporistas' plucking. I'm not enough of an economist to determine the bottom-line, minimal "carrot on the stick" that would need be dangled by the rulers to avoid either economic, productivity, or revolutionary collapse. Nor can I guess just how far the elites can shrink the global working class numbers and still maintain their desired output and productivity.

This I do know (shudder): in order to protect any quality of environmental life and safety for their holy lineage (yes, behind gated communities), the elites MUST engineer a reduction in global population of approximately 3 billion. War is a far too inefficient and posssibly indiscriminate means to that end. They are currently researching genetically engineered viruses/plagues, but science would say that such measures cannot sufficiently select and discriminate undesirables either. My question to you before sleeping on such a cheery note is - how do the rulers reduce world population by that 3 billion in the next, say, 30 years?

[bobbyboucher]

9. I got a message to Freepers

Go fuck yourselves. You will be joining us when you realize you have been fucked by your masters, you bunch of blithering pod people. Thanks in advance for your unmittigated ignorance. Thanks for voting against your own self interest, FOR DECADES, while the wealthy laugh at your ignorant asses. Goddamn are you stupid.

What a bunch of maroons.

[DiverDave]

12. You Tell EM

I am in total agreement.

And I just sprayed my monitor with coffee.
Nail on the head man.

[Cannikin]

17. I'm never hear in time to read the messages before they get deleted!

hehehe

[JNelson6563]

18. You would have betterluck reaching them

in GD 2004. :toast:

Julie

[cthrumatrix]

19. kick

[markburgess]

20. I'd edit "Wars hurt the economy" out of the post personally

After all, WWII is how FDR got us out of the Great Depression.
Other than that, great post. Kudos.
:D

[tom_paine]

21. An editorial cartoon about the Freepers...