Check this post out ...

[primative1]

I found this on the unity blog and am reposting it here without permision because it RULES (so shhot me)
Read it. I dare ya :)


Interesting.
But I wonder whether this movement is really up to the task. Or is it merely another form of corporate information management.
Is this movement prepared to stop the present charade of using "important" issues as cover so as to fail to address the "crucial" issues of our time?
It would appear that more than a few folks who have read widely and deeply think our fundamental problem is the fact we have the best government that money can buy.
I found the new movie based on Chris Buckley's very funny book rather more mordant than funny -- all the fun of the book had drained away. It wasn't the fault of the actors or the script -- it was merely that when the book first came out it was such an outrageous, over-the-top presentation of the Washington K St. system that it seemed fresh and one could laugh. Surely reality would never become so absurd or resemble this book so closely ....
But yet we with a straight face speak of achieving Clear Skies and lower gasoline prices by, of course, suspending environmental regulations. That is, after all, the first thing we all should have thought meet, is it not?
Now that we've seen many more years under that K St system we've begun simply to bury ourselves under more and more lies until the very concept of the public interest has been all but lost.
As for politics and polarization, the debate over “liberal” versus “conservative” long ago became quite tiresome. It has become a mere word game thru which groups of people thought too educated and culturally elite are vilified by "regular" folks, who fancy they are somehow imbued with distinct and appropriate moral values -- notwithstanding the evidence.
The debate has been a setup -- provoked and stage managed by communication experts to cover up what is really at stake.
Going behind the word games -- I think our real political problems all can be boiled down quite simply to a fundamental conflict: A conservative, by his very nature, is bound to defend established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege.
The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some that are not available on equal terms to others.
To protect their privilege, including the ability to plunge into self-dealing while ignoring certain Constitutional rights or legal requirements as inconvenient using the mask of national security, conservatives find it convenient to smear all concepts of liberalism, classical as well as what passes for it these days. In doing so, they assassinate their own credibility.
Today, it would appear so-called “conservatives” merely feel threatened by so-called “liberals.” So they exaggerate most absurdly the “liberal” side of things.
The essence of the conservative complaint was nicely put by Willis Player, who said: “A liberal is someone whose interests aren’t at stake at the moment.”
This reduces the “conservative” complaint to something Thomas Sowell characterized and which in altered form I believe to be true of most who today call themselves “conservatives”: “The problem isn’t that can’t read. The problem isn’t even that can’t think. The problem is that don’t know what thinking is; confuse it with feeling.”
Today’s conservatives are really populist authoritarians.
They might be surprised by their similarity to those like them in other eras, especially post-Weimar Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. But that might require them to read and understand something of history.
Today’s “conservatives” I think you will find, do not read or think anything: they feel and believe things.
I say this due to the clear difference between the old "Bullmoose" political philosophy with which I identify myself and these “conservatives” who so blindly swear fealty to the arbitrary, capricious, and lawless swaggering of the present Administration and their ilk. Whereas those in authority apparently can do no wrong, even if it means outsourcing torture or manufacturing intelligence falsely to link an attack on the United States to Iraq, I hold with those who oppose in all its forms the exercise of arbitrary coercion in the name of the people.
The “rule of law” is not embedded in the arbitrary exercise of authority by men; the “rule of law” exists independent of men as the living body of principle by which the governed give their consent to those who govern.
So often one finds “liberals” accused of having “perverted” classical liberalism. Yet that shoe seems to me to be on the other foot and it is so-called “conservatives” who have betrayed and perverted their own classical roots and morphed them into a simulacrum of Benito Mussolini’s pathetic, corrupt and doomed Corporatism.
Tom Frank has the essence of the way I see things in his book "What's the Matter With Kansas."
I believe, as he does, that the terminal stupidity of the Democrats is largely to blame for the "backlash" that has put those whose economic status should make them vote Demoratic vote Republican instead.
All this is due to the Democrats' abandonment of the groups and of the fundamental issue of economic justice that comprised their coalition of voters and their agenda of ideas through the post-WW II era. They have sold out and simply become Republican "light," conceding the economic ground.
Democrats appear merely to have bought into the Republican game of hiding in plain sight using culture wars and social issues to mask the real political issues of our times, which IMHO are fundamentally economic in nature: energy policy, health care, jobs, pensions, trade policy and this country's crumbling sanitation and transportation infrastructure -- and all of this flowing from the continuing laissez faire looting of the country, the growing divide between haves too much and haves not enough.
The problem at the center of all this is the headlong fall into laissez faire capitalism, which we escaped from with great pain in the post-Civil War era. Learning nothing from our own history, we are doomed to repeat a lot of it.
Democrats, such as the Clintons, lack ideas because they have merely appropriated the brief of the genteel, moderate Republicans of another age -- thus, they are complicit in this Administration's rampaging Corporatism that is making the United States look more and more like Mussolini's kind of country.
The Democrats have abandoned any attempt to represent the classes beneath those with significant assets and might as well, like NASCAR drivers, wear their corporate sponsors' logos on their $3000 suits.
In other words, from where I stand, I see the various sects among Democrats as having chosen to represent particular corporate interests as opposed to other sets of corporate interests represented by various sects of Republicans.
No Democrat will point out that Republicans do NOT want to overturn Roe v. Wade, do NOT want to "win" the battle over gay rights, etc. because if the Republicans did win these battles they'd lose their ability to rally the knuckle-dragging, neolithic religious right.
The Meiers mess gave more people than usual a glimmer of that. The disgraceful Terry Shiavo display by Republican congressional leaders made it most painfully evident.
Why don't the Dems point out the fraud? Because they use the same techniques and hide using the same false issues: they simply run on the other side of the smoke and mirror nonsense that these so-called "important" issues represent instead of running on economic realities.
Not until Democrats or some altnernative movement returns to an earlier view, one articulated by my favorite Republican president, will true leadership emerge.
There is just one central principle in all this. Theodore Roosevelt put his finger directly on it:
"The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means."
And, as you well know, TR also said: "...our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today. Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-... For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. "
I want to see a political movement embrace these key aspects of TR's Bullmoose agenda:
"There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done. "
"...Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs. "
Let any new political movement stop identifying with and representing the plutocracy and rise up against it and I'll support it.
I firmly believe "the absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise."
Much of this revolves around the military budget, that of the Corps of Engineers and the "military-industrial complex." No wonder military services engage in deceit and illegal activity to avoid environmental liability -- they can barely get enough money out of the titantic defense budget to even minimally perform their mission -- let alone put enough troops in the field equipped to get the job done.
I wonder whether your "unity" movement is up to the task. It would be so easy to buy them off -- if they aren't already merely a ploy financed by the same old familiar household names.
My generation has come a cropper. We started out screaming about the evils of the "system" and the lies of the military industrial complex -- and we end up its servants and boosters -- a worse bunch of bottom dwellling, slime sucking, sewage eating scavengers than any number of catfish.
The corporatist owned media has made the web of lies so pervasive that the kids growing up since the 1960s have no sense of perspective with which to sense the fraud perpetrated on them. I found this to be the central joke in John LeCarre's 2003 book "Absolute Friends," and I think he's got it right this time.
So, I'm rather skeptical, I'm afraid, all said and done.
I think back to a song Phil Ochs used to sing: "I'm not marching anymore