Welcome to Mussolini Land folks!!

[Raoul]

Run time: 05:33 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8c-mOA1lgk   Posted on YouTube: May 28, 2010 By YouTube Member: raoul116 Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 28, 2010 By DU Member: Raoul Views on DU: 1741

 
The BP oil disaster, Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, and those aholes who call themselves Libertarians..

[mmonk]

1. Good one.

[Raoul]

2. Thanks.

[Ozymanithrax]

3. Actually, it happened not long ago in Australia...

They are not trying members of the company that caused the problem, so far as I've heard.

Of course, Australia isn't China. But...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skytruth/sets/72157622226354812/

[Raoul]

5. I checked out your source.

I looked at all of the pics from that site you mentioned and can only think that all of the pieces are coming together to totally destroy Mother Earth..

[Ozymanithrax]

9. We could be seeing the beginnings of the ecoside of humanity...

but mother earth will be fine.

When the Astroid took out the dinosaurs, the earths artmosphere would have caught fire. Earth abides.

There have been many massive extinctions, but earth moves on, and if there is just one type of living creature somewhere in the deepest mine, life will go on, evolves, and new forms of life will spread across the planet.

But it would suck to be a human.

[Raoul]

10. You got that right - about humans not doing so well.

[zeemike]

4. Fascism by any other name...

As they say, smells the same.
But our brand of it is not so easy to see and not so in your face as it was in the good old days.
Todays Fascism is hidden by the philosophy of Ayn Rand of the virtues of selfishness...which will destroy us because it attracts the sociopaths to power, just as it did in the past.

But perhaps now we will wake up from our dream world and come together.

[Raoul]

6. Yeah.

We've always been a bit more subtle with our reactionary policies however once the war criminal came into office and screwed up everything he touched during his odious 8 years, one would think the American people would wise up to the crap. But, with all of the movements cropping up, even considering they're in a minority, it's dismaying to say the least. People NEVER learn from history - they simply repeat it in different ways..

[zeemike]

7. ya can't learn from history if you don't know it.

Like Orwell said....if you control the past you control the future...or something like that.
We can only hope that the internet is teaching it because the media will not.

[Raoul]

12. Agreed.

Actually I get all of my REAL news from the internet. The stuff on TV makes me wanna puke especially the way they talk to the audience - as if we're all a bunch of 3rd graders. Wait a minute - at least 95% of the populace has the attention span of 3rd graders.
(My apologies to all 3rd graders)..

[RoccoR5955]

8. Rant on Brother Raoul!

They're not Libertarians, they're Libertardians! There's no liberty to them. They are all about a two class state. The haves, and the have nots. As far as Rand Paul is concerned, well, the shit doesn't fall far from the asshole. Look at his father, Ron Paul. Never trust a person with two first names, is something that I heard a long time ago, and it holds true for this creep too. He's too damn old to run for anything, so he throws his son into the fray.

As far as the oil spill is concerned, there was a spill in Sauteed Arabia.. I mean Saudi Arabia. It was offshore as well. Well these bassturds got some super tankers out there, and sucked up the oil and water, and recovered 85% of the crude. I wonder where those damn super tankers are now. They should have been on their way on day one, to suck the stuff up. I think that they are waiting for the price of oil to go up high enough for them to make more money on it though. Oh, and now if you go on one of the beaches that has been greased, BP will throw you off, because they're afraid that you are going to steal their damn oil.

Talk about fascism, we are right there. Look at the last coal mine disaster, and this oil spill, and you will see that what they had in common were two things: 1) Lax enforcement, due to the fact that current regulators worked in their respective industries, and 2) corporations cut corners on safety to make more money. When Bushco, Inc. was in power, they made damn sure that it would be difficult, if not impossible to get things straight, as many career people in government agencies retired, or were forced to resign. Then there's the problem that since the days of Ronnie Rat.. I mean Reagan, regulatory agencies budgets have been slashed to the point where it is difficult, if not impossible to be effective. Once Bushco, Inc. got in, it was quite easy to just have the corporations write their own regulatory ticket. It's disgusting.

[Raoul]

13. I have to toss you off for plagarism.. LOL

Stop stealing shit from Bill Maher bud.. (the shit doesn't fall far from the bat as he put it but you coyly changed words you devil.)
LOL
Seriously though - That thing you said about Sauteed, oops, Saudi Arabia (home of the real 9/11 hijackers and Bin Laden) pretty much says it all. Do you remember when that happened?

And, the other thing about the war criminal doing his thing really hits home because during his tenure I was a union steward. We attended training classes a lot and they showed us case after case of where he and his cronies were breaking down the labor movement, job by job. But, as you also put it, this all began with senile reagan..

[RoccoR5955]

25. Here you go Raoul

First, let me say, that I don't steal from Bill Maher, he steals from me. I don't even get HBO.
Here's a link to an article about the Saudi spill: http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/could-cleanup-fix-for-gulf-oil-spill-lie-in-secret-saudi-disaster/19476863

And the shit about Reagan goes far and deep. I have a personal grudge against him that I will take to my grave, and beyond, if possible, because of his actions early on in the AIDS epidemic. He called it a "gay cancer," so there was no funding for research. My younger brother died from complications of AIDS in that era. We figure that he contracted it through a blood transfusion, that he got before the blood supply was tested. Had there been some research, they may have tested blood earlier, and/or come up with some kind of treatment earlier. I am one person who can say that Reagan killed my brother. Anyone who praises this bastard, gets an earful from me.

[Raoul]

26. Sorry for your loss

Sorry about your brother and I hope time has healed your grief. You're right about Reagan - one of the most overrated assholes that ever lived. He probably did more to destroy the middle class than anyone else before or even after him but right wingers are too freaking dumb to realize it. I remember reading a Pulitzer prize winning series titled 'America, what went wrong?' It was about his tenure in office and how his policies led to the destruction of companies and the loss of millions of jobs in America. I'll never forget the last thing the article said - "never before in history has so many people made so much money doing absolutely except for gutting industries and destroying them to make a fast dollar" That was a loose paraphrase of what I recall about the article.

I went over and checked that Saudi article - it makes all the sense in the world. Just skim the oil off the surface into empty ships. Sounds so easy, so why don't they do it? Gotta be something about money involved or profit motive.

[RoccoR5955]

27. Not only money

But also a lot of people these days just think that if they throw technology at a problem it will be fixed. More times than not, the latest, greatest tech will only make things harder, and not necessarily better. I should know, I am a 20+ year veteran computer tech. And I won't even start about how it's getting worse over time.

[Raoul]

31. Interesting..

Very interesting that you're in the computer field. I worked in it in management roles and mostly large mainframes. Hated every minute of it but the money was good - back in the 80s,90s. Funny how they always used to say that computers would make everyone's life much easier - yeah, right!

[fascisthunter]

11. economic Libertarianism=economic policy based on sociopathy

but yes, this is fascism.

[Raoul]

14. Sociophathic runs rampart..

There was a study done by a psychologist years ago in which he actually proved that bush was one by various examples cited in his behavior especially his attitude towards his daughters. Dunno if you caught it when it came out. I have it somewhere on my computer I think if anyone wants to see it.

[fascisthunter]

16. post it...

[Lars77]

21. Utopian thinking

I think that these so-called libertarians are utopian in the exact opposite of Pol Pot. Pol Pot wanted to wipe out people that did not fit into his utopian society. The so-called libertarians wants to dismantle society in stead. The power vacuum that follows is taken over by corporations.

[florida08]

15. there you are

Love you guys. Yes there's a reason a 'rat' is in corporatocracy. They say things like we're not a democracy we're a republic as if there's a difference. They have SCOTUS in their pocket along with our government. Have you seen John Perkins talking about it.
(Confessions of an economic hit man) http://www.johnperkins.org/?page_id=9

Have a wonderful Memorial Day.

[Raoul]

19. Actually I did catch part of what he wrote about.

I forget where he was - maybe the Daily Show. But I remember listening and feeling more and more uneasy as he spoke about what he'd done before he'd allegedly seen the light.

[onlyadream]

17. Check this out:

The 14 Defining
Characteristics Of Fascism
http://www.couplescompany.com/features/politics/structure3.htm

by Dr. Lawrence Britt

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14-defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. TOP

2. Disdain for
the Recognition of Human Rights -
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. TOP

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats
as a Unifying Cause -
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. TOP

4. Supremacy of the Military -
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. TOP

5. Rampant Sexism -
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. TOP

6. Controlled Mass Media -
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. TOP

7. Obsession with National Security -
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. TOP

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. TOP

9. Corporate Power is Protected -
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. TOP

10. Labor Power is Suppressed -
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. TOP

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked. TOP

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. TOP

14. Fraudulent Elections -
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

[florida08]

18. omg

That it's to s T

[Raoul]

20. Another OMG from me!

As Florida08 exclaimed - OMG - that's it exactly. Thanks for taking the time to post it. I'm gonna cut and paste it into one of my many reference files. I think I'll be able to shove it down the throat of all those religionist right wing aholes in the future.
Thanks again.

[fascisthunter]

29. another great post

[Raoul]

22. Per Fascist Hunter's request

The following was taken from 'Bush on the Couch' by Justin Frank. Dr. Frank is a psychonanalyst and not a psychologist as I'd originally stated in this thread somewhere.

Bush on the Couch
By Justin Frank
Dr. Frank is the author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (2004). He is a Washington, D.C.–based psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical School.

If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would want to know why. If I found that he often used words that hid their true meaning, and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp reality. And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged – even sadistic – indifference to human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion, I would worry about the safety of the people whose lives he touched.

For the last three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my patients. He is our President. He wants to remain our President for four more years, and he intends to do so on his own terms. On August 27, the eve of the Republican Convention, Bush said to New York Times reporters Sanger and Bumiller that “he would resist going ‘on the couch’ to rethink decisions.”

Since the Swift Boat controversy hit center stage in mid-August – both the ads and Bush’s refusal to take responsibility for them – we again see his reluctance to examine his conscience. Instead he remains mired in his long-standing pattern of denial and blame. Responsibility is something this president flees at all costs. It is a behavior pattern that began long before Bush became president, governor, or even a college student. It even began before Bush had become an alcoholic (he finally stopped drinking at age forty, with the help of his religion), though his response to criticism is typical of untreated alcoholics.

Bush was the first born child to a family that had long and moneyed traditions on both sides. When he was three and a half his sister Robin was born. It has been said that the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” was written with the first-born child in mind. It seems to capture perfectly the irrevocable trauma felt with the second child is born: Nothing can put the first-born back together again. Of course, first-born offspring find different ways to manage this insult. Some can be suspicious and overly competitive; others can be overtly nice while covertly furious; still others always keep an eye on the second child, making sure he doesn’t get too much. First-born children keep careful track of how much food mother gives to their siblings.
But if the second-born dies, as Robin did when George was seven, then an entirely new and complex dynamic is set in motion. The first-born often has to disown his destructive fantasies and banish them into his unconscious. But such fantasies threaten his mental equilibrium and he has to do something with them. One solution is to project them outward, thereby experiencing people around him as destructive or a source of danger.

By the time Robin died Bush already had a mother who was emotionally elsewhere. Children resent it when the mother is absent, and Bush’s resentment would have grown stronger in the face of his mother’s grief after Robin’s death. If George’s feelings were never addressed – and it is clear from numerous family accounts that the parents didn’t have a funeral and never talked to George about the loss – his natural animosity toward his sister would have remained unresolved; he would have been left with a host of forbidden feelings that were too threatening to acknowledge, only furthering the process of having to disavow these unwanted aspects of himself. He was deprived of the opportunity to learn to mourn, to heal. In that deprivation lays the kernel of what has by now become Bush’s knee-jerk reaction of denying responsibility for anything that goes wrong. He can’t allow it to be his fault.

It is true that blame and denial are arguably as typical of politicians as of alcoholics, though the latter are generally more likely to involve family members in the process. But blame is also a reminder of one’s destructive impulse; the individual who hasn’t resolved his anxieties surrounding that impulse is particularly motivated to avoid confronting those anxieties, which he can accomplish by shifting responsibility to someone else, or denying it outright. Drinkers turn to alcohol to suppress anxiety.
The untreated alcoholic who has simply stopped drinking treats anxiety as an enemy, and with good reason: He is often more challenged by anxiety because he has lost his time-tested means of numbing its sting. He knows that anxiety is a threat to his abstinence – he fears anything that might lead him back to the bottle – but his years of drinking get in the way of learning other methods to manage uncomfortable feelings. Bush manages his anxiety through his inflexible daily routines – the famously short meetings, sacrosanct exercise schedule, daily Bible readings, and limited office hours. All public appearances are controlled and staged – even the ones that appear to be spontaneous. They have to be.

But when routines fail, denial kicks in as the treatment of choice to manage the potential development of internal chaos. The habit of placing blame and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush’s personal history that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat; when Jay Leno, on the eve of Bush’s DUI revelation (just a week before the 2000 election), asked him if he’d ever done anything he was ashamed of, he replied, “I didn’t” – and proceeded to tell a humiliating story of his brother Marvin urinating in the family steam iron. Fast forward to the Swift Boat ads, taking a brief stop at his denial that he knew Ken Lay (“Kenny who?”) of Enron who was in fact a friend and major contributor to his campaigns; then to his blaming 9-11 for the failing economy when the market actually began to crash after he announced his tax cut plans; then to his inability to admit to any mistake he made after 9-11 (in the April 2004 press conference he couldn’t bring himself to accept even a modicum of responsibility for either the intelligence failures before 9-11 or for the war in Iraq), to his denial in May of knowing Iraqi information source Chalabi despite having invited him to sit just behind the First Lady at his 2004 State of the Union Address. Putting it all together, we see a pattern that I call the KWD – the Kenny Who Defense. He employs it whenever and wherever he can, whenever he feels threatened.

All his disavowed destructiveness coalesces and requires management whenever anybody challenges him. He becomes instantly wary: Questions mobilize his anxiety and invite that exaggerated degree of rigidity he uses for self-protection. It is not a matter of intelligence per se, but a matter of paralysis when confronted with any question that requires thinking. When there is nobody in particular to blame he stumbles anyway, as he did at the Unity Conference on August 6 when asked to discuss the sovereignty of the Native American tribes. Mark Trahant, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noted that children study city, county, state and federal government but that Indian government is not part of that structure. In noting Bush’s unique experience as governor and president, he asked about Bush’s understanding of sovereignty and how to think about tribal conflicts in the twenty-first century. Bush hesitated, and then said, “Sovereignty means that you’re a sovereign – that you’ve been given sovereignty and can be viewed as a sovereign entity. Therefore the relationship between Government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.”
His relationship to his father makes all the more sense in light of the anxieties I have described. First, his father cast a giant shadow: he was a good student, a fine athlete, a war hero, a successful businessman. One grows up in awe of such a father – and given this particular son’s need already to disown his own feelings of destructiveness, he imbues his father – partly by projecting his own aggression onto the father – as a man of enormous power, making him more of a threat. And young George W. had few of his father’s qualities with which to defend himself. Being a cheerleader and a big fraternity drinker are just not the same thing. This situation can make a son feel rage, frustration, and shame.

One way Bush managed his feelings was through his humor, his sarcasm (not unlike his mother), and his need to be in charge of any undertaking. At times, being in charge meant mocking his father’s power (being stick-ball commissioner while his father had been an All-American first baseman is a good example). One particular power that George Sr. did not express, however, was the important paternal responsibility to help a son separate from his mother. I doubt the success of that endeavor with George Jr., as his father was absent for most of Bush’s childhood. And when he was present, George Sr. was absently reading or distant.

This particular son is driven by the need to retaliate – against his father and against a world full of enemies. He does so in a variety of ways – though the underlying motives are the same. He tells Bob Woodward that he needn’t consult his father before invading Iraq because he consults a stronger higher father; he regularly introduces Vice President Cheney as the greatest vice president in history, without mentioning that his father was VP for eight years; he dismantles international coalitions once valued by his father; he practices what his father called “voodoo economics” by implementing massive tax cuts for the rich, maintaining that deficit spending will revive the economy; and at the Republican Convention in New York, he doesn’t make a place for his own father – an actual ex-president – to speak. Each event taken on its face value is but an incident. When they are linked together they reveal a distinct pattern.

His drive to manage anxiety is paramount. That requires him to shift responsibility whenever possible. He can consciously deny blaming his father for having failed him in his time of greatest need as a child – in helping him both stand up to his mother and to let go of his need to be her cheerleader rescuing her from her unspoken grief. But unconsciously, the blame persists – crippling his ability to think. He remains a cheerleader, not a leader. The inability to take responsibility makes Bush genuinely unable to lead: he can bully others and seem to act decisively, but he retreats from threatened confrontation (he says “bring em on” only when embedded behind the Secret Service thousands of miles away from the battle). His need to remain in control makes him unable to think things through in order to lead from strength. His is a stage-managed strength, something we saw all too clearly during the week of the Republican Convention.

[fascisthunter]

23. thank you

[Raoul]

24. My pleasure (I think)

I said 'I think' because it wasn't very pleasurable reading it all over again before posting it. I just despise that motherf**ker so bad! And why isn't he in jail? I mean, he's a war criminal isn't he?

[fascisthunter]

28. indeed... believe me when I say this... I share your rage

I really think the mentally insane are in charge.

[Raoul]

32. Happy to hear that!

Glad to see I'm not the only one banging my freaking head against the wall.

[Althaia]

30. The only appropriate result for the corporate incompetence displayed..

...by Halliburton, British Petroleum, and Transnational (I think the owners of the Deep Horizon rig are called Transnational, please correct me if I'm wrong) would be the loss of the right to do business in the United States. No more government contracts for Halliburton! No more BP/Amoco gas stations! No more American dollars in their coffers!

The cost of their negligence is deep and far-reaching, and us poor American taxpayers will be footing the bill. It won't just be in taxes, but in increased costs for goods and services caused by the collapse of the fishing industry in the Gulf, as well as the serious long term disruption of shipping moving through the Gulf and up the Mississippi.

[Raoul]

33. Amen!

Thom Hartmann calls it corporate execution - actually close the corporation down, dismantle it assuming it's a U.S. held subsidiary. I know BP isn't but then they should do exactly what you suggested with BP and other foreign companies.

[Raoul]

34. An update on the oil spill

In case you didn't hear it, the latest effort by BP to close the leak has failed. BP is now saying it may not be until August before the spill is stopped. I am so f-ing pissed! But Congress will fix the problem. They'll have a hearing, haul BP execs before them, scold them, and then graciously take their campaign contribution money..