If We Call Communism, Capitalism, Does It Make It Alright?

Barack Obama has recently met with Xi Jinping, President of China. Mr. Obama, who bowed to the Emperor of Japan and the King of Saudi Arabia, is likely being duly deferential. After all, he’s meeting with the Boss. One can only wonder if there is a performance review.

For those of us who grew up during 70 year struggle known as the Cold War, one of the defining features of our lives was to make sure future generations would live in a free society and not one run by the commissars  of a totalitarian State. It has been the great disappointment of history that we lost that struggle. Oh, sure, the Soviet Union fell but its successor, China, has developed the model of Capitalism which is our future. A very small power elite owns and controls 90% of the wealth created by the exploited labor of a vast majority who are allotted a bauble or two before expiring. Commissar or Capitalist? Who can tell the difference? Is there a difference when American industry manufactures its widgets and whiz bangs using Chinese slave labor?

The biggest retailer in the U.S. is Wal-Mart, one out of four retail dollars is spent at Wal-Mart. Where does Wal-Mart get their goods? It purchases over $ 27 BILLION goods a year from China. So while 40,000 factories closed here, China is building labor complexes where the workers work for 16 hours and then sleep for 8, seven days a week. American CEOs marvel at the Chinese accomplishment and look forward to reducing American wages and benefits down to a point where homegrown labor camps could compete with the Chinese.

As Sara Robinson wrote in The Progressive Populist (August 15, 2012), “It’s not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that’s awful enough). It’s also that they’ve taken control over -and put serious limits on – our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.”

A new Feudalism uniting America and China is underway. Tom Friedman will get his wish, the world will flatten by bringing the American worker down to the level suffered by the Chinese, Indian and Indonesian worker while bring the Chinese Commissar and Third-World Potentate up to the standards enjoyed by the American CEO and Bankster.

We have seen the future and it is Hell.

 

The People Won’t Stand for It? The Wimp Factor in History

Motoring by several service stations I noted that the price of gasoline has taken a little dip. In my part of the country it is $ 3.69 per gallon down from $ 3.89. This jogged my memory and I recalled a conversation I had with a friend  when gas was about $ 1.30 a gallon. I remember predicting that the $ 2.00 gas-gallon was then not far down the road. My friend snorted, “It will never get that high, the people won’t stand for it, there’d be a revolution”.

In the 1990s, while discussing the Constitution with others we spent sometime on the absurdity of the Electoral College. Someone took out a clipping quoting Hillary Clinton who said that the people would not allow an election to be overturned by the Electoral College. That is, the former First Lady opined, if the popular vote went one way while the electoral count went another, she was of the belief that a popular uprising would insist on the rule of democracy and not the States.

Not too long ago, all the semi-official pundits held that Social Security was the third rail of politics and no serious politician would ever suggest that it be abolished or deformed. Today the “Democratic” President joins his supposed adversaries in the Republican congressional caucus to suggest hacking away at this key New Deal, Democratic and popular program.

The fact is that the American people are the weakest, most dominated, wimps in all history. They don’t rebel, they don’t oppose, they don’t resist. Other peoples will man the barricades, protest, march, and engage in massive civil disobedience. When things are at their worst, other gutsy people will rebel. But not the Americans! Americans will gripe to one another but won’t act. You can expect a muffled, “Well, whatta ya gonna do, they’ve got the power”, and that’s it.

The descendants of a people who took on the world’s Superpower with a single-shot musket in 1776 don’t have the will or energy to write a measly letter to their Congressman in 2013. I hear that some are worried that a dictatorial government will forcibly take away our liberties in the near-future. Nonsense, no tyrant need fear the American people, they do not need force, the American people will peaceably hand over their liberty, their property, their guns, their money without a fight. Hell, many have given the Government their kids as cannon fodder to fight a war without reason or justification.

I was tempted to write that as long as Americans get to slouch in front of the TV, they’ll allow the government to do anything it wants to do. But upon reflection that would be incorrect. We’ve given them our TVs as well. When I was young my city had five channels and provided more programming than is now provided with 70-plus. There is now 9 minutes of commercials for 21 minutes of programming in sharp contrast to my yesteryear in which 27 minutes of programming made room for 3 minutes of commercials. Many programs are 100% commercials. But even with the drastic increase in the proportion of commercial interruptions, most of us have to pay a cable or dish company just to get a TV signal.

So we’ve given up our TV as well without a fight.

The Government taxes us and then redistributes our money to bankers and billionaires. More taxpayer money is given in corporate welfare than ever offered to the poor, hungry and homeless.

Ninety per cent of the people surveyed declared their support for background checks prior to the sale of a gun, a stand that was even supported by the NRA 20 years ago, and the Senate easily musters a majority against this simple regulation.

The law in its majesty prohibits “insider trading” to everyone engaged in stock market transactions, except for Congress-critters who are by law exempt. What a blatant violation of ethics! And what does Mr and Mrs America do? Nothing.

Congress critters retire from a fulltime job as our “representatives” and end up with a greater net worth than if they had actually worked for a living. We have a President with a documented career as a community organizer, part-time college instructor, state senator, U.S. Senator and President who has accumulated a fortune of $ 12 MILLION and  no one questions it.

Factories are closed and jobs shipped to China. This is done as the result of an industrial policy promoted by our political and corporate elite. It isn’t an act of God nor the result of a natural process, it is the deliberate result of policy known in advance and set in the understanding that the mass of American workers would suffer. And what do Americans do as the jobs disappear and as 100s of millions of dollars are sucked up by Chinese commissars? Sigh, and slump back to the couch. Soon, those who still have couches will be slumping to the curbstone instead.

America didn’t lose in an open competition with other nations. The game was fixed and we were sold out by our coaches and team managers. But most importantly, while our grandfathers fought to give us the country and the liberty that was ours, we were unwilling to fight to keep it.

Americans wimped out.

Contempt for the Courts

The audacity and the sheer criminality of the blatantly partisan Republican courts is beyond belief.

A Republican-dominated * Federal Appeals Court ordered the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to stop requiring employers to inform employees of their legal right to organize. The NLRB, the agency responsible for regulating labor-management relations, had required employers to post a notice advising employees of certain rights under the law. The Court has decided that employers will no longer have to advise employees that they have legal rights.

The tortured logic of these ethically-challenged stooges for the Plutocracy holds that the First Amendment protects free speech and the NLRB interfered with employers’ free speech by making them tell their employees NLRB’s opinion. Opinion!?!? The NLRB simply required that employees be told what the law already requires — it’s not an opinion, it’s the law!

The Court essentially used the same reasoning as found in the court cases which held that schools could not order children to say the pledge of allegiance. It is nonsense, it is bull—-! Labor law IS mandatory, the Pledge is not, and to confound them is a specious violation of common sense.

This by the way is the very same Court which also has decided that ALL of President Obama’s appointments to the NLRB are illegal and hence the NLRB cannot operate. So although created 80 years ago and charged by statute with labor law enforcement by the Congress, the Court has effectively abolished the agency. Their argument here is that the appointments were made during a Congressional recess and therefore not subject to Congressional approval. Heck, Congress is always in recess, it is impossible not to appoint or conduct operations unless done during a Congress recess.

The Republican caucuses have refused to act on Presidential appointments thus leaving agencies and courts without responsible policy-makers. Presidents have always made recess appointments when the Congress neglected to act. Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents have exercised this power and now a Republican Court has overturned appointments with precious little legal basis other than adherence to to the McConnell Rule: “Republicans will do anything to contribute to the failure of Government under the Obama Presidency”. The McConnell Rule is a corollary to the Republican Fundamental Principle: “Who cares if we wreck the country as long as we own the wreckage”.

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* The Courts have been increasingly dominated by Republican appointees since 1980 for one very lamentable reason. When Presidents Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 had appointed judges, the Senate approves them. But when Presidents Clinton and Obama have attempted appointing anyone other than a Republican or Bluedog Democrat, the Republican caucuses have done everything they can to stymy the appointment. As a result the Courts have 70 vacancies and Republican-appointee majorities in 10 of the 11 Circuits.

Et tu Barack

Snippet of an interview with Rep. Alan Grayson —

John Fugelsang: President Obama did meet with Senate Democrats today. And according to Politico — and I found this a bit disturbing — “He warned them that social insurance programs, including Social Security and Medicare, would need to be cut in some way in order to keep them going.” Now, we’ve discussed this before. The President also said Republicans would have to agree to more revenue before he’d agree to change those programs. What do you think of that particular bargain, sir? Do social insurance programs need to be cut in order to save them, and will this particular crop of Republicans ever agree to add new revenues anyway?

Congressman Alan Grayson: No. The answer is that they don’t. Social Security has almost $ 2 TRILLION in the bank. It is the largestgovernment fund in the world.  That’s what they’ve got sitting in the bank, and that’s what the rest of the government and the American people owe that fund. Under current law, Social Security can pay 100% of its benefits for the next 25 years which is probably longer than I’m going to need it And after that, 85% to 95% of its benefits forever.  A minor tweak like, for instance, raising the cap on who has to pay Social Security taxes above the current [limit of] roughly $100,000, or, for instance, making it apply to investment income — either one of those two things would make the program solvent forever. The situation is not terribly different for Medicare.

John: So does the President mean it when he talks about putting these cuts on the table, sir?

Alan: Look, I take no pleasure in saying this, because the President is my President. I voted for him twice, and he is the leader of my party. But in this regard, the President is wrong.

John: Before you go, Congressman, what do you think of the Senate budget that came out today?

Alan: I think the Senate budget that came out today is a stab at trying to deal with a lot of different problems, without focusing necessarily on our core problems. I would like to see all our effort devoted towards putting people back to work, improving education, making sure everybody who is sick can see a doctor, and making sure people who lose their jobs don’t end up living in their cars. That’s the America that I see in Central Florida these days. And these are the problems we should all be concentrating on solving. I think that this obsession – this preoccupation – this terrible preoccupation with austerity, with deficits, with debt is mistaken. The government has never been able to borrow at such low rates for my entire lifetime, and going back 100 years. The government has never been able to borrow at 2% before. That’s what the rates are these days. And that just shows you that there is no fiscal crisis. What it is, is that we’ve simply given into the Republican mindset of crisis – one crisis after another. The Republicans are crisis junkies. And they’ve all sucked us into the same sort of mindset.

Note, Obama met with Senate Democrats and told them Social Security would have to be sacrificed so that he can get his Grand Bargain with the Congressional Republicans. The DISSENTING DEMOCRAT has been saying this since September 2009 and have been repeatedly chastised by Liberals who are in denial. We said back then that no Republican could ever kill the last New Deal program and so Wall Street chose a black Democrat who they built up as a “Liberal”. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could kill Social Security. We have been betrayed and not by our known enemies but by those who campaigned as our friends.

“GIDEON” One Step Forward, 1963 — The Courts 20 Steps Back, 2001-2012

On this date in 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that poor defendants being prosecuted for criminal offenses had a right to a court-appointed publicly-funded attorney. The Constitution established a right to counsel but that right was effectively possessed only by those who could afford to pay legal fees, it was a right conditioned upon wealth, and no wealth, no right.

The case known as GIDEON vs WAINWRIGHT was novel for several reasons, first, the defendant, Clarence Gideon had the gumption to write his own appeal once convicted on a charge of larceny for allegedly stealing a few beers, Cokes and jukebox change and sentenced to a five-year term for the $ 50 infraction. That in itself was remarkable because most people are too beaten down by the system to complain much less take action. Second, Earl Warren, Chief Justice and his colleagues were willing to read and consider a handwritten appeal from an indigent defendant.

The drama contained within the case was sufficient to support an award-winning book by New York journalist Anthony Lewis and then a film adaptation starring Henry Fonda.

It was one of several reforms accomplished by judicial review which helped to extend rights to the oppressed and to render our democracy closer to the ideal for which it was founded.

As the 50th anniversary of the decision has been reached the Right to Counsel remains on the books and is black-letter law but is observed only in civics texts and Law 101 classes while ignored in practice. Sure the rights exist but State Legislatures refuse to appropriate the funds to pay for lawyers thus effectively placing legal defense out of the reach of at least half, if not more of the population. Public Defenders, those assigned to provide a legal defense for the poor, are so overworked and so strapped for office support that it is estimated that an average attorney can devote only six minutes per client before arraignment.

In a way it is worse now than in 1963. At least the poor knew they were being shafted then, now we promote an official illusion that they will be represented while knowing full well that it is a scam.

Why are the Courts abdicating their role to protect the rights of the poor and dispossessed? Within the last 20 years the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy suitably provided with millions in donations have led a guerrilla campaign to takeover the Courts on behalf of Corporate interests. Tony Scalia, the squat fascist and his puppet, Clarence “Cokecan” Thomas, didn’t get to the bench by accident. There is a network of jurists and lawyers called the Federalist Society which recruits right-nutters in law school and prepares them with money, training, recommendations and jobs leading to clerkships, professorial appointments and judgeships. The Right’s co-conspirators in Congress have  declined to approve of judicial appointments made by Democratic Presidents while ramming through wingnuts whenever blessed with a patsy in the White House. The result is the most biased, most ideological and most anti-democratic judiciary in our history. Yes, even worse than then.

Ask yourself when has the Supreme Court ever before the 21st century overturned State election laws in order to appoint their own candidate? When has any Court overturned 100 years of legal decisions to extend a right to carry firearms that even  the Marshal of Dodge City in the old west would not recognize? Or put the kibosh on years of Federal and State regulation of campaign financing so as to effectuate corporate dominance of the electoral process. We don’t have objective judges, we have political stooges disguises in robes.

We’ve got a long fight ahead of us. The first thing we must achieve is the recognition that it is not a series of ad hoc differences of opinion among professionals but rather an incessant counter-revolutionary movement intent on overturning the Revolution of 1776, Jeffersonian democracy, Jacksonian democracy, the struggle for the Union of 1861-65, the Reconstruction of 1866-76, the Populist crusades of the 1870s and 1880s, the good-government reforms of the turn-of-the-century and the New Deal of the 1930s. Once recognized the threat of the new Corporate Feudalism may be faced square on and Democracy given a 50/50 chance of winning.

Running Down Social Security on the Daily Rundown

DAILY RUNDOWN with Chuck Todd on MSNBC hosted two Congress-critters, one a Democrat and one a Republican, or what the Media likes to call a Democrat and Republican. The critters reached a bipartisan consensus that it was necessary to destroy Social Security in order to save it. The only disagreement was as to how to kill it, with a swift hatchet to the neck or slow strangulation. The Republican was the hatchet man while the Democrat being liberal and compassionate wanted to slowly squeeze the life out of the program all the while assuring Seniors that he felt their pain.

The Republican signed on to the Boy Wonker’s budget proposal while the Democrat, caring to a fault, would merely extend the eligibility age for its  white collar workers, and shift the program away from being a universal entitlement to becoming a welfare program for poor folks only.

Let’s talk about the so-called Democrat’s “liberal” approach, after all we know that the Boy Wonker’s approach is simply tossing granny over the cliff without further nicety. The Democrats conceded that manual or bluecollar workers probably won’t last long enough to retire at 70 or so and so would be allowed to retire at 65 as it is now. Office workers being supposedly shiftless lazy folks who coast through their workdays will be forced to drudge it out until reaching a yet older age.

How would that work? Would the white-collars still have to pay a full tax throughout their working life or would they get a discount? And if discounted wouldn’t that contribute to the financial deficit that Social Security vultures are sounding the alarm about?

How does one determine what an office worker is? Some workers work in an office in the factory while some factory workers sit in cushy chairs and in air-conditioned comfort assembling widgets with the exertion of a nabob. Some office personnel slave over a copier in the heat and dust that saps human energy worse than any assembly line, how would Social Security apply that distinction?

And to be fair, Congress-critters sit on their butts all day rising now and then just to let C-SPAN know they’re still alive and yet they can collect FULL GOVERNMENT PENSIONS as early as the age of 45 and then do so for life. By this calculus Congress-critters shouldn’t be allowed to retire until they reach the age of 240.

The Dem’s other Deform would be to change Social Security from universal social insurance into a welfare program where poor old folks would dutifully beg to get their money from a welfare bureaucrat who would then police their lives. Social Security is today an “entitlement” meaning that once you pay in sufficient taxes covering working-quarters you are entitled to collect upon reaching retirement age. You don’t have to beg, you don’t have to lick boots, you turn 65 and collect. This has made Social Security the most popular program ever. Means-testing it would lower it in estimation to that of TANF (AFDC) or Food Stamps.

Furthermore, what do you say to someone who has worked their entire life while paying INTO Social Security only to be told to kiss their money goodbye because they will not be allowed to enjoy any benefit from the promise of 1933.

It was a service to the debate that Chuck Todd picked a Democrat and a Republican to “debate” Social Security because there was no real debate. The Elite have decided to KILL Social Security and the only debate allowed by the MSM* is regarding how best to effect the execution. If we had a truly free media we would be exposed to the very solid argument supporting Social Security as-is, undeformed.

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“MSM” Mainstream Media, otherwise to be known as the Corporate Media

Power Elite in Chicago Dump the Kids

CHICAGO CLOSING 129 PUBLIC SCHOOLS

From BLACK AGENDA www.blackagendareport.com —

Bruce Dixon

If you don’t live in Chicago you might not know that the CEO and the dozens of other six figure a year mayoral cronies who run the Chicago Public Schools want to close 129 public schools this year, more than a third of the city’s total. It’s not national news for the same reason that CLOSING 40 PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN PHILADELPHIA last year wasn’t national news, and massive school closings in the poorer neighborhoods of cities across the country is not news either.

It’s not news because school closings and school privatization, the end game of the bipartisan policies the Obama administration, Wall Street, the US Chamber of Commerce, a host of right wing foundations and deep pockets and hordes of politicians in both parties from the president down are pushing down the throats of communities across the country, are deeply unpopular. The American people, and especially the parents, teachers, grandparents, and other residents of poorer neighborhoods where closings and privatization are happening emphatically don’t want these things.

Even the word describing their policy, “privatization” is so vastly unpopular that they’ve taken it out of circulation altogether. The best way, our leaders imagine, to contain and curtail resistance to their deeply unpopular policies is to avoid naming them for what they are, to keep them on the down low, to not report on their implementation, and certainly to not cover any civic resistance to them.

Local elites in each city and school district concoct real or imaginary “crises” to which the solution is always firing more experienced teachers, hiring more temps in their place, instituting more high-stakes testing, closing more public schools and substituting more unaccountable (and often profitable) charter schools, frequently in the same buildings that once housed public schools. In Chicago the “crisis” is precipitated every year when the CPS (that’s Chicago Public Schools – Chicago’s never had an elected school board, they’re all mayoral appointees) honchos announce the schools are in a billion dollar hole. The Chicago Teachers Union of course, took a look over the same books and revealed that despite the host of top $100,000 a year officials whose jobs never seem to be cut, the system was nine figures in the black, not ten in the red. Naturally, local and national media didn’t report that either.

Rahm Emanuel, formerly Obama’s controller, as Mayor of Chicago has pursued an aggressive strategy of privatization of public resources. Chicago handed over the city-installed parking meters and their revenue stream to a private for-profit company and is hell-bent on converting the foundation of American democracy, public schools, into another profit center for banksters and corporateers

Today, Michigan, Tomorrow the Nation

RICK SNYDER, Gauleiter * for Michigan, has abolished democratic government in that state’s largest city, Detroit, as he has done for Royal Oak Township, Hamtramck, Highland Park, Flint, the Village of Three Oaks, Allen Park, Pontiac, Ecorse, and Benton Harbor, as well as Detroit Public Schools, Highland Park Schools, and Muskegon Heights Schools. The State Gauleiter has appointed local dictators ** who under Michigan’s emergency law have the power to abolish departments of government, breach public contracts, fire workers, sell public assets, repeal laws and promulgate new laws by decree.

It is probably not too surprising to note that the local governments taken over have not been those in predominantly White communities but rather in cities and public schools comprised of African-Americans. The Republican Party is working to purge voting rolls of Black voters and, as we learned earlier this week, have their Judicial stooges gunning to overturn the cornerstone of the nation’s Civil Rights laws, the Voting Rights Act.

It is surprising that the mainstream media has given very little attention to the dismantling of democratic government in Michigan. If this had happened in Russia, Iran or China,  the Media would be giving it non-stop coverage and the Obama Administration would be seeking a United Nations resolution in condemnation. But it is happening in the United States. The very foundation of American democracy is local self-government and the fact that it has been so easily discarded portends ill for the nation at large.

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* “Gauleiter” is the term Nazi Germany gave to provincial governors. It seems to be the appropriate title for Governor Snyder as well.

** “Dictator” is accurate and is not hyperbole. A public official who has absolute power and is subject to no legal constraint as are the “Emergency Financial Managers” appointed under this Law are dictators.

Well-organized Insanity, Inside the WorldNetDaily

Those Wacko ideas promoted by the Psycho-Right don’t just happen . . . . .

“News company” WorldNetDaily has pumped out staggering
volumes of froth and nonsense, which then spreads to the
rest of the Right’s media echo chamber.

WorldNetDaily (WND) describes itself as “an independent
news company dedicated to uncompromising journalism,
seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of
the free press as a guardian of liberty.” The online
newspaper, which this year celebrated its 15th year in
operation, is one of the “very few sources” martial
artist and action film hero Chuck Norris (who happens to
be a columnist) trusts for news and an operation that
megachurch pastor Greg Laurie (also a columnist) says
does “a service to God and Country.”

WND is the brainchild of Joseph Farah, a self-described
“radical” and longtime antigovernment propagandist and
apologist for the Confederacy who believes “cultural
Marxists” are plotting “to transform our political
system, to change the way we think, to attack our
values, to demean our faith in God, to reduce that
shining city on the hill to the status of a drab public-
housing project.”

Together with a coterie of antigovernment “Patriots,”
anti-gay activists, white nationalists, Muslim-bashers,
conspiracy theorists, end-times prophets and
ultraconservative hardliners, Farah – who did not
respond to requests to be interviewed for this article -
has built WND into a modest media empire including a
book imprint, an online subscription-only “intelligence
resource,” and a glossy, full-color monthly magazine. At
press time, Alexa, which ranks websites, said WND was
the 1,832nd most popular website in the world and the
423rd in the U.S. – just above the site for Nickelodeon
and a few notches below Victoria’s Secret.

WND’s point of view is best described as a cross between
the now-defunct supermarket tabloidWeekly World News,
which was famous for reporting on Elvis sightings, and
The New American, a monthly magazine published by the
far-right, conspiracist John Birch Society. In its 15
years online, it has introduced readers to a smorgasbord
of bizarre ideas, specializing in anti-gay, anti-Muslim,
and anti-liberal propaganda; antigovernment conspiracy
theories; and end-times prophecy.

It featured a six-part series claiming (falsely) that
soybean consumption causes homosexuality and promoted
Scott Lively’s vile opus The Pink Swastika, which says
that gays were behind the Holocaust. It has identified
the first “leftist” as Satan, and declared that Muslims
have a “20-point plan for conquering the United States
by 2020.” It has warned of secret plans to create a
North American Union, advised readers to invest all
their assets in gold, and promoted myriad, if
conflicting, theories about when and how the world will
end.

Its most enduring claim, by far, is that President Obama
is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president
because he supposedly is not a “natural-born” U.S.
citizen.

WND’s stable of writers includes “birther” conspiracist
Jerome Corsi; Bob Unruh, a former Associated Press
reporter who once sued his fifth-grade daughter’s school
after it forbade her to distribute promotional materials
for his wife’s “vacation bible school”; black neo-
secessionist Walter E. Williams, who in a 2002 WND
column wrote that the Civil War was an unconstitutional
exercise of “federal abuse and usurpation;” and a
panoply of other far-right and ultraconservative voices.

The online paper is also a launching pad for a new
generation of extremists. Kevin DeAnna, founder of the
white nationalist student group Youth for Western
Civilization, was recently hired as marketing
coordinator. DeAnna, 29, also has written articles for
WND – including one that asserted that Earth Day falls
on April 22 in order to honor Lenin’s birthday. Another
young pundit who benefits from WND’s patronage is Jason
“Molotov” Mitchell, 33, a self-declared “Christian
Supremacist” who wants his co-religionists to reject
“effeminized American Christianity” and start “advancing
the Kingdom on earth.”

Farah shares those sentiments. “I don’t think the
Scriptures teach us to passively wait for God to take
care of the world. We are taught to occupy until he
comes,” he wrote in his 2003 book, Taking America Back.
“Don’t you think He wants us to reestablish the promises
of America – one nation under God born of a creed?”

Despite – or perhaps because of – all this, WND has had
unnerving success at injecting its agenda into the
public sphere. Especially since the election of
America’s first black president sent the far right into
paroxysms of anxiety, this far-right supermarket tabloid
of the Internet has become a force to be reckoned with.

From Left to Right

Joseph Francis Farah, 57, of Centreville, Va., is a
former liberal activist who as a high school student in
1971 was arrested at a massive Washington, D.C., May Day
anti-war demonstration, voted for George McGovern and
Jimmy Carter (twice), and says he once volunteered to
serve as a bodyguard for anti-war activist Jane Fonda.
In the 1980s, while working his way up the journalism
food chain to become editor of the now-defunct Los
Angeles Herald Examiner, he became a devoted fan of
Ronald Reagan, to whom his 2007 book, Stop the Presses,
is dedicated.

He also found God and cultivated what he describes as a
“Christian worldview.” He claims that becoming a
journalist was his response to the question, “What would
Jesus do?” and says that his chief influences are
Watergate muckrakers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein;
Matt Drudge of “The Drudge Report”; Ronald Reagan; and a
book called Marx & Satan, which improbably claims that
the author of The Communist Manifesto belonged to a
Satanic cult.

Farah became the subject of national headlines in 1990,
when he was hired as executive editor of California’s
conservative Sacramento Union, whose new owners hoped
that fresh blood would help turn the struggling 139-
year-old paper around. Instead, during Farah’s 15 months
at its helm, the Union’s circulation dropped by more
that 25% as he dragged it sharply to the right.

Under his direction, pro-choice advocates were described
as “pro-abortion” and environmentalists were reportedly
called “eco-fruities.” The word “gay” was reportedly
forbidden, replaced by “homosexual” – and once, in a
column by the late David Chilton (who elsewhere wrote
that “The Christian goal for the world is the universal
development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which
every area of life is redeemed and placed under . the
rule of God’s law.”), with “sodomite.” Farah also
convinced rising conservative radio star Rush Limbaugh
(who had left Sacramento a few years earlier to take his
show national) to write a daily column, and ran it on
the paper’s front page.

Journalist Daniel Carson described the Union as “a
mouthpiece for the fundamentalist Christian right,
preoccupied with abortion, homosexuals and creationism.”

“[E]ach day seems to bring a bizarre new episode,” he
wrote in 1990. “Farah altered a news story to call the
National Organization for Women a `radical feminist
group.’ A front-page story speculated about whether the
confrontation in the Persian Gulf is the political
beginning of Armageddon.”

Editors, managers and writers reportedly left in droves.
“The feeling is it’s not really an objective newspaper
anymore,” a former Union reporter told The Washington
Post in 1990. “We didn’t go into journalism to work for
some slanted publication.”

In October 1991, Farah resigned. Twenty-seven months
later, the Union – which was at the time the oldest
daily paper west of the Mississippi – closed its doors
for good.

But Farah kept on writing. That same year, he founded
the Western Center for Journalism (WCJ), a non-profit
whose purpose was “to encourage more philosophical
diversity in the news media.” In 1994, WCJ was hit with
a $2 million libel suit for promoting a “report”
suggesting that White House Deputy Counsel Vincent
Foster had been the victim of foul play, rather than
suicide. (The suit was later dismissed.) Farah also
contributed occasional op-eds to respectable outlets
like the Los Angeles Times, and ran a series of
“watchdog” publications focused on liberal media and
culture.

In May 1997, together with his wife, Elizabeth, Farah
founded WorldNetDaily as a project of WCJ. In 1999, he
used $4.5 million in seed money from unnamed investors
and incorporated WND as an independent for-profit
company. It quickly became one of the most popular
“news” sites on the Web.

Excerpt from Alternet (October 10, 2012)

Congress About to Breach Its Constitutional Duties

Postal Services On the Chopping Block — Wackos in Congress Hot to Kill America’s Government

John Nichols, THE NATION

The plan to end key Saturday services, which has been correctly described by the National Association of Letter Carriers  as “a disastrous idea that would have a profoundly negative effect on the Postal Service and on millions of customers,” is not necessary. Ryan and his fellow proponents of austerity manufactured the current crisis in USPS funding, when they enacted the Postal Accountability & Enhancement Act of 2006 . The PAEA forced the Postal Service to prefund its future healthcare benefit payments to retirees for the next seventy-five years. That’s something no major corporation could or would do, as it required the service to divert more than $5 billion annually to pre-pay the health benefits of retirees who have not yet been hired.

“Slowing mail service and degrading our unmatchable last-mile delivery network are not the answers to the Postal Service’s financial problems,” says the NALC President Fredric Rolando.  “If the Postmaster General is unwilling or unable to develop a smart growth strategy that serves the nearly 50 percent of business mailers that want to keep six-day service, and if he arrogantly thinks he is above the law or has the right to decide policy matters that should be left to Congress, it is time for him to step down.”

Rolando is right. Congress can and should intervene to preserve Saturday delivery, to provide bridge funding for the service and to develop a plan that undoes the damage done by the PAEA and reforms rules so that the Postal Service can compete in the digital era.

This is doable. The Postal Service needs to make changes. No one argues with that. But the changes should — along lines outlined by Bernie Sanders — allow the service to compete with private delivery firms, and they should capitalize on a rural infrastructure that can play an key role in broadband buildout and the development of new financial and community services.

The current leadership of the Postal Service will not save it; they have bought into the austerity lie. Indeed, with the Saturday delivery cut, they are promoting austerity on steroids.

Any move to save the Postal Service requires members of Congress, not just Democrats but responsible Republicans, to reject austerity and get serious about maintaining public services.

This is not an option. It is a constitutional responsibility.

Article I , Section 8, Clause 7 of the U. S. Constitution directs Congress “To establish Post Offices and post roads.”

If Congress will not follow a constitutional charge to protect the Postal Service, should we really expect that it will defend Social Secuity, Medicare, Medicaid and other public services? The question should tell us that the work of preserving and expanding the Postal Service is an essential battle in the fight against the austerity lie.

— Excerpt from THE NATION (Feb 6, 2013)