THE LATEST TEA PARTY-INFESTED, REACTIONARY REPUBLICAN PARTY GRANDSTANDING!

May 16, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

For nearly as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has used  lies – BIG lies - as tools both to gain and to maintain power. To enumerate all but the most recent ones would fill this blog page beyond its maximum allowable capacity. The latest batch, originating as they have from deep within the bowels of the now reactionary, Tea Party-infested version of that wretched party, are especially vicious, conniving, and downright rotten. 

Ever since last September 11, these Teapublicans have frantically been trying to convince the public that President Obama has been lying about, and therefore trying to cover up, some deep, dark, sinister secret about the unfortunate killing of an American ambassador in Benghazi. They have held dozens of hearings and have wasted many hours and millions of taxpayer dollars in the House of Representatives on attempting to prove this conspiracy theory, to no avail. Now this week has come the revelation that the Justice Department had wiretapped the phones of numerous Associated Press reporters, and that the IRS has been used to scrutinize the tax returns of numerous conservative groups and individuals, including the Tea Party.

The immature and unethical crybabies over at Fox “News”, the de facto lying propaganda arm of this new Tea Party-infested Republican Party, is having a field day with these supposed “scandals”. I, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly care less! The Teapublicans, with their constant defiance and obstruction, as well as  their hatred-of-government rhetoric, have been cruisin’ for a bruisin’ for a very long time. Justly or unjustly, they have apparently gotten a little of what they so richly deserve!

Yes, the possibility that a supposedly neutral government agency like the IRS may have politically involved itself by targeting opposition groups and individuals is disturbing and a cause for concern. But it is hardly a cause for the type of alarm the hyper-political Teapublicans are sounding. And yes, the fact that the Justice Department overreached with its wiretaps of administration-critical reporters is very disturbing and offensive as well. But it does NOT signify that there is a secret White House conspiracy to deprive us of our First Amendment rights, or that our political slavery is imminent!

Once again, the Teapublicans are screaming conspiracy and are grandstanding and overreacting for what they hope will be their political gain. I ask them, though, where were their screams when the preceding Bush/Cheney clique suspended the writ of habeas corpus as they did? Where were their screams when this same regime put the whopping expenses for the war in Afghanistan and the unnecessary Iraq War on a very expensive Chinese credit card? Perhaps now you may better understand my contempt for these utterly hypocritical and opportunistic scoundrels! Unfortunately, though, President Obama, through his failure to take immediate action on these apparent scandals, may be aiding this rotten Teapublican cause.

For the President, both directly and indirectly (through robotical surrogates like Press Secretary Jay Carney) has given less-than -satisfactory explanations as to how or why all of these unseemly occurrences happened. To simply claim he was unaware of what had transpired is unacceptable: it is his job to know what is happening within his administration and its agencies! Further, we pay him $400,000 a year to take firm and decisive steps whenever a sticky situation develops, something he has failed to do in this case.

Teapublicans are screaming like raped apes and will be repeating the lies about how the government is a big bogeyman which nobody can trust and that yaxes are too high for the wealthy and  that the IRS should be abolished. They are succeeding in their attempt to foster government and administration mistrust, and to deflect attention away from exceedingly slow job growth and other failed economic measures their new austerity program has wrought. Unless and until the President and his Democratic Party begin to combat them directly by showing some distinct initiative, 2014 may well result in Republican victories in both the House and Senate. The droll Mitch McConnell will skate to a successful reelection in Kentucky, and the reactionary Ken Cuccinelli will capture the governorship in Virginia. Teapublicans everywhere are licking their chops in anticipation. This impending Republican victory is something the country can ill afford. The possible Republican lies which could result must be nipped in the bud – NOW. Remember, these fools can certainly dish it out, but when it comes to taking it, they crumble and become inconsolable crybabies. And the louder and more frequently they cry, the better it is for we normal, more rational folk!

There is little evidence to suggest that the President or his party will abruptly change their weak modus operandi. Thus, be ready for a disastrous 2014 - or, pray for a political miracle to occur between now and then. We progressives must dig in our heels and completely refute what we believe will be an onslaught of empty, preposterous Teapunlican grandstanding, or we will lose heavily!      

A LONG-OVERDUE TRIBUTE TO I. F. STONE!

May 12, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

A voice rarely mentioned anymore, yet nonetheless tremendously influential during that fabulous liberal era of the mid-1950s to the early 197os , was that of Isidor (Izzy) Feinstein Stone, better known as I. F. Stone. During that great time, this iconic man rose to promimence as the originator of the tremendous publication I. F. Stone’s Weekly. This great digest was once ranked by his fellow journalists as 16th on the list of “Tthe Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century.”  A thorough look through his website will show you why this was so. I strongly urge you to check it out at http://ifstone.org/!

Mr. Stone was a brilliant investigative journalist and worked for The New York Post, The Nation,  and other sources in the mainstream media until he was blacklisted during the horribly excessive McCarthy era of the early 1950s. He began his own publication as a result of that blacklisting. Like many leftists of his day, he was accused by the paranoid far right of having Soviet ties. The allegations have never been solidly proven, and he made a decisive break with Soviet-style communism when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 anyway. Regardless, Stone proved to be a thorn in the side of the establishment (especially conservatives) ever afterward. Paranoid FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even placed him under surveillance for many years.

I have reprinted his story below, in his very own words, taken directly from his abovementioned website. This man was truly one of a kind , and I sincerely hope we will be lucky enough to see a journalist of his caliber arise again before long! For the world desperately needs more I. F. Stones, and, regrettably, we haven’t had one since his death way back in 1989. Check out that website, and you’ll see what I’m talking about! 

A word about Myself

Izzy in his thirties working on the Remington typewriter

I  am, I suppose, an anachronism. In this age of corporation men, I am an  independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither  mortgager or broker, factor or patron. In an age when young men, setting out on  a career of journalism, must find their niche in some huge newspaper or  magazine combine, I am a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone,  without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good  readers. I am even one up on Benjamin Franklin—I do not accept advertising.

The  pieces collected in this volume are from a four-page miniature journal of news  and opinion, on which I have been a one man editorial staff from proofreader to  publisher. This independence, like all else, has its price—the audience. My  newspaper reaches a relative handful, but the 5,000 readers with whom I started  have grown to more than 20,000 in ten years. I have been in the black every one  of those ten years and paid off the loans which helped me begin, without having  had to appeal to my readers or to wealthy friends to keep going. I pay my bills  promptly, like a solid bourgeois, though in the eyes of many in the cold-war  Washington where I operate I am regarded, I am sure, as a dangerous and  subversive fellow.

Izzy, age 40, appearing on Meet The Press, July 29, 1949.

Once  before a newspaperman successfully attempted this same experiment in  independence. My predecessor was a distinguished foreign correspondent and  crusading liberal journalist, George Seldes. His four-page paper, In Fact, published much that was brushed  under the rug by the conventional press. But Mr. Seldes had the advantage of  publishing in a kind of Popular Front in the late ‘30s and the early ‘40s when  there were powerfully organized left-wing unions and organizations ready to  take bulk subscriptions to a maverick publication (though the dangers in such  support were demonstrated when it was withdrawn from Seldes after he backed  Tito in his fight with Stalin) . I, on the other hand had the disadvantage of  starting my paper in January 1953 when McCarthy and McCarthyism were in the  ascendant. That very month the unscrupulous Wisconsan had become chairman for  the first time of the Senate Committee which he used to terrorize the left of  center, the Eisenhower Administration and even his own Senate colleagues. There  could not have been a less propitious time to launch a radical paper, fighting  the witch hunt and the cold war. In these essays collected from its pages one  may savor again the full flavor of those haunted years.

Izzy, about age 40, on Fire Island where the Stones summered from 1945 on for a few decades.

I  have been a newspaperman all my life. In the small town where I grew up, I  published a paper at fourteen, worked for a country weekly and then as  correspondent for a nearby city daily. I did this from my sophomore year in  high school through college, until I quit in my junior year. I was a philosophy  major and at one time thought of teaching philosophy, but the atmosphere of a  college faculty repelled me. While going to college l was working ten hours  afternoon and night doing combination rewrite and copy desk on the Philadelphia  Inquirer, so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week—big  pay in 1928. I have done everything on a newspaper except run a linotype  machine.

I  had become a radical in the ‘20s while in my teens, mostly through reading Jack  London, Herbert Spencer, Kropotkin and Marx. I became a member of the Socialist  Party and was elected to the New Jersey State Committee of the Socialist Party  before I was old enough to vote. I did publicity for Norman Thomas in the 1928 campaign  while a reporter on a small city daily, but soon drifted away from left-wing  politics because of the sectarianism of the left.  Moreover, I felt that party affiliation was  incompatible with independent journalism, and I wanted to be free to help the  unjustly treated, to defend everyone’s civil liberty and to work for social  reform without concern for leftist infighting.

I  was fortunate in my employers. I rarely, if ever, felt compelled to compromise  with my conscience; even as an anonymous editorial writer I never had to write  something I thought untrue. I worked for a succession of newspaper people I  remember with affection: J. David Stern and his editor Harry T. Saylor on the  Camden Courier Post, the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post; Freda  Kirchwey of The Nation; Ralph Ingersoll and the late John P. Lewis of the  newspaper PM; the late Bartley Crum and his editor Joseph Barnes of the  short-lived New York Star; and Ted O. Thackrey of the New York Post and the New  York Daily Compass. Working for them was a wonderfully rewarding experience and  I learned much from all of them. From 1932 to 1939 I was an editorial writer on  the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post, then strongly pro New Deal  papers In 1940 I came to Washington as Washington Editor of The Nation and have  been here ever since, working as reporter and columnist for PM, the New York  Star, the New York Post (for a short interval) and the New York Compass. When  the Compass closed in November 1952 and no congenial job seemed likely to open  up, I decided to launch a four-page weekly newsletter of my own.

Esther’s father, Morris Roisman (left) and Izzy’s father, Bernard Feinstein (right), standing behind I.F. Stone’s children, Celia, Christopher and Jeremy with the shortest child being cousin  Michael Boudin, elder son of Esther’s sister Jean.

I  succeeded because it was what might be called a piggy-back launching. I had  available the mailing lists of PM, the Star and the Compass and of people who  had bought my books. For a remarkably small investment, in two advance  mailings, I was able to get 5,000 subscribers at $5.00 each. I was my own  biggest investor, but several friends helped me with loans and gifts. The  existence of these highly selective mailing lists made it possible to reach  what would otherwise appear to be needles in a haystack—a scattered tiny  minority of liberals and radicals unafraid in McCarthy’s heyday to support, and  go on the mailing lists of, a new radical publication from Washington. I am  deeply grateful to them.

It  speaks well for the tradition of a free press in our country that even in the  heyday of McCarthy it was possible for me to obtain my second-class mail permit  without trouble. I had then been working in Washington for 12 years as  correspondent for a succession of liberal and radical papers. I had supported  Henry Wallace in 1948.  I had fought for  the civil liberties of Communists, and was for peace and coexistence with the  Soviet Union. I had fought the loyalty purge, the FBI, the House Un-American  Activities Committee, and McCarran as well as McCarthy.  I had written the first magazine article  against the Smith Act when it was first used against the Trotskyites in 1940  There was nothing to the left of me but the Daily Worker.

Izzy in action at age 64, in April 1972

Yet  I was able to get second-class mail privilege without a single political  question. As George Seldes had before me, I encountered old-fashioned civil  service courtesy and political impartiality in the post office and the  second-class mail privilege when I started was my bread and butter. The  difference between the second-class rate and the cheapest third-class rate was  the equivalent of my salary.

My  idea was to make the Weekly radical in viewpoint but conservative in format. I  picked a beautiful type face, Garamond, for my main body type, and eschewed sensational  headlines. I made no claim to inside stuff—obviously a radical reporter in  those days had few pipelines into the government.  I tried to give information which could be  documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth  out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as  accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor to add  humor wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt that if one were able  enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even  beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news. I sought in  political reporting what Galsworthy in another context called “the  significant trifle”—the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried  observation which illuminated the realities of the situation. These I often  used in “boxes” to lighten up the otherwise solid pages of typography  unrelieved either by picture or advertising.  I tried in every issue to provide fact  and opinion not available elsewhere in the press.

Izzy and Esther on a cruise celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in the summer of 1979

In  the worst days of the witch hunt and cold war, I felt like a guerilla warrior,  swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least  expected independent inquiry. The reporter assigned to specific beats like the  State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper  soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations  forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many  ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3  A.M., the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the  story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp—private  off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs.  Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the  habits, attitudes and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should  a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. If his  publisher is not particularly astute or independent, a little private talk, a  hint that the reporter seems irresponsible—even a bit radical—“sometimes  one could even mistake him for a Marxist”—will do the job of getting him replaced  with a more malleable man.

Izzy in his 29th Street office in 1988

But  a reporter covering the whole capital on his own—particularly if he is his own  employer—is immune from these pressures. Washington is full of news—if one  story is denied him he can always get another. The bureaucracies put out so  much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from time to time. The town  is open. One can always ask questions, as one can see from one of my  “coups”—forcing the Atomic Energy Commission to admit that its first  underground test was detected not 200 miles away—as it claimed—but 2600 miles  away. This is the story of how I got that story—one example of what independent  news gathering can be like.

Izzy and Esther with children Celia, Jeremy and Christopher from  left to right  in December 1988.

The  first underground test was held in the fall of 1957. The New York Times report  from the test site in Nevada next morning said the results seemed to confirm  the expectations of the experts: that it would not be detected more the 200  miles away. But the Times itself carried “shirttails” from Toronto, Rome,  and Tokyo saying that the shot had been detected there. Since the experts (viz.  Dr. Edward Teller and his entourage at Livermore Laboratory, all opposed to a  nuclear test ban agreement) were trying to prove that underground tests could  not be detected at a distance, these reports from Toronto, Rome and Tokyo  piqued my curiosity. I did not have the resources to check them by cable, so I  filed the story away for future use.

Next  spring, Stassen, then Eisenhower’s chief disarmament negotiator, testified  before the Humphrey Disarmament Subcommittee of the Senate that a network of  stations a thousand kilometers (or 580 miles apart) could police a nuclear test  ban agreement and detect any underground tests. Two days after his testimony  the AEC issued its first official report on the Nevada explosion for  publication the following Monday. This said that the Nevada underground  explosion had not been detected more than 200 miles away.

The  effect was to undercut Stassen’s testimony. If the Nevada blast could not be  detected more than 200 miles away then a network of stations 580 miles apart  would not be able to police an agreement. I recalled the New York Times report  of the previous fall, dug it out of a basement file and telephoned the AEC  press office. I asked how the AEC reconciled its statement in the report about  to be released that the blast was not detected more than 200 miles away with  the reports from Rome, Tokyo and Toronto the morning after that it had  registered on seismographs there. The answer was that they didn’t know but  would try to find out.

In  the meantime I decided to find me a seismologist. By telephoning around I  learned there was a seismology branch in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, where I  duly found a seismologist and asked him whether it was true that Tokyo, Rome  and Toronto had detected the Nevada underground blast. He said that he did not  believe the claims of these three foreign stations but he showed me a list of  some 20 U.S. stations which he said had certainly detected it. One of these was  2600 miles north of the test site in Fairbanks, Alaska, another was 1200 miles  east in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I copied the names and distances down.  When he asked why I was so interested, I said  the AEC was about to release a report for the following Monday claiming that  the explosion was not detected more than 200 miles away. When he heard the AEC  angle, he became less communicative. I had hardly got back to my office when  the phone rang; it was the AEC press relations man. He said “We just heard  from Coast and Geodetic. There must be some mistake. We’ll reach Nevada by  teletype in the morning and let you know.” When the Joint Committee on  Atomic Energy later investigated the incident, the AEC claimed it was an  “inadvertent” error. No agency in Washington—not even State  Department or Pentagon—has a worse record than the AEC for these little  “errors.”

No  bureaucracy likes an independent newspaperman. Whether capitalist or communist,  democratic or authoritarian, every regime does its best to color and control  the flow of news in its favor. There is a difference here and I’m grateful for  it. I could not operate in Moscow as I do in Washington. There is still freedom  of fundamental dissent here, if only on the edges and in small publications.

Esther with children Jeremy (6 years old), Christopher (4 years old) and Celia (9 years old) in 1941 at 5618 Nebraska Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.

The  fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. It is  the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American  newspapers carry very little news.Their main concern is advertising. The main  interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications  industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.  This is obvious on television and radio but it is only a little less obvious in  the newspapers. Most owners of newspapers are businessmen, not newspapermen.  The news is something which fills the spaces left over by the advertisers. The  average publisher is not only hostile to dissenting opinion, he is suspicious  of any opinion likely to antagonize  any reader or consumer. The late Colonel McCormick, in his Chicago Tribune, ran  a paper about as different as possible from mine in outlook. But I admired him.  He stood for something, he was a newspaperman, he gave the Tribune personality  and character. Most U.S. papers stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news,  prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons. There are only a handful of  American papers worth reading —The New York Times, The  St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The  Baltimore Sun, The Christian Science Monitor—these are news papers in the real sense of the term. But even here opinion is  often timid; the cold war and the arms race are little questioned though these  papers do speak up from time to time on civil liberty. There are only a few  maverick daily papers left like the York (Pennsylvania) Gazette and Daily and  the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times. All this makes it easy for a one-man  four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course  opinion they would rarely express.

Esther and Jeremy at a 1990 Library of Congress exhibit, “The American Journalist: Paradox of the Press,” with Loren Ghiglione, guest curator of the exhibit.

For  me, being a newspaperman has always seemed a cross between Galahad and William  Randolph Hearst, a perpetual crusade. When the workers of Csespel and the 1956  Hungarian Revolution put a free press among their demands, I was thrilled. What  Jefferson symbolized for me was being rediscovered in a socialist society as a  necessity for good government.

I  believe that no society is good and can be healthy without freedom for dissent  and for creative independence. I have found among the new Soviet youth kindred  spirits in this regard and I watch their struggle for freedom against  bureaucracy with deepest sympathy. I am sorry, when discussing our free press  with them, to admit that our press is often almost as conformist as theirs. But  I am happy that in my own small way I have been able to demonstrate that  independence is possible, that a wholly free radical journalist can survive in  our society. In the darkest days of McCarthy, when I often was made to feel a  pariah, I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying  forward the best in America’s traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a  line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the  preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations, from which sprang the pieces  that follow.

I.  F. STONE               Washington,  D.C.               July 1963

HYPOCRISY WON BIG IN SOUTH CAROLINA!

May 8, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

Hypocrisy won big in South Carolina Tuesday night. There, 1st congressional district voters elected their recently disgraced former Republican Governor, Mark Sanford, to a term in Congress by a 9 point landslide. In a very heavily gerrymandered Republican district, Sanford easily captured the vacant House seat.

It didn’t matter that Sanford had left the governorship in disgrace only a few short years back. If you recall, he had been conducting an illicit affair with an Argentine mistress behind his wife’s back. It didn’t matter that he had been using taxpayer funds while in office to finance his trips to Argentina to see the little darling (who now, after his wife divorced him, is being paraded around as his new fiancee). It didn’t matter that Sanford had left his state unattended, or had lied to the press as to his whereabouts when he had left South Carolina for a romantic rendezvous in Argentina at taxpayer expense, or that he had even failed to tell his staff  where he was going. No, this supposed fiscal conservative thought nothing at all about spending taxpayer money to support a wild weekend getaway for himself. It also didn’t matter that he had been brought up on charges of allegedly trespassing by his former wife.

Sanford campaigned like an old-time snake oil salesman. He told voters that it was “God’s grace” which was guiding him now, and he tried (successfully, as it turned out) to portray his opponent, the very able Elizabeth Colbert Busch, as a surrogate of Nancy Pelosi. His desire to now be viewed as a reformed, renewed, reborn Christian deserving of the voters’ trust should bear very close scrutiny, however. For Mark Sanford has never shown himself to be a friend of the poor, as Jesus was, nor has he ever shown himself to be the very model of honesty he now claims to be. More likely, he will join the prevalent Tea Party caucus in Washington and will obstruct and grandstand with all the rest of them.

Mark Sanford, neither the great family values man nor the strong fiscal conservative Republicans go ape over that he claims he is, will prove himself to be just another in a long line of very mediocre politicians from a very mediocre state! 

              

THE SLY TEA PARTY ATTEMPT TO CIRCUMVENT OUR GOVERNMENT!

May 1, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

With very, VERY rare exception (notably in its earliest years and again, briefly, during the progressive-era presidency of Teddy Roosevelt over 100 years ago), the Republican Party has never stood for or represented the best interests of working people or the small businessperson. Rather, it has allied itself time and again with the wealthiest, biggest, and most powerful businesses of the day, such as the banking and railroad industries of the 1870s, to the robber barons of the 1890s, to the reckless Wall Street speculators and laissez-faire capitalists of the 1920s who put us into the disastrous Great Depression, to the huge multinational corporations , and the  ”free trade” / “free market” advocates of recent years, whose insistence that government safeguards and regulations be lifted on hundreds of businesses helped bring on more reckless speculation which led to our current Great Recession of 2008 .

Along the way, Republicans have also aligned themselves with some of the most extreme, autocratic, and oppressive forces our country has ever produced. These have included the Temperance Movement (which gave us the bar-busting Carrie Nation and the  ill-fated Prohibition era), the post-World War I and post-World War II  communist witch-hunts (which gave us McCarthyism and blacklists), the Ku Klux Klan, the “Moral Majority” (which gave us the hypocritical Jerry Falwell and the  institutionalized persecution of gays), and now the Tea Party (which has yielded legislative stalemate, plus an incredible array of crybabies, crackpots, and outright kooks, including Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul,  and Ted Cruz, to name but a few). Truly, if one is looking for ignorance, excess, or extremism, one need look no further than today’s Tea Party-infested, reactionary Republican  Party. For. like a plague of disease-ridden cockroaches, the once-proud Republican Party has been literally swallowed up whole by this malevolent force of backward-looking anti-government crazies. . There is a very real danger that this unhealthy epidemic could engulf our entire government.

This Tea Party was literally born amid distortion, disinformation, and lies. It first became prominent in the summer of 2009, when shadowy far-right, very wealthy, government-hating reactionaries were desperately trying to derail any attempt to reform our very broken health care system. They paid for buses to transport innocent citizens who were first wound up with lies and scare tactics to invade and disrupt selected Democratic congressional town hall meetings nationwide. These people were given signs and talking points and were instructed to argue with and shout down Democratic congresspersons. The very irresponsible Fox “News”, itself the most disingenuous  de facto propaganda arm of the now far-right Republican Party, wasted little time in promoting this as a bold new popular movement with broad voter support, which at that time it certainly was NOT. But through incessant lying and constant misreporting, Fox managed to create enough widespread voter fear that this new “movement” suddenly had legs.

In 2010, numerous moderate, mainstream Republicans went down to defeat at the hands of newly-recruited reactionary Tea Party candidates who successfully opposed them in party primaries. They were then elected that fall, casting the already conservative party into a much further rightward shift. Some of these successful candidates, like Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, proved themselves to be utterly lacking in politesse, whereas others, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul, displayed a twisted interpretation of the U.S. Constitution on numerous issues. Virtually all of them committed themselves to pursuing a path of very small government and a policy of obstruction and opposition to  compromise of any sort with their political opposition. With this sizable  influx of  newly elected Tea Party members, Congress ground to a halt and put forth the least productive session in its entire history!

Several successful Tea Party candidates implemented a number of moves they slyly omitted in their election campaigns, knowing full well that had they even brought them up, voters would not have elected them. In Wisconsin, newly-elected Governor Scott Walker slashed corporate taxes, cut state aid to public schools, and then had his Teapublican-controlled state legislature ram through a bill which took away the rights of Wisconsin state employees to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions. That he had shattered 50+ years of state precedent or that hundreds of thousands of voters reacted with obvious disapproval to this action mattered little to Walker: he was bound determined to cut taxes and smash state labor unions no matter what.

In nearby Michigan, Teapublican Governor Rick Snyder boldly implemented a most anti-democracy policy to sell off public land to private investors to restore fiscal soundness to financially -troubled cities. Using what he termed “Emergency Managers”, he basically dissolved the duly-elected mayors and city councils of a number of Michigan cities (like Benton Harbor, Flint, Pontiac, and even DETROIT, to name but a few) so that an Emergency Manager appointed by Snyder himself could assume total dictatorial control over running the affairs of each city. So much for freedom and democracy in Tea Party-infested Michigan! 

But it is in North Carolina that the most ominous news of all is happening. There, longtime notorious Koch Brothers ally and multimillionaire Republican activist Art Pope  has parlayed the millions he has spent to elect Republican candidates into a Cabinet position as Deputy Budget Director. Pope made and maintains his vast inherited wealth by owning and operating a large chain of inherited dollar stores in his state as well as chairing the very well-funded John William Pope Foundation, which was named for his wealthy father. The Institute for Southern Studies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group founded in 1970 by former civil rights activists to promote progressive policies throughout the American south, has begun an investigation of Pope’s often secretive political activities, They have found that he is a frequent invited guest to the Koch Brothers’ ultra-secret political gatherings and that Pope himself, through his foundation, has provided nearly 90% of the operating costs of North Carolina’s major far-right organizations. In fact, it was a shadowy 527 organization Pope co-founded called Real Jobs NC which ran smarmy political attack ads against selected Democratic legislators.  For the first time since the Reconstruction days of 1870, the Republicans now have super majorities in both state houses as well as control of the governorship due to Popes influence. This does not bode well for workers or minorities in the state.  

Like his idols the Koch Brothers, Pope has managed to operate mainly behind the scenes, and many North Carolinians are completely unaware of him as a result. Now this sneak sits as Deputy Budget Director for his state. The negative effects of his growing power and influence are already starting to emerge. Redistricting has changed what used to be a fairly balanced state into a new Republican stronghold. What used to be a slim 7-6 Democratic edge has now shifted to a 9-4 Republican congressional advantage. Like we have seen in other states Republicans have overrun, numerous voter suppression laws were enacted almost immediately. They have introduced Voter ID, which usually restricts turnout by minorities. low-income people, and students, all of which tend to be Democratic-leaning voters. They have reduced available hours for early voting and have eliminated voting on the Sunday before an election altogether. This directly affects African-American turnout, as many of their churches have adopted popular early vote “Souls to the polls” programs. They are even attempting to lock a very restrictive anti-worker “right to work” clause into the state constitution!

These are but a few of the many examples of how the reactionary Tea Party is attempting to force its very autocratic and anti-democratic agenda upon the entire nation. They want to minimize the power of the federal government to the point where it will be unable to further regulate those who MUST be regulated or protect those who desperately need protection! They hope to accomplish this by sly circumvention. They must be stopped COLD in this sneaky effort! DON’T TREAD ON US, YOU REACTIONARIES!

The best way to stop them dead in their tracks is to NOT VOTE FOR A SINGLE REPUBLICAN FOR AT LEAST  THE NEXT THREE ELECTIONS! The more friends and relatives you can enlighten about this need as well, the better!

THE LIES OF AUSTERITY MEASURES!

April 26, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

An April 18 piece by Senior Editor Lynn Parramore which appeared in Alter Net has blown a hole in the reactionary Republican LIE which has fueled utterly ridiculous and needlessly barbaric austerity measures all across Europe and the United States. That these far-right fools have been engaged in lying or economic barbarism is hardly a new phenomenon – they’ve been at it for many years. Like a flock of superbly well-trained parrots, they have been cackling out their insane nonsense for decades: that giving the wealthy huge tax breaks would create millions of new, good-paying American jobs; that raising taxes on the very wealthy would be persecuting “job creators” and would result in higher unemployment; that huge corporations would “self regulate” for their own good and therefore didn’t need any government oversight whatsoever; that government itself was too big and needed to be scaled back for the public good; that taxes are too high across the board and must be greatly reduced; that the federal government has never created even one new job; that providing a safety net for the poor would make them chronically dependent on government aid and cause them to become lazy and unwilling to work; and that government spending is far too high and must be immediately slashed.

People with even an ounce of common sense knew how false and foolhardy these arguments were. They knew that simply giving the wealthy more money would never (and never did) spur them on to create new, good-paying jobs (the only growth it created was in low-paying and even slave-wage jobs outside of the country). People knew that taxing the wealthy more was only fair and sensible policy and wasn’t “persecution” at all – in fact, it had been proposed long ago by Thomas Jefferson, and besides, even after their higher rate had been paid, the wealthy would still have even more money than they  could ever hope to spend anyway! Not only that, but isn’t the way corporations and wealthy business owners have exported jobs, held down wages and reduced or eliminated benefits for workers and the poor despite huge productivity gains over the past 30 years a form of unjust “persecution” against those very same workers? Honest, thinking people would certainly agree! As for reducing government regulation, the speculation Wall Street engaged in and the reckless loan-sharking mortgage bankers engaged in up until 2007 which brought on the Great Recession of 2008 more than proves the preposterousness of that position! Regarding the belief that the government is too big and needs to be shrunken, perhaps that would be advisable once the business community stops its decades-long assault on the poor and middle class, stops trying to eliminate labor unions, stops hoarding almost all the profit for itself,  and begins to finally engage in fair and sane business practices instead of the insane money-grab it has been on for farrrr too long. Business in America simply needs to begin exercising some legitimate self-discipline instead of practicing easy-way-out, “me-first-and-to-hell-with-you” crybaby  shenanigans! As for taxes being too high, they are - but only on the working poor and the middle class! The wealthy have been getting away with economic murder ever since conservatives cut their top tax rate to 50% under Ronald Reagan! Since then, they have pushed for, and gotten, an insulting array of tax loopholes not available to those of lesser income. Today, their maximum rate has dwindled to only 39.6%, a mark far lower than in other developed nations, and many get by without having to pay even a single dime. Still, they push for even lower tax rates. When they claim the federal government is spending too much, it is, pure and simple, a mockery of truth AND justice! The FACT of the matter is that they are paying FAR TOO LITTLE and are shifting the burden of taxation unjustly below them onto many who can ill afford it! Lastly, when it comes to their argument that the government safety net for seniors, the chronically underemployed, and the poor must be abolished because it is turning them into dependent wards of the state, that is ludicrous by itself, but all the more so when one considers the vast amounts of subsidies, tax write-offs, and other forms of corporate welfare the wealthy continually avail themselves of every single day. For these people to insist that the government spends too much - especially on needed social programs for the less-fortunate – is the height of their blatant hypocrisy!

These extremely short-sighted and callous people on the far-right (most of them from the Tea Party-infested reactionary Republican Party) love to use “the typical American family” as their role model for not only condemning federal deficit spending but also for advancing their utterly insane agenda for putting the government and country on a very, VERY harmful austerity budget. They say that government spending is out of control and must be immediately slashed. As the abovementioned Ms. Parramore points out in the Alter Net article, these thoroughly mistaken yahoos have based their position on a recent study by two Harvard ”economists” named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Their Reinhart-Rogoff Report has been lustily embraced by all the leading far-right parrots, from Paul Ryan to John Boehner to Mitch McConnell to John Cornyn to Rand Paul  to Bill O’Reilly to Glenn Beck,  ad nauseum.  They all point out how supposedly  disastrous it would be if “the typical American family” overspent as they allege the federal government does. They claim uniformly that once a country’s debt to annual gross domestic product ratio crosses a 90% threshold, it is disastrous for economic growth. The problem is that no one can say how or why this 90% figure became THE determining figure. Was it simply pulled out of thin air, or what? Another problem is that the assertion itself is simply NOT TRUE.  Worse yet, it was based on false data!

The report completely ignored data from the high debt countries of Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Australia, and CANADA, which for many years had shown fairly robust growth rates despite carrying very high levels of debt.  Beyond that, nearly a century of high debt, average growth British data had been totally omitted! A close inspection of this supposedly rock-solid report had exposed it as being a complete fraud. Unfortunately, right wing pundits and far-right politicians the world over were using it as a basis for implementing harsh, restrictive anti-spending budgets everywhere rather than providing stimulative measures, as they SHOULD have properly done! This means the austerity budgets which have been imposed on many countries, including the ridiculous sequestration we are now struggling with in this country, should never have been adopted and must now be REVERSED!     

The obvious FACT here is that deficit spending is a necessary and vital component of any healthy economy! Deficit spending provides jobs, just as it did in the 1950s with the ambitious interstate highway program. The economy grew in leaps and bounds for the next two decades as a result of this government-sponsored measure. Many other industries sprang up as a result of this increased spending. Tax revenues increased greatly, and the country nearly achieved full employment on a number of occasions. Business and labor both prospered, and each had a definite, rewarding seat at the economic table. We need EXACTLY that type of program today to revitalize and renew our decaying infrastructure! Not only that, but deficit spending, in the form of mortgages and bank loans for automotive and business equipment purchases, is a very needed component, one which helps drive the economy. Nearly all Americans can and should partake in this activity, and most do to a certain extent by using credit cards. Like anything, spending in itself isn’t necessarily all bad: often, it stimulates a slow economy. It must simply be engaged in for economic stimulation rather than be needlessly wasted. Grim, fear-breathing deficit hawks like Paul Ryan and his Tea Party-infested reactionary Republican cohorts need to learn this lesson and stop preaching economic lies!

Let us hope that the knowledge that this Reinhart-Rogoff Report is badly skewed and flawed will lead to to its demise, and to the end of these foolish and destructive austerity measures throughout the world! Such nonsense cannot be allowed to flourish!

GREAT PROGRESSIVE VOICES (Part IX)!

April 18, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

It has been some time since I have added a post to this series, which has highlighted a wide array of people from a great many walks of life. Each has, through progressive ideals and actions, greatly contributed to the welfare of  our citizens and whose efforts have had a profoundly positive effect on the lives of every single American.

Today, I would like to place my spotlight squarely on perhaps the greatest progressive voice this country has ever known: that of the truly remarkable FRANCES PERKINS.  

Born Fannie Coralie Perkins to Frederick and Susan Bean Perkins of Boston in April of 1880, she legally changed her name to Frances 15 years later, upon joining the Episcopal Church.   She earned a B.A. in Chemistry and Physics from Mount Holyoke College, and a Masters in Political Science at Columbia University, and very early on became heavily influenced by the leading social and labor writers of her day, among them such famous muckrakers and reformers as Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair. While in school, she took a course in history which featured field trips to nearby factories. There she saw firsthand the negative and injurious effects that long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions were having on working people. This experience led to her lifelong commitment toward the betterment of workers’ and poor people’s lives. She once remarked on her anti-poverty efforts by saying, “…foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is destructive, wasteful, and demoralizing, and poverty, in the midst of potential plenty is  morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic society.” To achieve her goals, Perkins worked as a social worker after college in Worcester, MA, and briefly taught in Chicago. There she involved herself with the Hull House, a settlement house set up by Jane Addams. She later moved to Philadelphia for a time to work with immigrant girls, many of whom had been forced into prostitution by greedy landlords or exploitative employers. Perkins then moved to New York and  eventually became the executive secretary of the National Consumers League.  She lobbied vigorously for shorter hours and better working conditions for workers. The following year, she witnessed the horrible Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, the worst industrial fire in New York City history, in which 146 women senselessly and needlessly perished because they were physically locked-in their sewing rooms and forbidden to leave while working. Perkins became active with the New York State Factory Commission, and worked tirelessly to promote job safety. She testified before the State Assembly and persuaded lawmakers to actually visit factories and workers’ homes to see up close the poor working and living conditions they faced.  In this capacity, she came into direct contact with leading progressive politicians of the day such as New York State Senator Robert F. Wagner and soon-to-be New York Governor Alfred Smith. Her efforts were successful, paving the way for important new legislation which provided strengthened worker safety measures, compensated workers for injuries they suffered while on the job, and established less working hours for women and children between 1011 and 1915. Frances Perkins’ social and political star was just beginning to rise…

In 1919, the newly-elected Democratic Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the state’s Industrial Board (which she became Chairperson of 5 years later). She managed to obtain a reduction in the working week for women to 54 hours while at that post. Prior to this, in 1913, she had married Paul Caldwell Wilson and successfully sued to keep her own original last name, as she was unwilling to sacrifice the influence it had already achieved in the social and political world. Her suit showed her to be a real pioneering trailblazer, as it was common for all wives in those days to adopt their husband’s last name. By 1929, newly-elected Democratic New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt called on her to become New York state’s Commissioner of Labor. Perkins proved herself to be quite politically adept, as she skillfully worked with numerous competing political factions to turn New York into a leading example of pragmatic progressive reform. During her time as Commissioner, she successfully implemented expanded factory investigations, instituted a 48 hour maximum work week for women, and worked hard to end child labor and provide for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws for New York woekers. But the pinnacle of her success would come with the election of Roosevelt as President in 1932.

On March 4, 1033, FDR was inaugurated as President , and Frances Perkins was finally able to exert her social justice influence on the national stage. The country was at the lowest, seemingly most hopeless point of the Great Depression. Roosevelt nominated her to be his Secretary of Labor, and she became the very first woman member of a President’s Cabinet, a post she remained at during his entire time in office. Prior to agreeing to serve as Secretary of Labor, Perkins told the new President, “I don’t want to say yes to you unless you know what I’d like to do and are willing to have me go ahead and try.” She outlined her proposed agenda to FDR, and it was a bold one indeed: a federal minimum wage, specified maximum weekly work hours, unemployment benefits, a SOCIAL SECURITY system for the elderly, and UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL! Roosevelt agreed to support her plans, so she accepted his offer and soon set herself into a whirlwind of activity. 

An unprecedented level of federal activism soon prevailed. Aided by huge new progressive Democratic Party majorities in Congress, dozens of new government departments and agencies were created and sprang into action. Perkins worked hard to create programs like the Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps (which employed two of my very grateful uncles), and the Public Works Administration (which employed yet another relative of mine, along with millions of others). Soon, previously unemployed persons were building new schools, parks, roads, dams, and office buildings all across the country. Labor unions were finally legalized, which meant that workers now had the legal right to band together and collectively bargain for a fairer wage and better working conditions. In 1935, Congress gave Perkins her greatest victory by passing the Social Security Act. It was a revolutionary action which provided a guaranteed government-paid supplementary pension to sick and elderly retirees and lifted millions of them out of poverty. Conservative Republicans of the day screamed out in horror that the country couldn’t afford such a program. Consequently, they have been trying to get rid of Social Security ever since, but have justifiably failed in every attempt. They were wrong about that vitally important social safety net program back then, just as they are dead wrong in their attempts to privatize it today.

Frances Perkins had accomplished a great deal in a short period of only 3 years: millions of people had been given meaningful jobs; the sick, unemployed, and elderly had received vital relief; but she wasn’t done yet.

Roosevelt was deservedly re-elected by a huge landslide in 1936, and, in 1938, Perkins achieved another great goal with the passage by Congress of the Fair Labor Standards Act. This immediately raised wages and shortened work hours in most industries, and eradicated the use of child labor in many. In a short 5 year span, Perkins could point to a number of solid successes her government-led intervention in the economy had achieved. All of her initial agenda had been adopted except for universal health care, and the country was showing slow by steady signs of recovery. Unemployment had dropped steadily each tear since 1933, and there were undeniable signs of progress everywhere. But within a short time after his second inauguration, FDR made a big error. It enabled his conservative Republican opposition to gain ground with their preposterous lie that his and Perkins’ ambitious New Deal programs had been a mistake and must therefore be rolled back.

Roosevelt had listened to his more conservative advisors’ warnings that all his new social spending would cause tremendous inflation. Thus, he drastically cut back on his New Deal programs in 1937, and, within a few months, the effects of this disastrous advice became clear: unemployment once again began to steeply increase. These conservatives had actually caused a recession to occur within the Great Depression! This recession continued into early 1939, when increased government deficit spending for arms purchases to aid allied countries in the early years of World War II, and our eventual involvement in that war, spiked a massive increase in employment which finally lifted us completely out of the Great Depression. Of course, modern government-hating reactionaries (who mistakenly refer to themselves as “conservatives”, such as John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, as well as most of the Tea-Party contingent) disagree with this correct accounting  of actual history, and ludicrously parrot the far-right lie that “government never created a single job.” We progressives, as well as my uncles and relatives who actually worked those New Deal jobs, all know the real truth. We know that it was massive government deficit spending which not only created millions of new jobs, but also lifted us out of the horrible depression which had been caused by the very same flawed, free-market economic theories that modern Tea-Party infested reactionary Republicans are once again spouting.

All Americans today owe a supreme  debt of gratitude to Frances Perkins! The HUGE benefits her agenda accomplished for all of us helped usher in an unprecedented four decades of upward mobility and tremendous, unequalled prosperity. Her outstanding efforts yielded us our broad middle class, SOCIAL SECURITY, the 40 hour work week, overtime pay, collective bargaining rights, higher wages, a social safety net for the poor and elderly, disability payments, and unemployment benefits. Though she died in 1965, the magnificence she brought to our economy still endures, nearly 80 years later!

We must preserve her great legacy by firmly standing to oppose any and all modern Republican attempts to dismantle or destroy her wonderful achievements!    

 

BEST WAYS TO BATTLE THE NRA AND GOA!

April 14, 2013  By Jack Jodell.

The National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America have once more flexed their political muscles, and their paranoid efforts have again worked against the safety, welfare, and best interests of the American people. They have successfully eliminated the restoration of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Assault Weapons Ban and have managed to push the elimination of high volume magazine clips completely off of the legislative agenda. This is a giant and wholly unjustified slap in the face of the survivor families of the Sandy Hook massacre, as well as to the survivors and victims of the many other gun violence episodes we have unfortunately endured. To say that the NRA and GOA must be politically opposed is a gross understatement of fact. Instead, they must be politically annihilated, and in today’s post I will outline a few steps that voters must take to ensure that this happens. This will be neither a short nor an easy battle, for each is firmly entrenched on Washington. But it MUST be undertaken and won in order to protect our citizens from future massacres by deranged, paranoid individuals whom these groups are so badly trying to protect! Here are spme important steps I would recommend be taken:
1). JOIN THE NRA AND THE GOA.  You read me right, folks: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” – and THEN beat them both badly from the inside by overthrowing their crazed leaderhip! Paranoid, bought-out crazies like Wayne LaPierre and H.L. (Bill) Richardson do NOT belong in influential, responsible high ranking leadership positions. The sooner we oust toadies like them, the better!
2). Do NOT vote for any more Tea Party-infested reactionary Republicans, or for any pro-gun, anti-people Democratic candidates at any level of government! The very moment an aspiring candidate says something about “second amendment rights”, scratch him or her off and work to defeat them. We all know there is no “far left conspiracy” to eradicate the public’s right to bear arms, or that electing anti-assault weapons candidates does NOT mean voting to create a network of disenfranchised political prisoners. So if you hear ANY candidate saying such insane things, make sure he or she is NOT ELECTED!
3). Write and/or call your existing representatives and Senators, at both the state and federal level, plus your own Governor, especially if any of them are pro-gun or anti-gun reform, and let them clearly know that you will work to defeat them in the next election if they fail to support bans on automatic weapons, bans on large volume magazine clips, or expanded background checks on gun applicants. Let them know further that you do NOT approve of NRA-sponsored attempts to weaken or prevent the adoption of such vital legislation! 
4). Write and/or call the offices of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, or ANY politician whom you believe has been responsible for opposing or stalling any and all gun-reform bills. Read them the riot act for their having obstructed and stalled important legislation in the past, and let them know you will NOT put up with their doing so in the future! Tell them to start actually EARNING their bloated congressional paychecks, and to stop grandstanding and playing politics while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars in the process!
5). FLOOD both the NRA’s and the Gun Owners of America’s corporate offices with both letters and phone calls DEMANDING that they both come to their senses and start supporting meaningful legislation banning assault weapons and high volume magazine clips. Let them know that you do not see legislation of this nature as threatening the private ownership of guns by responsible gun owners in the least, and that further efforts on their part to block gun safety laws will cause you to donate heavily to candidates strongly supporting gun control legislation! You can and SHOULD reach them by writing and/or calling these addresses:
NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION
Attn.: Mr. Wayne LaPierre
11250 Waples Mill Rd. Fairfax, VA 22030
NRA Member Programs  800-672-3888

GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA
Attn.: Mr. H.L. (Bill) Richardson
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102
Springfield, VA 22151
701-321-8585 / FAX 701-321-8408

We have allowed these special interest lobbyists to dominate and blackmail our elected officials for far too long now. The only things we have seen coming from this domination have been the unneeded proliferation of handguns and automatic weapons, and a huge rise in senseless massacres and individual murders.

This is not sensible gun ownership by responsible gun owners. It is utter LUNACY which needs to be brought under control, and NOW! 

I strongly urge ALL of us to start taking positive action on this pressing problem of gun violence immediately, and these are several important ways to do just that! By acting now, you may very well be helping to save the life of your own child, family member, or acquaintance in the future. Thank you, readers!