As Older Americans Become Paupers, Talk Of Cutting Social Security

By Manifesto Joe

I turned 54 late last month. Where I work, nearly half the work force we had 30 months ago has been laid off or pushed into buyouts. Many of those who hit the sidewalks were about my age, and from what I've heard, they've had trouble finding work. If you're over 50, people don't want to hire you.

And now, amid this rapid impoverishment of upper-middle-aged Americans, there's serious, bipartisan talk in Washington of cutting Social Security.

People in their 50s and 60s are being put into an economic vice grip. There was plenty of talk in the past about how much we baby boomers were going to be needed for the work force, since there are so many of us and fewer workers among the younger generations.

I also remember futurists of the 1960s and 1970s talking about how, by now, we were all supposed to be working 25-hour weeks. Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!...

We have now seen the future, and it looks a lot more like some high-tech version of the 1930s. But since I make the comparison, let's go back in time.

One of the main reasons FDR and Congress created Social Security in 1935 was the destitution seen then among Americans born between 1860 and 1880. The old were perhaps hit hardest by the Great Depression -- a 65-year-old back then was often physically unable to work at most jobs, and unable to be hired for less-demanding
ones. And if you can imagine what it's like to be thrown out of your house and into the street as a younger person, envision what it must be like when you're old.

And yet now, in the middle of what's being called the Great Recession, Washington's "deficit hawks" are talking about raising the age for standard Social Security benefits to 70. House Minority Leader John Boehner is on record as favoring this. It's being discussed seriously by people like former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, who's "serving" on President Obama's debt commission. (See previous post.)

What seems to be in the works is a deliberate impoverishment of people over 50 -- or not? Inside the Beltway, most of the big players are over 50, but they aren't the kind who will be laid off and have to live on a limited term of unemployment while they search fruitlessly for a new job. Maybe they are so out of touch with reality, as it is experienced by most people, that it isn't deliberate. Or maybe they know exactly what they are doing. The truth is somewhere in between. It's easy for someone whose ass isn't on the line to talk about breaking eggs to make an omelet, about things being tough all over, and so forth.

Another thing that apologists would point out is that the raising of the retirement age would be implemented gradually, with people born after 1964 being the main victims. They will someday grow old, too, and they will wonder how this travesty ever happened.

There are a lot of myths being floated as this debate goes on inside the Beltway. Moveon.org recently named five of them:

Top 5 Social Security Myths

Myth #1: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.6 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a 'T'). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever.1 After 2037, it'll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits—and again, that's without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers' retirement decades ago. Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Myth #2: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than they did 70 years ago. What's more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly—since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half. But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Myth #3: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn't need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here's a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come. Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income. But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Myth #4: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn't full of IOUs, it's full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market—which would have been disastrous—but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Myth #5: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It's not just wrong—it's impossible! By law, Social Security's funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can't add one penny to the deficit.

I smell the stench of Grover Norquist here -- the concept that government must be reduced to the size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.

This is probably not something the right wing will be able to pull off in the long run. When your belly is empty and there's no roof over your head, you've got nothing to lose. It's not likely that our power elite is going to let things go that far, even when the victims are going to be those over 50.

But history teaches that many horrors can be perpetrated before action is finally taken to correct them. The idea here is to prevent this atrocity before it happens.

The boomers started out as a pretty bad-ass generation. Then they went soft during the Reagan years. Time to get tough again, fifty- and sixty-somethings. The barbarian elite is at the gates.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Tax Cut Expiration: $175,000 A Year Is Middle-Class, Says CNN

By Manifesto Joe

The propaganda machine aimed at continuing Il Doofus' tax cuts for his rich friends is shifting into high gear, and the allegedly liberal Mainstream Media are falling for the line, and into line.

CNN is no exception. Sunday afternoon I watched a special report focusing on a family in New Jersey who were supposed to exemplify "the middle class." There was one enormous, gaping problem -- they aren't.

This was a couple with two kids. Both parents work at secure jobs. The man is a Certified Public Accountant. Their household income -- $175,000 a year.

Man, if that's middle class, I want to know which planet that's on, and how my wife and I can legally immigrate there. That's well over twice as much as my household has ever brought in, and in real, inflation-adjusted dollars.

I understand that a lot hinges on what one's definition of "the middle class" in America is. It may not necessarily be a family of middle income -- by definition, the middle class includes professionals such as doctors, lawyers, CPAs and such. These groups fall short of what is traditionally regarded as the upper class, people who can get into the Social Register and so forth.

But these groups are at the very highest end of the upper middle class, and are hardly representative of a broader view of middle America. Many more people are "lower" middle class than are "upper" middle class. In 2008, according to the Census Bureau, the median annual income of U.S. households was just over $52,000.

This would probably put the aggregate midpoint of the U.S. "middle class" at somewhere around $70,000 per household, when the very large lower middle class living on median incomes is included.

This report illustrates the insularity of much of the allegedly liberal MSM. If these are "liberals," they are most certainly of the limousine variety. I guess they pay a lot more at CNN than they do the rank-and-file workers in the sector of the MSM where I work.

What to do about the expiration of the tax cuts is certainly a debatable issue. On one hand, it's worth recalling that when the previous tax rates were in effect, late in the Clinton presidency, the federal government was running a record surplus. On the other hand, letting taxes go back up broadly, now, might derail an already-weak economic recovery. I think the Obama administration is on the right track by suggesting that taxes go back up only on families making $250,000 or more a year. I'd say that is filthy rich by almost anybody's standards.

But the debate isn't helped by the kind of laughable distortion I saw yesterday on CNN. This focus couple, making $175,000 a year, were lamenting that they would have to cut back on discretionary spending by about $350 a month in order to meet the bigger tax bill.

Poor little tootsies!

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's a link to the CNN report by Allan Chernoff. It looks even more stupid on second viewing. And, predictably, there's no way for the viewer to comment negatively.

Joe's On Vacation: But Check Out The Flamin' Groovies, And Webb Wilder

Joe's taking a little time off. I'm turning 54, and I'm going to try to take a few days off from the whole damned world. Here's some music to keep you all company until I come back in a few days. It's called Slow Death:



That's the 1971 original by the Flamin' Groovies, an old San Francisco band. Sounds a bit like the Stones when they were at their best, and I mean that as a compliment. Webb Wilder did a great cover, which unfortunately I only could find 42 seconds of. The full play of Webb's cover is available on the streaming services last.fm and pandora, and on his album Town and Country:



So, why didn't the Flamin' Groovies become big stars? And, for that matter, why isn't 56-year-old Webb Wilder one now?

See you in early August, or perhaps earlier. -- MJ

Manifesto Joe's Great Moments In Conservative History, Chapter 8: Alan Simpson Licks Saddam's Jackboots

By Manifesto Joe

Alan Simpson, whose daddy was a U.S. senator and governor of Wyoming, leaves me in awe with his resourcefulness. He pulled himself up by his own Republican bootstraps to follow in Daddy's footsteps, serving three terms (1979-97) in the U.S. Senate from Wyoming. And his service to We the People endures. He's serving on President Obama's debt commission, and one of his big goals appears to be cutting Social Security, which is there, he says, as part of the effort to take care of "the lesser people."

Before pursuing this, let's take the time machine back to 1990. Bush 41 is president. Bush 43, the future Il Doofus, is a hapless failure in business who is sort of a White House Doberman for Daddy. Snearin' Dick Cheney is secretary of defense. The U.S. just got through pillaging Panama to abduct its unruly head of state, "Pineapple Face" Noriega, formerly of the CIA payroll. Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna, is in theaters, and David Letterman jokes about how Dick hates it "when Pruneface kids him about Ishtar." Debbie Gibson still has videos running on MTV, and Rick Astley still has a pop music career.

And, Alan Simpson is a U.S. senator, Republican from Wyoming, and a member of a diplomatic mission to Iraq.

According to the senator at that time, Saddam Hussein mainly suffers from a public relations problem. This is what Simpson told Saddam:

"Mr. President, I can see that what you have here isn't really a policy problem; what you have is a public relations problem. You've got a problem with the haughty and pampered press. I know all about that, because I've got problems with the press back home. What you need is you need a good public relations person."

Here's a link to an article about the entire episode of April 12, 1990. I'm sure it will be noted that Simpson was joined by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, in licking the chemical-stained mud off of Saddam Hussein's jackboots. Republicans have no monopoly on foolish behavior -- they just seem to exhibit it disproportionately. And especially toward those nasty reporters.

Fast-forward to 2010. Simpson, now 78 and drawing the hefty pension of a former senator, is co-chairman of Obama's debt commission. And it looks like one of the things he wants to do is cut that nasty Social Security that the "lesser people" rely on.



Thanks to firedoglake.com for staying on this papier-mache man.

I fully expected, since we are mostly living longer, that someday we would see the age of Social Security claims raised. It seemed inevitable.

But now, in the "Great Recession," we're seeing a livelihood bubble developing for people ages 50 to 64, and increasingly, those older. Either we can't get Social Security, or the disincentives for taking it early are too great. And, we can't get jobs. For all the erstwhile talk about how much the baby boomers were going to be needed in tomorrow's work force, we now seem quite expendable. I still have the job I had in the '90s, but have seen massive layoffs of co-workers, and worry about my job daily. My wife had to re-enter the work force recently, and found herself lucky to be able to land a part-time job with no benefits.

And now, Simpson's beloved fellow Republicans in the current Senate are filibustering against an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless. It's estimated that well over 2 million Americans are now without unemployment benefits, waiting for the job that never comes, and/or waiting for eviction or foreclosure.

This man is, at best, a naive product of a privileged background. At worst, he part of a corrupt elite that has been looting honest working people in the country for generations. We are the people who have been doing the grunt work at demanding jobs all over America so that presumptuous types like him can dine in style while "governing" us.

I have a better idea of something for Simpson to do in his old age: Go back to Iraq, disinter Saddam's rotten corpse, and lick his jackboots some more. That will do far less harm than he seems prepared to do right now to honest working Americans.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Typing This On A Dell Computer Is Evidence: Capitalism Doesn't Regulate Itself

By Manifesto Joe

We Americans are indoctrinated, usually quite effectively, in the notion that capitalism is an ultimately fair, if sometimes unmerciful, economic system. It is supposed to be merciless competition itself that disciplines the market. If you make an unsatisfactory product, your competitors, in theory, eat your lunch, and your company soon goes under.

There are many examples of why this is merely theory, divorced from reality. The latest comes to us from the company that sold me the very computer I am typing this on, Austin, Texas-based Dell.

A recent New York Times article reported that Dell employees knowingly sold millions of defective computers "from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic, and small businesses." The University of Texas, in Dell's hometown, was another victim of this corporate malfeasance.

This came out as a result of a 3-year-old lawsuit against the computer giant. "Documents recently unsealed ..." the Times report says, "show that the company's employees were aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk."

To read the full article, go here.

The obvious question is: How the hell is Dell still even in business? The Times article does mention that Dell has been going through harder times in recent years, with complaints of poor customer service (I can attest to that) among other problems. That they would knowingly sell defective machines to companies and institutions big and small seems the most damning thing.

Why are they still operating? Granted, they don't have the market share they used to, and they have a few competitors. But that is a key word -- few.

For 120 years, the U.S. hasn't seen many blatant monopolies in our economy, mostly because the Sherman Antitrust Act more or less outlawed them. Intentional monopolies, such as can still be found in some places among utilities, are an exception.

But better economists understand the very strong presence of oligopolies, and also monopolistic competition, in the contemporary corporate world. "Bigness" is the defining factor here. We've seen it all too well among the banks, some of which are now termed "too big to fail," so they rate bailouts with taxpayer money. But it exists in plenty of other enterprises that don't benefit from such wide-open subsidization. (The subsidies are there -- but often indirectly, so you have to poke around to find where they are. The tax system is a good place to look.)

Dell became so staggeringly big that it could engage in this kind of malfeasance and yet still be in business, years later. Its competitors are few, and they are huge, too. All these folks appreciate a quiet life as much as anyone else. One of the crucial lessons of real competition is that you can lose.

So, Dell has lost market share, but it retains a great deal. It's so big, it almost can't fail. I still get plenty of junk mail from them, and here I sit, typing this on a five-and-a-half year-old Dimension 3000.

The marketplace discipline that competition is supposed to bring may have been very real in Adam Smith's day. There, we're talking about microeconomics at the village smithy and yeoman farmer level -- maybe small manufacturers. But today's enterprises have grown so large, they can get away with astounding things and still pay a very limited price for their misconduct. They still have the profits from the sales of millions of faulty computers; and even the aforementioned lawsuit, yet to come to trial, won't really compensate the victims.

So, what's the alternative? There aren't many good ones. But one thing seems clear. The "free market" model of popular indoctrination looks, in reality, nothing like it does in theory.

Maybe I could go to some bank, get a loan, hire techs to start building good, moderately priced computers, and put these rapacious bastards out of business. Which bank would you suggest? One of those that's "too big to fail?"

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Steele and Palin: Where Do The Republicans Find These Harebrains?

By Manifesto Joe

The day after Independence Day is as good as any to breach this subject: Where the hell are the Republicans finding all these political/historical illiterates to parade before the public in high positions?

Michael Steele

Forget for just a moment what your personal views are regarding the Afghanistan war. I will grant that it's looking more and more like a stupid quagmire that can't be won, but just put that aside for a moment.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was caught on video Thursday, at a fundraiser, saying, "This was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Here's a link.

Um, where the hell was Michael Steele in 2001, when the (Republican) Bush administration decided to invade Afghanistan? And where the hell was he for seven-plus years after that, while the same administration neglected the pressing problems in Afghanistan while deciding to skin Saddam Hussein's scruffy ass?

This is comparable to a scenario in which some leading Democrat, in 1970, had blamed Richard Nixon for escalating the Vietnam War after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Historically, it is illiterate. Makes absolutely no sense.

So, where did the Republicans find this guy? Well, he's a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, and has a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center. I always assumed you would have to have a first-rate intellect to have made it that far in life. Silly me.

And youthful error can't explain it, either. The man's 51.

Turns out that Mr. Steele has at least one prominent defender: U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, Republican and erstwhile Libertarian from my home state of Texas, where we've seen for countless decades that anybody can conceivably be elected to anything. I can't say I disagree much with Mr. Paul for challenging the wisdom of pursuing what is looking more and more like a futile, stupid war.

But I noticed that Mr. Paul had no comment about the historical absurdity of Mr. Steele's statement. But then, judging from Mr. Paul's views and congressional voting record, I never got the impression that he possesses a sense of the absurd.

Sarah Palin

Youthful error might explain some of this gaffe. Sarah Palin is, quite manifestly, 46 going on 19, at least intellectually. And a very, very shallow 19 at that. I think she's still trying to get that platform speech for the Miss Alaska pageant right.

Her list of gaffes is growing long. But the latest one was a topper -- it was about a Republican hero, and one not himself known for intellectual prowess.

During a recent fundraiser at California State University, Stanislaus, Ms. Palin spoke gushingly about President Reagan being a graduate of Eureka College in California.

Reagan did indeed graduate from Eureka College, in 1932. But it was in Illinois. It was described that he took "the gut course" in economics. Eureka College isn't overly well-regarded, but Ronald Reagan could boast of this: He's the most prominent economist that the college ever produced.

But, of course, it would have been wise for Sarah Palin to check on this before including it in a speech. There is a Eureka, Calif., but there's no college of that name anywhere around there.

By the way, according to Politics Daily, Ms. Palin was paid $75,000 for her speech.

Man. I wish I could be paid that well for f**king up.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

America, 2010, and America, 1934: How Are We Different?

By Manifesto Joe

The America of 1934 was much worse off than the America of today. But there are some parallels: stubbornly high unemployment, pay cuts, political polarization, a field day for demagogues, a right-wing Supreme Court confronting a liberal Democrat in the Oval Office ... above all, a general feeling among the populace of, "When did my life become a horror movie?"

Today's America has Keynesian economic precedents, and something of a social safety net, with food stamps as the centerpiece. At least few people could actually starve, unlike the situation in '34. And the official unemployment rate is hovering at only around 10 percent. Even if one factors in the underemployment and other differences of today, the job situation of 1934 was certainly worse. There are no bums coming to my door, begging to do whatever work I have here for some food. My mother, who was 7 in 1934, had vivid memories of them. And, beans and cornbread was mostly what my grandmother had to offer a Depression-era tramp. My grandfather was making about a dollar a day.

But one of today's crucial differences, the social safety net -- such as it was at the start of "The Great Recession" -- now seems in peril.

Last week, the extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed failed to clear the Senate. I've created a link. The vote was 57 for, 41 against, with 40 smug Republicans plus Nebraska Blue Dog Ben Nelson blocking the bill. Nearly 1 million jobless Americans will lose their unemployment benefits because the Democrats could not muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened Republican filibuster.

If this had happened in 1934, I would dare say there would have been a lot of people out on the streets all over this country the next day, and quite possibly bloody violence. It's true that Americans were remarkably stoic through 10 miserable years during the Great Depression. But in those days, there was at least enough turbulence to show that people basically knew who their enemies -- and friends -- were. In the America of 2010, at least half the country doesn't seem to get it.

Because of the Senate's inaction, there will be a spike in homelessness and hunger. There will be many more foreclosures and evictions.

There are doubtless some right-wingers who think that unemployment benefits encourage people to remain jobless. I don't think that such people have ever had to try to live on the meager sum that unemployment insurance pays. But even if their notions were so, there are few jobs compared to the number of jobless. This will force many people out of their homes, into shelters, into already-stressed food banks -- and into suicidal despair.

I find it a bit ironic that the one Senate "Democrat" who sided with the Republicans on this is from the very state where a Depression-era food riot occurred. The eruption that took place in 1932 in Lincoln, Nebraska, is now barely a footnote in history. It was one instance in which the stoicism of heartland Americans was finally exhausted.

But, history doesn't exist for many Americans of today. It's interesting to note that one of the most active Communist Party cells in America during the 1930s was in Oklahoma City, capital of what is now one of the nation's most rock-ribbed Republican states, represented by two of the most dimwitted right-wingers in the Senate. Not that being a communist was an especially bright thing, even then -- but it's understandable when you realize what daily life was like for most Oklahomans during the Depression. I lived in that state briefly during the 1980s, and by then, you couldn't tell there had ever been a Dust Bowl. Nobody seemed to remember it.

So, what's the difference between America of 1934 and America today? Back then, people seemed to have a collective memory, at least of sorts. Today, many can't remember back any further than whatever Glenn Beck told them on Fox News yesterday. And, while there were indeed demagogues back then, and right-wing ones -- they seem to have more muscle now.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Gulf Spill Notes: A Yacht Named Bob, And A Boob Named Barton

By Manifesto Joe

Joe's been kicking back a bit while recovering from an illness, but surely the faithful few out there knew I wouldn't be gone very long.

So, how can there be any doubt left as to why there are millions of gallons of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico?

BP Chief Executive Tony ("I want my life back") Hayward took a day off Saturday to watch his yacht "Bob" compete in a race. This man is one of the leaders of a huge multinational corporation, and he names his yacht "Bob"? This takes some of the mystery out of the disaster. There were even Republicans, namely Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who were bent out of shape about his little holiday. But it seemed to me that his day off wasn't a bit nonplussing. That he would name his 52-foot yacht "Bob" -- now that says a lot, I think.

A boob named Barton

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, based in Arlington, Texas, is sort of local phenom around these parts. Those of us who don't quite share his corporate-lackey political philosophy have long had to suffer through those silly campaign ads, with his Down's syndrome eyes and knee-jerk right-wing slogans ("We've got to stop librul ideas ...").

But hey, I didn't realize until last week that Oil Can Joe could emerge among House Republicans as one more of those gifts that just keeps on giving. He joins Joe "You Lie" Wilson of South Carolina, fellow Texan Randy "Baby Killer" Neugebauer and Minnesotan Michele (of the countless idiocies) Bachmann in the pantheon of House GOP fecal feet.

There were Republicans who came down on him hard after his "apology" to BP, in which he referred to the $20 billion damages fund extracted by President Obama as a "shakedown" and a "slush fund." Even after his halfhearted apology, there were actually Republicans who were calling on him to resign his committee post.

Don't do it, Joe!

The Democratic Party needs you, especially this November. Your "seat" is Republican-safe, there being so many insular fools residing in that generally suburban middle-class district. You'll be re-elected -- Bachmann may not be, so the Democrats need one more guaranteed buffoon. Stay the course, Joe!

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Atlas Shagged: Colorado Springs Is What Happens When Rich Twits Refuse To Pay Taxes

By Manifesto Joe

The city of Colorado Springs, Colo., has become a microcosm of what happens when those in the community who are prospering are unwilling to pay the taxes needed to fund basic government services.

I visited C.S. way back in 1984, and was blown away by what a beautiful place it was. There were gorgeous plants and flowers everywhere. You could see Pike's Peak through some residents' kitchen windows. There were mild days and cool nights even in August. And, most of all, one was taken by how pristine everything always looked. "This is Heaven!" one resident, a former Texan, told me unabashedly.

But, one other thing I noticed: I had never seen so many extreme right-wingers congregated in one place in my whole life. And, mind you, I'm an almost lifelong Texan.

It was Religious Right Heaven. It was also NORAD ex-military Heaven. When we went to the "hipper" part of the urban area, a place just next door called Manitou Springs, a seemingly cool-looking bookstore had a display case featuring the complete works of Ayn Rand, fiction and nonfiction. (I'm still trying to figure out how one tells those apart.) This place had every kind of extreme right-winger, variously theistic to atheistic, on full display. Even at a sort of dude ranch where we went to see a popular local show combining a traditional chuck-wagon meal and Western music, somebody shoved a right-wing screed in your hands while you ate your ranch beans and got ready to hear the greatest hits of the Sons of the Pioneers. ("Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds ...")

I was absolutely blown away by the physical beauty of the place, the Garden of the Gods, the Cheyenne Mountains ... you name it. But it occurred to me -- this is a place that votes for Reagan something like 4-to-1, or more. The local daily newspaper, the only one competing with the Denver-based papers, was a place where you practically had to pass a Libertarian ideology test to go to work as a journalist there.

Now we know what happens to a place when the locals become pathologically anti-tax. It's a lot like what happened, more gradually, to the state of California in the decades that have followed the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. That place, once the envy of the other 49 states, has become such a hellhole that hardly anybody wants to be the governor. There's not enough money for basic things. I call it "Atlas Shagged."

Courtesy of Truthout, here's an exclusive video of what's happening in this once-pristine city. Last fall a proposed property tax increase was rejected by a margin of almost 2-to-1, and now they can't even afford adequate police protection in this fast-growing city. It's reported that two-thirds of the streetlights are idle, like, out. A merchant was murdered at a place where a city streetlight was nonfunctional.

I went to C.S. 26 years ago as a tourist. I wonder what effect all this is going to have on their tourist trade?

Spread 'em, Atlas.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A New Inductee Into The White Trash Hall Of Fame: S.C. State Sen. Jake Knotts

By Manifesto Joe

This "gaffe" was a most revealing one: Even a person who toes the Tea Party line can be highly suspect if they are not a good old-fashioned, right-thinking (white male Protestant) Murkan.

South Carolina State Sen. Jake Knotts, commenting on a Republican, Tea Party-backed candidate for the gubernatorial nomination who happens to be a female Christian from a Sikh ethnic background, said: "We already got one raghead in the White House; we don't need a raghead in the governor's mansion."

Obviously I live in Texas, so I'm used to encountering such prejudices. The senator wasn't expressing an unusual sentiment, and I understand that it's even more common in South Carolina than it is here.

But it doesn't hurt to bring such malignancies to the surface. Here's a link to the story.

In the category of, sometimes it's better to laugh than to rage or cry

The Onion sometimes doesn't seem to have the quality of writers it used to have, but they got a good laugh out of me with this one. "Gulf of Mexico Inducted Into OPEC."

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

You Heard It Here Early: Sarah Palin Is A Semiliterate Dunce And Had No Business Even Being Alaska's Governor

By Manifesto Joe

"Gov.Jindal:to avoid ravished coast, build the berms.Ask forgiveness later;Feds are slow to act,local leadership&action can do more for coast"

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tweeted this imbecility Monday evening to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

My source? No, not Keith Olbermann -- although he is the one who most widely publicized this bit of Palin semiliteracy. I cut and pasted this off of a site called Conservatives4Palin.com. I've put a link in here, if your stomach is strong enough to read some of this moronic swill.

How titilating -- that lusty, gushing BP offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is going to "ravish" the Louisiana coast. I want to see that video on The Weather Channel.

And this person got 46 percent of the vote for vice president of the United States? Scary.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

From Joe's Vault On Memorial Day: Remembering A Real American Hero

By Manifesto Joe
Originally posted on BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com, Aug. 5, 2005

In an age of faux heroism, illustrated by the swagger and tough talk of our "president," we should perhaps take time to remember a real American hero.

July 30 was the birthday of Smedley D. Butler, born in 1881. Few Americans have heard of this two-time Medal of Honor winner, who rose to the rank of major general in the Marine Corps. But history teachers ought to note that Butler probably thwarted the first serious conspiracy toward a coup in the United States.

In 1933, soon after he retired from active duty, Butler alleged that he was approached by a representative of a group of super-rich business interests, led by the Du Pont and J.P. Morgan industrial empires, with a proposition. The representative, a top Wall Street bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire, was said to have tried to recruit Butler to lead a move to strip recently inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt of his political power.

Butler testified before a congressional committee that he was promised a militia of 500,000 men for a coup, after which Butler would assume near-absolute power as "secretary of general affairs," with Roosevelt retained as a figurehead. The men behind MacGuire feared a major redistribution of wealth by an FDR administration, and they were prepared to bankroll the force needed to prevent it.

The outcome of Butler's testimony was predictable. The press, at the time mostly owned by business-friendly conservatives, generally played the story way down. The tiny "reports" that did run ridiculed Butler and said he lacked evidence. Those whom he accused of the conspiracy, including former Democratic presidential nominees Al Smith and John W. Davis, professed innocence and did not come under public scrutiny. MacGuire -- known through his correspondence to have been an admirer of Mussolini's fascist rule in Italy -- was the panel's only open-session witness besides Butler. Of course, he told the lawmakers he never made such a proposition. The allegations are now a footnote in history.

But in 1967, journalist John Spivak vindicated Butler (who died in 1940) when he uncovered the House committee's internal, secret report. It clearly confirmed the story. The panel's public report was a whitewash and even omitted the names of the powerful men whom Butler accused.

This was not the only time Butler tangled with the early U.S. military-industrial complex. He had seen its operations firsthand many times, and blew the whistle on it. In a speech delivered in 1933, the same year he went public about the conspiracy, Butler told his audience:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the few at the expense of the masses. ...

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

"There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its 'finger men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations, and a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

"It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

"I helped make Mexico ... safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. ... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. ... I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Today we have other names -- Iraq, Halliburton, Diebold, Rove. We've had two Bush administrations; the first was at best legally questionable, the second possibly elected through voting irregularities in the deciding state and high-tech rigging in others. The stench of war for profit, and of crypto-fascism, is in the air.

Those who discuss this odor are being either ridiculed or ignored by the mainstream media. Perhaps they will be vindicated one day, as Butler was.

Meanwhile, let's honor a real hero, a man who blew the whistle on nascent American fascism.

HISTORICAL SOURCES: Wikipedia; excerpts from an online transcript of a 1933 speech by Smedley D. Butler

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A Great Song Is Timeless: Frank Sinatra, 'Summer Wind' (1966)

It's been a while since I posted music on this site. This has been an earwig for me for a while, and for better reasons than for worse. Ol' Blue Eyes was certainly no saint, but he also certainly knew his way around a song or two. -- MJ



Songwriters: Bradtke, Hans; Mercer, Johnny; Meier, Heinz

Who Is John Galt (And Why Does He Keep Saying All Those Foolish Things)? Musings On The Rand Paul Controversy

By Manifesto Joe

Why is anyone shocked about Rand Paul, and his views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I confess to being a recovering libertarian, and therefore I understand that viewpoint better than most left-leaning people do. It's about absolute property rights.

John Galt, that shadowy character in Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, articulated this view about as well as something that silly can be. This is from a Wikipedia article on Rand's 1957 novel:

Atlas Shrugged endorses the belief that a society's best hope rests on adopting a system of pure laissez-faire. Rand's view of the ideal government is expressed by John Galt, who says, "The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force," and claims that "no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality — to think, to work and to keep the results — which means: the right of property." Galt himself lives a life of laissez-faire capitalism as the only way to live consistently with his beliefs.

The obvious extension of this philosophy isn't much of a stretch. Nobody is obligated to pay taxes -- they would come only at the generous sufferance of volunteer property owners who realize they will have to have roads and bridges to drive on. Your neighbors would be theoretically "free" to bury dioxins in their back yards, and you have no say in the matter. A machine shop owner could hire you, require you to furnish your own tools, ignore safety issues -- and when you get hurt, well, tough, buddy. Go home and get well, and maybe we'll see you again some day. Of course, bear in mind that wage slaves are always "free" to change masters.

And, the private owners of lunch counters would be "free" to segregate, or to ban minorities altogether, as they did before 1964.

This brings to mind a simple observation: No civilized society has been able to function for long with the notion that property rights are generally absolute. It's not workable, and never has been.

I admit, long ago I thought this way, regarding property rights as more or less something that cannot be abridged in a "free" society. To get past this, one must deconstruct the underpinnings of the idea.

Libertarians, and many conservatives, often point to nature as justification for absolute property rights. Territory is visible throughout nature, and animals will fight to defend it.

But this is actually crucial to the point: In nature, there is no property, only territory. And if you're going to keep territory, you'd better be able to defend it.

If one goes back to a time before property rights were codified among hominids, territory was something that belonged to the Baddest MF in the Valley. Let's figure that he had a few rivals across the river, and that there were constant fights over water.

But a generation goes by, and the Baddest MF in the Valley sees his kids grow up. His sons aren't nearly as bad as he was. His little tribe of warriors is growing old and soft. He sees his power over territory slowly slipping away.

So, he arranges a meeting with rivals, now also aging, from across the river. "Gentlemen," he says. "Enough of all this senseless violence and killing. We must have laws -- to govern us!"

And so, the codification of property rights is born. But, who will enforce those rights? The police department and the courts are soon born. Disputes are settled peacefully for a change, and yes, civilization is born.

But are such rights absolute or conditional? It should be obvious. Property rights exist because of government, not in spite of it.

Without codified property rights, my grasp over my home and yard would be tenuous. I would have to be able to defend them, as my territory. If someone could get the drop on me, kill me, my wife and my dogs, and bury us in the back yard -- well, the territory would "belong" to that person. It is the codification of my property rights that would enable the police and the courts to intervene. But I realize that my rights are conditional. I have to pay property taxes, and I don't have the right to let my grass grow over a foot tall.

As for Rand Paul?

I'm going to toss in recent video
of Dr. Paul, now the Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate nominee, talking to Rachel Maddow.

A lot of commentators are painting Dr. Paul as a racist over this. I cannot say whether he is one, as I cannot read his mind. But he is clearly the same thing that I was long, long ago -- an ideologue who has never had the experience of driving into a town, tired and hungry, and finding nearly all public accommodations segregated or just plain closed to him.

I will take the doctor at his word that he opposes segregation. But he also clearly buys into the idea of absolute property rights, something that distinguishes his brand of libertarian conservative from the older and more pragmatic style of Burkean conservatism. And it certainly sets him apart from modern liberalism, which has evolved a great deal since the days of Manchester liberals.

The notion of absolute property rights is certainly common in America, but the idea falls apart upon proper deconstruction. No civilized society could function that way for long. In a sense, it's time for many Americans, especially the Tea Party variety, to grow up and get over it. They are part of a larger society as much as they are individuals. It's time for people to start acting like it.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Republicans Again Rewrite History: They Were The Main 'Architects' Of Deregulation

By Manifesto Joe

Republicans either have a great sense of sick humor, or they think everybody else has amnesia, or they are brainwashed stoolheads -- or some of the above, or all of the above.

Some of us were paying attention to matters political and economic over the past 30-plus years. Deregulation was mainly a Republican idea, in all facets of the economy. The mantras were all very familiar: If you hamstring business to where it can't operate, everybody suffers; the free market is self-regulating anyway; competition will make the pie bigger for everyone. ...

There were Democrats, dating back to Jimmy Carter, who fell for all this and become accomplices. I can't blame them too much -- I'm all for leaving the market to do anything it can do better than the public sector, and that encompasses many things.

But recent evidence seems quite clear that finance and oil drilling are not strong suits for unfettered private sectors.

New Deal-era banking regulations (the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933) were rolled back by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Yes, President Bill Clinton did sign that bill -- he now acknowledges that to have been a mistake. Please note that the three legislators whose names were attached to the latter act -- led by the former Senate solon of kleptocracy, Phil Gramm of Texas -- were all Republicans.

Listening to Republicans talk now reminds me somewhat of the 1970s, when you could actually hear some of them blame the Vietnam War on the Democratic Party. Remember Bob Dole's remark during his vice presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1976, in which he talked about "Democrat wars"? I remember Barry Goldwater saying something to that effect as well.

Blaming Vietnam on Democrats is, historically, quite a stretch. Yes, they were in office during the 1965-68 escalation, and it was Cold War Democrats who crafted Vietnam policy. But was this against the opposition of Republicans?

Hardly. The main problem Republicans seemed to have with the Vietnam War was that, according to them, the U.S. wasn't fighting to win. They favored MORE aggressiveness, MORE escalation and MORE involvement, not less. With the lonely exceptions of Mark Hatfield in the Senate and Pete McClosky in the House, there were few high-profile Republican critics of the war -- only critics of its conduct. In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Goldwater even suggested that the use of "low-yield" nuclear weapons should be seriously considered. By 1968, it was the Democratic Party, not the Republicans, who were split up the middle over the war.

And, please recall that it was two Democratic senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who cast the only two votes in Congress against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Neither man saw his political career survive the decade.

Yes, Wall Street and the Gulf of Mexico are both a long way from Vietnam. But what is recalled is the Republican propensity to rewrite history for their own political purposes. To hear some of these people tell it, Barack Obama, with his 16 months in office, is largely responsible for the Gulf spill, for the Wall Street/subprime mortgage crackup, and for the Tate-LaBianca murders. And whatever he didn't do, Clinton and Carter did.

Let's see: Who was in office in 2005, when we saw BP's first big disaster, the explosion of the oil refinery at Texas City, Texas? Who didn't follow up with any advocacy of more stringent safety regulations of the oil industry, even after negligence on BP's part in the 2005 blast was so evident?

And, let's see: Who was in office when possible criminal prosecution of BP over a 2006 Alaska pipeline rupture was killed?

And, let's see again: Who was in office most of the time that the federal Minerals Management Service was supposed to be inspecting that Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf at least monthly, and failing to do it?

No, Republicans are not the exclusive owners of modern deregulation. But they were certainly the primary "architects" of it. And their anti-government rhetoric became a self-fulfilling prophesy: When you keep saying that government is the problem, that it can't do anything right, and then you put people of that philosophy in charge of what little regulation there is ... don't be surprised by the meltdowns. And, please don't blame it on those who sometimes just went along, in some cases reluctantly.

I'm reminded once more of something the late Molly Ivins wrote. It was something to the effect that when you deregulate something, you will often find out why it was regulated in the first place.

Republicans, enough revisionist history, please. At this time in history, we need to get busy cleaning up the messes. Obama seems willing to try, if you will let him. But so far, that hasn't seemed to be your inclination.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In
Texas.

Postscript: Please note that although this post is dated Saturday, May 15, it was not actually posted until Thursday, May 20. This discrepancy is the result of the saving of an earlier draft, and I don't think it will be worthwhile to go to the trouble of altering it.

Lewis Black On Glenn Beck And Nazi Tourette's: Yes, You Can See It Here, Too

Yeah, this has already been all over the Internet. I work at a job that makes it hard for me to stay right on the cutting edge of things. But something this good bears repeating. Once again, here's Lewis Black, discussing Glenn Beck's constant playing of the Nazi card, on Wednesday night's The Daily Show:



Vy haf zeh not come for me yet, ee-zer? I am vaiting ... -- MJ

BP Is Still Grappling With Its 2005 Texas City Disaster

By Manifesto Joe

While various officials try to sort out who's to blame for the environmental disaster, not to mention the deaths of 11 workers, in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time for a bit of context.

BP, the London-based multinational oil giant that's behind the huge Gulf oil spill, is still paying for a March 23, 2005 disaster. An explosion at a Texas City, Texas, refinery owned by BP killed 15 workers and injured 170. And investigations have repeatedly pointed to safety negligence on the part of BP leading up to that disaster.

Here's the U.S. Chemical Safety Board video on events leading up to the 2005 disaster:



To date, BP has been forced to pay over $1.6 billion in damages, fines and repairs for their gross negligence at Texas City. And litigation is still pending. A Wikipedia article details the company's persistent failure to heed or implement safety recommendations made as long as 14 years before the explosion.

And, BP is still fighting everything it can. It it challenging an $87 million OSHA fine, the largest in OSHA history, for failing to correct the hazards.

It appears, as usual, that nothing was really learned from history. BP continues to operate as a rogue multinational, with additional fatalities occurring at the Texas City refinery since the 2005 disaster.

From what we've been hearing from the kooky, phony-populist right wing and other sundry apologists for corporate greed, what we have here is failure to regulate. Such arguments are absurd beyond belief. I used to hold Warren Buffett in relatively high esteem for his modesty about his fortune and his sometimes progressive views. But he and his business partner, Charlie Munger, had the nerve to blame regulators for the duplicity of Goldman Sachs. And there are people who will consider lax regulators, not BP, to be primarily responsible for the current travesty in the Gulf.

This is like blaming the farmhand who fell asleep while the fox was pillaging the henhouse. Is the farmhand's ill-timed nap supposed to exonerate the fox of all guilt?

It's looking more and more like time to actually re-empower the regulators of capitalism, in all its facets. But that would require a sense of history that, so far, not many people seem to have.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas

At Last, An Explanation For Tea Party People ...

... And for Republicans in general. The Neanderthals walk among us. Here's the full story. -- MJ

Noam Chomsky: On The Depression And Revisionist History

I'm going to leave a link for those who want to read the entire article, which appears to have been from a recent Chomsky lecture. But this paragraph I found priceless.

... I left home for graduate studies at Harvard, where I had my first extensive experience with the elite intellectual world. On arrival, I went to the standard faculty-run party for incoming students and was regaled by a very distinguished philosopher with an account of the Depression - which, he assured me, had not taken place. It was a liberal fabrication. There were no rag-pickers coming to our door in desperation in the early '30s, no women workers being beaten by security forces while on strike at a textile factory that I passed on a trolley with my mother when I was about five, none of my unemployed working class relatives. A few businessmen might have suffered, but there was nothing beyond that.

I guess that means I never saw the more recent problems, either, like a solid crowded city block of dudes waiting for a few day-labor employers to drive up in their pickups. It didn't happen. I never saw it. Ever. -- MJ

Goldman Sachs Con Artists Belong In Jail

By Manifesto Joe

At Goldman Sachs, the internal e-mails belie the company's denials. McClatchy Newspapers reported yesterday that:

WASHINGTON -- In an internal e-mail released Saturday, Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein wrote in November 2007 that the firm "didn't dodge the mortgage mess," but "made more than we lost" by betting against the U.S. housing market.

Blankfein's e-mail, which a Senate investigations panel released with three other subpoenaed company documents, appears to contradict Goldman's denials that it profited from the subprime mortgage meltdown by secretly betting that housing prices would fall. At the same time, Goldman was selling tens of billions of dollars in risky mortgage securities.

Goldman has said that its contrary bets were largely on behalf of its clients.

The release of the documents sets the stage for a confrontation on Tuesday, when Blankfein and six other present and former Goldman executives are scheduled to testify to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which will begin revealing the results of a yearlong investigation.

Here's a link to the entire McClatchy article.

More from the story:

The disclosure comes a little more than a week after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman for civil fraud, accusing the firm and one of its vice presidents of allowing a long-time hedge fund client to help select the securities for a deal without telling the investors that the client planned to bet against the securities.

In America, the accused are innocent until proved guilty. Right now, this is just a civil case. But it looks more and more like certain officers of this corporation deliberately defrauded investors.

It would be such a pleasure to see these assholes doing the perp walk, on their way to someplace like The Tombs or Riker's Island, with bond set in the amounts that they defrauded from investors.

But alas, this is America, so I won't be holding my breath. Here, people that rich are especially innocent until proved guilty.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A Modest Proposal Of Barter For The Republican Party

By Manifesto Joe

I've been reading about a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada, and one who's being taken seriously (She's challenging Harry Reid), who suggests that one could use livestock to barter with your doctor for health care. Like, bring a chicken to your doctor.

Since we're talking about using livestock in the place of currency, I have a modest proposal for the Republican Party. Would they accept my pit bull terrier as a campaign contribution?

My pit bull terrier

I haven't asked him whether he's a Republican. But he's smarter than most of the Tea Party demonstrators, and he could be meaner in a fight. He's also housebroken.

One big problem is that he eats a lot. (Chicken is his favorite, by the way.) And, he's grown since this picture was taken. And, of course, they would have to pay for his rabies shots upon acceptance. And then there's the expense of obedience school ...

RNC, I await your response.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Teabonics: You Can't Fix Stupid, And Sadly, You Can't Keep It From Voting, Either

By Manifesto Joe

I hadn't heard about "teabonics" until the other day. There are Web sites dedicated to this new dialect of American right-wing culture.

Let's go linking:

No Amensty!

Even the copy desk at the Daily News saw this error!

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a socilist. (Or is it socialest?)

One of the big regrets of my life is that I didn't dedicate myself to larnin' a furrin lanaguage. I knows just enough Spanish to get myself into major trouble in Piedras Negras.

This hyar is clearly a fite for feedom. If I ever becomes a rich banker, I wants to charge them deadbeats a fee!

And now for something completely different...

I've been awfully busy lately. I have a night-shift job with a news organization, and it's demanding. But I try to keep up with things. The other day on one of the talking-heads TV shows on one of the cable news networks, they had a biker-looking dude who was there as a representative and spokesman of the Tea Party people.

He started his point by talking about middle-class Americans. He described these "typical" Americans as, say, a household bringing in $100,000 a year.

Hold the phone there, biker dude. Chain mail must be more profitable than I ever thought.

According to the U.S Census Bureau, the median household income in America is $52,000 a year. This man was describing a typical U.S. household as one making nearly twice that. Shit, if I were bringing that much dinero into my household, I would have absolutely no complaints and would pay my taxes gladly, hoping to get commensurate services.

This was a very revealing moment. What this is all about is ME ME ME. The profile of the typical Tea Party asshole is a white male, upper middle-class Republican, with just enough "education" to be dangerous. ("A little bit of education is a dangerous thing.") I suspect that this "education" generally consists of a lot of business administration courses. I had a couple of those during my 6-year acquaintance with the liberal arts, and if there's a place to be indoctrinated into right-wing, "free-market" misconceptions, that's where to find it.

Another revealing thing is that these people have no fundamental opposition to Social Security or Medicare. Either they or their parents have benefited from these "socilist" programs. But once more, this is obviously about ME ME ME.

These people have been vocal enough, and have shown up at enough rallies, to get themselves taken seriously by the MSM. Go back to the top and check out these links. These are the fortunate anthropoids of America. They have done just well enough, through dumbass luck, usually, to be dupes for the real elite. They are stupid enough to be the foot soldiers for people who have money stashed away in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

Such imbeciles have been overcome before. I seriously pray that it can happen again.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Nostalgia For 'Good' Demagogues: Remembering Huey P. Long

Demagogues are always dangerous. But once upon a time in America, at least they would sometimes fight for the well-being of ordinary struggling citizens. Louisiana Gov. and Sen. Huey P. Long (1893-1935) comes to mind.





If only Sarah Palin had done half as much for Alaska before becoming a national figure.

Standard Oil is running the state again, Kingfish. America needs you, not Sarah Palin. -- MJ

Michael Steele's Speech, And 29 Dead Miners, Illustrate What's Warped About U.S. Conservative Ideology

By Manifesto Joe

Forget the silliness about the bondage bar and other misspent donor money. I heard some of Michael Steele's speech yesterday to Republicans at the New Orleans conference, and he embodies everything that is screwed up about their way of thinking. You know, the kind of thinking that creates mining disasters.

What I heard was the good old American dream thing, which Mr. Steele has dredged up many times. He's made a career of it. I guess there's nothing really wrong with that, if your life has been like the plot line of a Horatio Alger novel. His life appears to have been thusly charmed. I'm sure he's worked hard, and of course he had to overcome the stigma of racism. But his personal journey seems to have left him with no understanding of what reality is like for most Americans, and perhaps especially fellow African-Americans.

The reason people come to America from all over the world, Steele told the Republican audience, is that this is supposed to be the one great place on Earth where the tentacles of big government are restrained. It's the place where people are free to become what they are capable of, through hard work and talent.

Nowhere to be heard on any Republican lectern are the many talented, hardworking folks out there who one day found themselves stuck in the middle of the pack, in large part because there simply isn't room at the top for everyone who fits that description.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, Mr. Steele, but folks like that still have to worry about things like keeping (or even having) health insurance, being laid off and left with a meager, unreliable public subsistence in the meantime, having your IRAs and 401(k) tank because of Wall Street malfeasance, etc., etc.

And then, there are those 29 dead West Virginia miners -- dead because they were all but forced to work in unsafe mining conditions, by a lack of area jobs, for an owner who has dedicated his life to busting unions and bitterly fighting government regulations that might have spared some lives.

Mr. Steele did all the perfunctory government-bashing in his speech. At no point did he seem to even think of those dead miners, who perished as a direct result of eight years of anti-government governing by the Il Doofus administration.

A government with proper and right regulatory powers could have saved lives. Instead, a fatcat named Don Blankenship, whom I'm certain agrees with every word of Steele's speech, can now waddle around and oink as though he has no miners' blood on his hands.

As you can see from this video link, Blankenship is an example of what results when you elevate swine to high stations in life. He acts mighty tough, with his bodyguard and all. He talks about a cameraman getting "shot." Blankenship wouldn't have to do it himself; he's got hired guns for that purpose, no doubt. I'd like to see fat boy up against one of the younger men in his coal mines. That's an asskicking I would enjoy seeing.

Granted, I've known people who ended up doing jobs like coal mining. The following was less true in earlier times, but people who end up in such jobs nowadays usually aren't the sharpest pencils in the box. Even in the region of West Virginia that they are from, the best and brightest tend to perform well at the poor-to-mediocre schools in such places, then probably get out of Coaltown to go to a university and eventually some job that won't give them black lung.

Even they, the best and the brightest from such circumstances, generally start out in life with so many handicaps that they often do well just to make it into the middle of the pack. And, where they are from, they are the lucky ones. Brains and decent health both come to us at the whim of genetics. Those who lack one or the other -- there but for the grace of God go any of us.

When I hear someone talking the sort of talk I was hearing from Mr. Steele yesterday, I instinctively check to see if I've still got my wallet.

And if Don Blankenship were in a room with me, I'd keep my hand on it every second until he and everyone around him left.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Sign Of The Times: Company Has Gotten Rich Helping Employers Fight Jobless Claims

By Manifesto Joe

A St. Louis-based company has gotten rich, and is getting richer, one of the old-fashioned ways: They profit off other people's misfortunes.

The Talx Corp. reportedly handles over 30 percent of the nation's unemployment claims, with a list of corporate clients that, The New York Times says, "reads like a roster of Fortune 500 firms."

How does this company handle jobless claims? Well, it helps the erstwhile employer fight every one it possibly can, for a fee. It's like the hired gun in Shane, famously played by Jack Palance, who is brought to town by the cattle baron to kill off a few homesteaders, with the expectation that the rest will soon turn yellow and leave the valley.

Here's a link to the entire NYT online report.

Of course, they don't prevent everybody from getting unemployment benefits. But Talx is paid to shoot first and ask questions later. They make a basic policy of contesting anything and everything, creating disastrous delays. In a certain number of cases, the would-be claimants do indeed become discouraged by the legal roadblocks, and just quit. A certain percentage of the "homesteaders" do turn yellow, and that is just what the Talx Corp.'s clients in Corporate America are betting on.

Even when the claimants doggedly hang on and eventually get their bare subsistence in benefits, the delays can bring on catastrophes. Check out the part of the NYT article on one former Walmart employee. He eventually won, but the legal maneuvering cost him plenty. He had to give up his apartment and move in with his sister.

So, how do Talx employees sleep at night, knowing, as they surely must, that they are deliberately undermining a crucial strand of the already-meager U.S. social safety net?

The NYT reporter wouldn't ask that, of course, even if the company had authorized anyone to talk to the paper. But I've often wondered that about folks like, say, insurance adjusters as well. I assume that they are paid well enough to afford plenty of Ambien and/or single-malt Scotch.

With a big recession upon us, the tide may be turning. Talx has been raking it in this way for eight years, but the courts and a few states led by Wisconsin have taken action to curb some of the abuses.

In hard times, the American people need a populist champion to step up and lead the fight against this amoral corporate hired gun.

Shane, come back.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Republican National Committee Spent Nearly $2,000 On Topless Bondage Bar

By Manifesto Joe

Here's the latest on the party of "family values." That is, if your family consists of 50-year-old right-wing skanks who love to be flogged by dominatrixes while wearing diapers.

This is from McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — Under fire from both right and left, the Republican National Committee is investigating how and why it spent nearly $2,000 for "meals" at a bondage-themed strip club in West Hollywood featuring topless dancers simulating lesbian sex.

The party confirmed Monday that it reimbursed a California consultant for $1,946 spent at Voyeur, a high-end bar/lounge that's described on one Web site as "classic slutty" where "you might not be completely shocked at the almost naked women writhing on each other, but you will undoubtedly be in awe."

Here's the whole story, if I get the link html right this time.

And here's yet another link.

GOP: Dancing With the Whores?

My wife, morally a very conventional person, has opined in irreverent moments that there's nothing wrong with these right-wing pickle butts that a couple of weeks with a good whore wouldn't cure. I suspect that recent revelations have proved her theory wrong. I think such experience has long been there, and it hasn't yielded good results yet.

According to jezebel.com, Republicans and nerds (am I being redundant?) make the best customers for those practicing the oldest profession. Here's a link there.

On the Question of David Vitter

Mr. Vitter is a U.S. senator from Louisiana who is running for re-election in 2010. According to his Wikipedia bio:

In early July 2007, Vitter's phone number was included in a published list of phone records of Pamela Martin and Associates, a company owned and run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, also known as the "D.C. Madam", convicted by the U.S. government for running a prostitution service. Hustler identified the phone number and contacted Vitter's office to ask about his connection to Palfrey.[21][22] The following day, Vitter issued a written statement:

“ This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible. Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there — with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.[23] ”

The statement containing Vitter's apology said his telephone number was included in phone records dating from his days as a member of the House of Representatives.[10] Phone records show that Vitter's number was called by Palfrey's service five times, the first on October 12, 1999, and the last on February 27, 2001.[24] Two calls were placed while House roll call votes were in progress.[25][26]

On July 16, 2007, after a week of self-imposed seclusion, Vitter emerged and called a news conference. Standing next to his wife, Vitter asked the public for forgiveness. Following Vitter's remarks, Wendy Vitter, his wife, spoke. Both refused to answer any questions.[27][28][29]

As background, several news outlets reported that in May 1999, Vitter replaced Congressman Bob Livingston after Livingston resigned due to an adultery scandal.[5][30][31] Vitter said about Livingston's decision to resign, "It's obviously a tremendous loss for the state. I think Livingston's stepping down makes a very powerful argument that Clinton should resign as well and move beyond this mess", referring to Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal.[32]

Oh, and by the way, Vitter has also been named as a client of New Orleans prostitutes when he was home. He reportedly liked for the hookers to make him wear diapers.

Damn, all this kinky shit makes me feel so straight-laced. I thought it was liberal Democrats who were supposed to be sleazy!

That leads me to a thought I've had a few times: Repression only represses; it doesn't eliminate the thought. I think right-wingers often grow up in homes that repress sexuality, and we're merely seeing what tends to emerge from that milieu when the people decide to "act out."

So, the next time you hear somebody call Obama a socialist, don't just think in terms of ideological foolishness. But -- it probably wouldn't be wise, either, to ask this Republican what color of silk panties he's wearing.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

With Health Care And Appointments, Obama Has Told GOP: I'm Not Jimmy Carter

By Manifesto Joe

I hope he's not LBJ, either, with the two foreign quagmires he inherited from Il Doofus. But he seems to have put the Republicans on well-deserved notice. He genuinely tried to work with them, and they are quite determined not to let it happen.

So, Obama decided to use the current congressional recess to put through 15 stalled appointments that are holding up the wheels of government. Here's the story from Yahoo! News.

The Republicans are, ironically, braying like jackasses about this, even after they have threatened the filibuster in many unprecedented ways to hold up routine nominations. I think they need to reconsider their choice of animal mascots. The elephant is a noble creature, famous for its memory. Nothing could be further from the current Republican reality.

Jimmy Carter is arguably the best former U.S. president -- a man unquestionably ethical, and of very high intelligence. Unfortunately, he wasn't prepared for the kind of partisan games he encountered in Washington, perhaps because of his lack of experience in the Beltway. He will always wear the albatross of "ineffectual" in retrospectives on his presidency. I think Obama, after a sincere period of bipartisan efforts, has concluded that this is not going to be the way to get things done in the current climate.

I worried about Obama at first, and confess that I voted for Hillary Clinton in the March 2008 Democratic primary here largely because of concern about Obama's relative inexperience. It would appear though, that a few years in the Senate, plus the expert background in constitutional law, prepared him much better than widely expected.

He hasn't delivered entirely on the promise, but something is better than nothing. I'll take something.

Hit 'em again, Barry.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

It's Hard To Imagine, But Somehow The Republicans Just Seem To Get More Stupid

By Manifesto Joe

If there was ever a time NOT to do this, this is exactly it. But, it's probably very good, in the vast scheme of things, that today's Republicans are not exactly masters of timing.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., decided here and now, of all times, to use his authority to block a bill and hold up jobless benefits for a lot of desperate people out there. Here's the story.

My hopes and dreams for this country are somehow, in the long run, renewed. As ineffectual as Democrats have been, and for so long -- when they have pathetic cretins like this as their opposition, that is encouraging.

More on Coburn, by the way -- one of his "amendments" to the health care bill was to deny coverage of Viagra for rapists. Yep, that's sure going to stop a lot of rapes. Great that we have such moralists as Sen. Coburn up there at bat for us.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

If You Needed Any More Proof That Many Republicans Are Contemptable Goons ...

By Manifesto Joe

I confess that I own a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook (1971). It's an interesting curiosity of the time. There's even a section on hand-to-hand combat that offers good tips for anyone who might find himself/herself facing a younger, stronger opponent.

But I own a copy of that book, as I said, mainly just as a curiosity of the period. I have firm moral convictions against the needless taking of life.

It appears that many of our "friends" on the political right wing, right now, do not share such convictions. The thugs and kooks who comprise much of the grassroots support for the Republican Party have responded to the passage of watered-down health care reform by smashing windows, making death threats, sending envelopes with white powder in them, making the ugliest phone calls imaginable, etc., etc.

Here's a rundown of what's been happening since the passage of health care "reform," with focus on a facedown between bellowing Fox "News" telegoon Bill O'Reilly and Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

On the right, there have been specious comparisons of these extreme reactions to those on the far left during the Vietnam War era. I'm old enough to remember the differences. The far left of 40 years ago was considered, and treated as, a lunatic fringe. Not so with Tea Partiers -- the Republicans have courted and encouraged them. Now, "suddenly," they're a problem, and the so-called mainstream of the GOP isn't sure what to do with them.

But they're still trying to spin the incidents to their advantage. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the second-ranking House Republican, accused Democrats of trotting out the various threats and vandalism to their political advantage -- "fanning the flames" was how he put it.

Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of such pigshit. Who the hell has been "fanning the flames" of the Tea Party bozos since they got started?

Keep it up, Republicans. We real, working Americans might even be able to get a public option soon if you do.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

GOP = Grand Old Psychoputzes: Poll Says 24% of Republicans Think Obama May Be The Anti-Christ

By Manifesto Joe

That's according to a newly released Harris Poll. That's right -- nearly one-fourth of Republicans in the sample think President Barack Obama may be the anti-Christ.

Where's the theme from The Twilight Zone when you need it?

Here's the story -- from The Raw Story.

Among the other responses: Two-thirds of Republicans think Obama is a socialist. Some 57 percent think he's a Muslim. And, 45 percent agree with Birthers that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and therefore isn't qualified to be president.

I will concede that, during my years as a progressive/liberal blogger, I have seen examples of kookiness on the far left. But I've also noticed that it generally occurs in a very tiny "out-there" fringe group. Among Republicans, we're talking about 2 out of 3 who are so ignorant and/or psychotic that they told pollsters that they think Obama is a socialist. The genuine socialists out there have gotten good laughs out of that one. For those who might be reading this from a contrasting view, please pick up a Webster's dictionary and look up the definition of the word "socialism."

It's hard to gauge whether this is a product of ignorance or some sort of mass lunacy. I think it's some of both. John Avlon of The Daily Beast, who has written extensively about the Republican lunatic fringe, wrote about this survey:

The poll, which surveyed 2,230 people right at the height of the health-care reform debate, also clearly shows that education is a barrier to extremism. Respondents without a college education are vastly more likely to believe such claims, while Americans with college degrees or better are less easily duped. It's a reminder of what the 19th-century educator Horace Mann once too-loftily said: "Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge."

OK, so a hell of a lot of these people are simply old-fashioned dumbshits. It reflects the vintage John Stuart Mill thought: Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

But there are some eerie parallels to other times and places where a sort of mass madness has occurred. I seldom watch Fox "News," because it's bad for my blood pressure. But when I've watched it, it looks a lot like a far-right version of what Soviet state TV must have looked like to the people of the former Soviet Union. It's a version of "facts" that's absolutely through the looking glass, and darkly. Yet, I've been in situations like in hospitals, convenience stores, etc., where the TV authorities had nothing but Fox "News" on, 24/7.

People are being indoctrinated in this manner each and every day. And not all of them are classically stupid, or bad people. Members of my wife's extended family are almost all Republicans. Many have good hearts. Where their heads are is another matter. Some do indeed believe that Obama is a Muslim, and that the Democratic Party has been dominated by "socialists" ever since the New Deal. And, if the poll results from Harris are a good indicator, they believe many other mentally disturbed propositions as well.

Mass stupidity, sadly, has always been with us. Mass madness comes and goes. I'm very worried that we're in one of those mass-madness periods. I really hope I'm wrong.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Thank You, Democrats: Health Care Reform Passes, 219-212 And 220-211

By Manifesto Joe

No, it's not the bill I would have wanted. I've advocated universal single-payer for decades. But, thanks to 220 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives (first cast as 219, with 220 on a companion bill), soon I probably won't have to worry about losing my health insurance if my employer were to lay me off.

Nor will I have to worry about being turned down for any new insurance because of my pre-existing conditions. Nor will I have to worry about a dollar limit on my coverage.

As I've said before, something is better than nothing. True, there will be no public option, so the mega-insurers will continue to siphon 30 percent of premiums for "administrative costs." They certainly don't stand to lose anything from this deal. But soon, there will probably be certain ruthless things that they cannot legally do, and that represents progress.

There may be more good developments now that action on the bill has gone this far:

It's clear now that the Tea Partiers are largely racist, homophobic goons.

For those who didn't read the reports, on Saturday, a Tea Party protester in Washington spat on Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., and Tea Partiers chanted the n-word repeatedly at Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Lewis, who was brutally beaten during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, said he had not heard or seen anything like that since the bad old days. Tea Partiers also shouted "faggot" and "homo" at Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.

The next day, as the House vote neared, Tea Party leaders tried to distance their "movement" from such behavior. But the general silliness couldn't all be contained. Some Tea Partiers suggested that the incidents didn't occur, were fabricated by the black congressmen, or that Democrats had placed plants in the crowds to stir people up.

It's possible that such behavior isn't representative of Tea Partiers -- but not probable. There have been a number of past incidents, such as one recent episode captured on video in which Tea Partiers taunted a man apparently suffering from Parkinson's disease, telling him, "No more handouts!" and such.

The Tea Party "movement" looks more and more like a bowel movement to me. Let's just hope that eventually our system has the plumbing to dispose of such excrement.

Kooks and thugs aren't just on the streets. Some of them are House members.

This just in from Yahoo! News:

Last night, as the clock approached midnight and the long House debate on health care reform was finally winding down, Rep. Bart Stupak stepped to the microphone on the floor of the chamber to deliver his remarks. As the famously anti-abortion congressman was denouncing a measure to kill the deal he'd struck earlier in the day for President Obama to issue an executive order reiterating that no federal funds would pay for abortions, a voice suddenly shouted "Baby killer!"

Today, after a flurry of media questions about the identity of the shouter, GOP Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer stepped forward as the offending shouter—though he stipulated he actually shouted, "It's a baby killer," in reference to the unamended health care bill, and has since apologized to Stupak for any suggestion that he personally was responsible for the killing of babies. Neugebauer's confession will help speed the episode's exit from the news cycle—particularly once President Obama signs the health care bill into law and Congress moves on to fresh controversies. But the "Baby killer furor" highlights a far more serious, long-term political dilemma for the Republicans: how to appear to be a respectable Party capable of governing while also providing political shelter for the highly motivated, though vocally disruptive, protest wing of the party associated with the Tea Party movement.

Here's the complete story.

It would appear that the childish arrogance of South Carolina's Joe "You Lie" Wilson wasn't necessarily an aberration.

Another of Texas' many GOP tantrum-throwers, Rep. Joe Barton, predicted that this bill won't last. I'm old enough to recall similar forecasts about Medicare and Medicaid from the 1960s. I'm not old enough to remember those about Social Security from the 1930s, but the Republicans of the time largely said the same kind of things.

This is just one battle, not the war. Now it's got to pass the Senate and get to Obama's desk before some psychopath shoots him. Then the Democrats are going to have to successfully run on this in the fall. If the Grand Old Putzes manage to regain control of the House and make big gains in the Senate, they may try to block funding for this bill. At least that's what former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney suggested during a recent Dallas stop on his book tour.

But, history was made Sunday night -- and the right kind of history, for a change. As ineffectual as Democrats have been over the past four decades, they've mostly been on the right side of socioeconomic issues in this country for at least a century. Wanna guess who's mostly been on the wrong side?

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Let's Buy Hannity And O'Reilly Blackboards And Have Proof That They're Crazy, Too

By Manifesto Joe

Glenn Beck plays the crying game, from multiple perspectives:







Keith Olbermann is in the habit of calling Glenn "Lonesome Rhodes." (For those unfamiliar, "Lonesome" is an Arkansas hayseed who rises to TV talk-show fame and soon becomes a megalomaniac, played superbly by Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd (1957).)

I'm a bit worried that he's more like a fascist version of psycho TV anchorman Howard Beale in Network (1976). Beck has made the comparison himself. I'm not making it in any flattering manner. Is he or ain't he nuts? And which way is he more dangerous? We report. You decide.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

History Is Written By The Winners: Texas Schoolbook Flap Nothing New

By Manifesto Joe

The old story goes like this: In Texas in the late 1940s, two Hispanic men walk into a restaurant and sit, waiting to order. The wait person comes up and tells them, "We don't serve Mexicans."

One of the men replies, "I don't want to eat a Mexican."

Thankfully, it's been illegal since 1964 for Texas restaurants to exclude Hispanics. Not so, however, with our state's public-school textbooks.

On Friday, the State Board of Education, now dominated by "conservatives," voted 10-5 to preliminarily adopt a social studies curriculum that, according to the dissenting minority, fails to recognize the achievements of minorities in Texas history.

Among other things, the board rejected a proposal to have the books mention that Hispanics were among the fallen heroes of the famous 1836 siege of the Alamo. That doesn't seem like much to ask -- I recall that Seguin, a town in the South Texas region where I'm from, is named after Juan Seguin, one of the great Hispanic heroes of the Texas Revolution. There were others besides him, and the men at the Alamo.

Things got a little ugly the day before. One of the minority members of the board, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, walked out of the session Thursday, accusing her fellow board members of "whitewashing" the social studies standards.

"I'm leaving," Berlanga told The Associated Press. "We can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist."

One place I'm not going to go is -- how Texas became part of the U.S. It's often been characterized as an outright theft from Mexico. Judging from what all I've read, it was a multifaceted, messy clash between two cultures that would have produced grievances had it gone either way.

The point is, one of the basic facts pushed by the minority board members is that there were quite notably Hispanics among those who rebelled against the dictatorship of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Refusing to recognize them does indeed seem like a cheesy, Anglocentric whitewash.

When I think of all the cities, towns, rivers and such here with Hispanic names -- San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Amarillo, San Angelo, Agua Dulce, Port Lavaca, Gonzales, Del Rio, Palacios, Padre Island, the Rio Grande, the Brazos River, etc., it leaves no doubt as to the huge imprint that Hispanic culture has had here. Our indigenous cuisine, known as Tex-Mex, is a blend of food from two cultures. Yet, the whitewash continues. The "English only" movement is alive and well, and there remain many "Minutemen" chapters who have immigrants with Hispanic surnames in the crosshairs.

But, sadly, this is nothing really new. "History" by omission has left gaps in Texas schoolbooks for generations.

In high school, my best subject was history. I won two academic awards, and placed out of 6 college hours of U.S. history by taking a CLEP test. Yet, I've learned more history in some ways through independent adult reading than I ever did in school. To wit:

-- The U.S. basically picked a needless fight with Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and seized the European country's colonies. A "pacification" of the indigenous population followed in the Philippines, one which, during the first years of the 20th century, led to the deaths of about 1 million Filipinos. The Turkish slaughter of Armenians about a decade later is often referred to as the first great genocide of the 20th century. Wrong -- that describes what the U.S. did to the Philippines years before. None other than Mark Twain was a leader of the opposition to the "pacification." "Thirty thousand killed a million," referring to the size of the U.S. military force and their victims, was a slogan of the opposition.

-- Now we get into an area long known to CIA insiders as "blowback." The former Spanish colony of Cuba became an American puppet state for decades. The U.S. turned the island into a big plantation/casino/whorehouse, at the expense of the indigenous population, and then acted shocked, shocked, when communist rebels overthrew the Batista regime and remain in control 51 years later. Hey, how did that happen?

-- The U.S. had a long history in Nicaragua before the modern Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. The Somoza family led a succession of puppet governments for decades after American soldiers chased Sandino and his rebels around the Central American countryside. Our Marines were down there so many times, they should have just renamed the place Camp LeJeune South.

-- In Iran, the CIA, with a contingent led by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, overthrew a legitimate nationalist government in 1953 and set the Shah back up in power. In 1979, the situation blew up in "our" faces, and a militant anti-American government has been in power there ever since. Hey, how did that happen, too?

I could go on, but that would make this post too long. Suffice it to say that "official" history has always been written by the "winners," or at least the majority. The real stories are often only available from unofficial sources. Those who have somehow managed to learn better, well -- they shouldn't be the least bit surprised that it's still going on.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.