I post this because I think it is rather telling - and accurate - in detailing how far out, and how far gone the leaders and policy makers of what has become the modern GOP have become. As someone who was raised steeped in conservative traditions, and a supporter of them, I find this kind of intellectual dishonesty (or perhaps simply stupidity?) exhibited by modern so-called “conservatives” (”reactionaries” is a much more accurate description) to be truly disturbing.

And I’m certainly not interested in getting into some kind of argument about how the members of both the two corporate parties distort the historical record in order to make cheap political points for themselves. Regardless of the distaste I may have for what passes for the Democratic party today (and yes, it is the Democratic party, not “Democrat party), trying to generate some kind of false equivalency between them and the GOP by saying “They do it, too!” simply doesn’t wash in the grand picture of things. Plus, there is nothing as lamely irrelevant as resorting to the “they do it, too” argument as a defense against one’s own transgressions, particularly of the intellectual and ethical kinds.

This piece has a whole host of some gems of disinformation, and even outright propaganda. Particularly surprising is the extent of selective forgetting being pushed by the Right today regarding September 11. Arguments over the merits of the New Deal certainly can be engaged in by those with intellectual integrity. But when those arguments are also encouraged by the same people who want to write Thomas Jefferson out of American history books, and push arguments about how slavery really wasn’t all that bad, then Houston, we’ve got a problem. Extra kudos to this author for bringing up one of America’s foremost quack historians, David Barton. Barton is to American history what biolgist Trofim Lysenko was to Soviet agriculture.

1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery
2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal
3. Forgetting September 11?
4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History”
5. The New Deal did harm
6. David Barton
7. Texas Textbook Revisions
8. Jim Crow wasn’t that bad

Conservatives’ view of history is either a warm, patriotic tale of American exceptionalism or a tale of Big Government oppression. It glides over or misrepresents progressive triumphs like the New Deal or Great Society and ignores unpleasant episodes like the Jim Crow era. Only studying the United States’ “best hits” ignores the contributions of minorities, labor and other groups.

“Historians constantly challenge each other, and understandings of the past evolve (for whatever reason),” William Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, told The Nation. “But these people are different in that they aren’t really reality-based and don’t have much standing or credibility among scholars.”

For American youth—particularly those subjected to revised textbooks in Texas—the political revision of history may have important consequences. Imagine a future when children know about the contributions of Phyllis Schlafly but not César Chávez, have heard of the “Reagan Revolution” but not the Bush recession. “It can pollute the educational process,” Link said. “A good education involves a search for truth and understanding. To an extraordinary degree you have to validate what you say with evidence…. that’s the accepted professional standard.”

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John Adams, not my favorite American President (Alien & Sedition Acts, anyone?), but he certainly had his redeeming points. Particularly his astute observations as detailed in this piece by Andrew Trees…

“Swilling the planters with bumbo” was what it was once called — the Colonial American tradition of treating voters with gifts during election campaigns, particularly plying them with rum (including a concoction known as bumbo). Virtually everyone who could afford the practice did it, including George Washington, who served 160 gallons of rum to roughly 400 voters during the 1758 campaign for the Virginia House of Burgesses. Needless to say, this was a prohibitively expensive way to campaign, and it meant that politics was largely the preserve of the rich.

I was reminded of this phrase when a recent Center for Responsive Politics study of 2009 data found that 261 of the 535 members of Congress were millionaires (this probably understates the actual number because members of Congress aren’t required to report their homes as assets). When looking at both houses together, the legislators weighed in with a hefty median income of $911,000. For the Senate alone, median income was an astounding $2.38 million. This is not too shabby when the median household income in America is roughly $50,000.

In other words, politics has increasingly been turned over to the wealthy.

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This unfortunate trend of the wealthy monopolizing higher office shows no sign of slowing. Election financing laws continue to erode, and income disparities seem likely to grow for the foreseeable future.

John Adams railed against this development more than two centuries ago. At the time, the prevailing view was that government positions should pay little, if any, salary so that only men with virtuous intentions would fill them. But Adams pointed out that this so-called solution did not ensure the election of virtuous men, only the election of rich men. Simply paying a reasonable salary, he argued, was “one of the best securities of liberty and equality.”

Adams’ great fear was that we would have what he called “an aristocratic despotism”: the possibility of “the rich, the well born and the able acquir[ing] an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense.” In typical fashion, his judgment of that aristocracy was unstinting in its harshness. He wrote of “the weakness, the folly, the pride, the vanity, the selfishness, the artifice, the unbounded ambition, the unfeeling cruelty of a majority of those (in all nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence.”

Over time, most Americans came to agree with Adams, and that is why public office now comes with a regular salary, health benefits and all those other attributes we associate with most jobs (ironically, those benefits are becoming increasingly rare for nongovernment employees).

With the modern return of the practice of “swilling the planters with bumbo,” though, we now find ourselves in a new age of aristocratic despotism. You need only study income distribution over the last quarter of a century to see that the nation’s policies have been slanted overwhelmingly in favor of the rich. Between 1979 and 2004, the after-tax income for the top 1% skyrocketed 176%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. How did the bottom fifth do? They squeezed out a measly 6% gain.

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J. Ward Regan, professor of history and philosophy at NYU, delivers one of the best presentations ever on Thomas Paine, his importance to the founding of America, and his essential relevance to the politics of today. Regan also deconstructs the co-option of Paine’s legacy by modern political forces that represent ideologies that Paine abhorred.

This is one of the best articles written on the Tea Party movement in America today.

As those who were following UnCommon Sense TV during the early years of the program, know that my colleague Ed Lacy and I were outspoken in our advocacy for reinvigorating the original premise of American revolutionary principles, utilizing the original 13-star “Betsy Ross” flag from the Revolution and the Bennington flag as our backdrop motif, and even displayed the Gadsden flag (the now-increasingly displayed yellow banner featuring Benjamin Franklin’s snake design with the exhortation “Don’t Tread On Me”). We were even proposing the need for a new Boston Tea Party, though this time throwing Goldman Sachs banking statements, Monsanto bioengineered seeds, NewsCorp paraphernalia and the like into the harbor.

However, this time the global corporate imperial powers that need to be resisted were no longer located in London, but are now using American governmental apparatus as a protective agent. It is sadly ironic, and even tragic, that the original Tea Party, an act of anti-corporate vandalism to protest imperial tyranny, is now being invoked as a symbol for a political movement in the service of global corporate interests. The American Revolution, if it was about anything, was a rebellion against the idea that government should be a tool to confer privilege on insiders. The modern so-called “Tea Party” movement is serving as *a* tool for those privileged insiders to use the government for just that very purpose.

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen, and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilizations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

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Most of these bodies call themselves “free-market thinktanks”, but their trick, as (Astro)Turf Wars points out, is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt. The thinktanks that the Kochs have funded devise the game and the rules by which it is played; Americans for Prosperity coaches and motivates the team.

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The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ‘emergency supplemental’. A nine-year ‘emergency’.

Let’s show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.

Tell Congress that you support ‘The War Is Making You Poor Act’.

Go to http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

The right-wing has been opposing Jefferson since the election of 1800. They may finally have their say with Texas history books, writing him out of the picture entirely. This whole affair is quite disturbing, though one can hardly find it surprising. Americans have, on a whole, never been overly interested in history (particularly their own that did not reiterate certain popular national mythos). And now, in our hyper-ideological, fact-free political landscape, we’re descending to this.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

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The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

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While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens.

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Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

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A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, who the questioner said “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government.”

Armey ridiculed the very suggestion.

“Widely regarded by whom?” he asked. “Today’s modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton.”

Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt.

In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia, others at the constitutional convention “thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government.”

Many more interesting points of reference made within this article. Read it in full Here

This is sad. Did you know Obama is going to ban fishing in the United States? The Tea Partiers are rightly concerned about the criminal class taking this country for a ride, but I’ve got to ask where have they been the last eight years before the Obama administration? The pervasive influence of Faux News at work again. One should never underestimate the power of propaganda in a modern, technological society.

Wow. Henry Giroux keeps getting to the point in ways that elude most analysis one sees these days. This is a bit of a tour de force in and of itself, and is highly recommended reading for all, though with people’s attention spans these days, its hard to conceive of folks getting past the first paragraph of anything anymore.

In a robust aspiring democratic society, language along with critical thought have a liberating function. At best, they work together to shatter illusions, strengthen the power of reason and critical judgment and provide the codes and framing mechanisms for human beings to exercise a degree of self-determination, while holding the throne of raw governmental, military and economic power accountable.

Language in such a society is robust, engaged, critical, dialectical, historical and creates the conditions for dialogue, thoughtfulness and informed action. Such a language refuses to be co-opted in the service of marketing goods, personalities and sleazy corporations. Needless to say, it is a language that is troubling and almost always threatening to the guardians of the status quo. As Toni Morrison said in another context, this is a language, a way of reading and writing the world, that “can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace … [that makes visible] the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”

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If successful, the language of oppression and cruelty becomes normalized, removed from the sphere of criticism and the culture of questioning. Such a language does more than normalize ignorance, illiteracy and irrationality; it also produces a kind of psychic hardening and deep-rooted pathology in a society increasingly willing to eliminate the policies that enable social bonds and protections necessary for a substantive democracy….

This language of cruelty, a zombie-inspired discourse of sorts, has been given a new life within the last few decades as it has become the lingua franca of powerful American politicians, corporations, and many in the dominant media. And it is mobilized to both dismantle the liberating function of critical reason and to stifle criticisms of a society that appears to be adrift. Such a discourse turns hate-talk into a commodity and human suffering into a spectacle.

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There certainly is a lot of hoopla swirling about regarding the recently passed health care reform legislation. Sorry to rain on the parade, but I’m afraid this bill isn’t nearly what many think it is, or is going to do what many hope. The bill is a short term balm for a few of the more egregious symptoms afflicting our highly dysfunctional health care system at the expense of actually treating the disease. I could go into detail, but Chris Hedges sums up the core problems pretty well here…

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: “This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?” Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get? 

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The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care-$7,129 per capita-although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have risen by 480 percent.

Some people are saying that “yes, we know it isn’t nearly all it needs to be, but it’s a step.” A step, but in which direction? You don’t solve a problem by solidifying the very institutional structure that is the cause of that same problem in the first place. It is similar to how this adminstration has been addressing the economic problems we face, by pursuing policies which financially reward the very actors who have been the instrumental cause of them of them in the first place. He now pushes “health care reform” (when what we really need is health insurance reform), by making sure that the institutions at the systemic center of the problem are amply rewarded and that their business models are preserved.

Enjoy your legally-mandated subsidization of private insurance corporations everyone!

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