Bonzie Bean Blog

In 1946, Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist fluent in German, was assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. The following year, his Nuremberg Diary was published, containing transcripts of his conversations with the prisoners. (Excerpts here).

In words consistent with what I have read of, and about, Gustav Gilbert, he is portrayed in the 2000 TV film Nuremberg, as telling the Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alex Baldwin): “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

“Absence of empathy” is likewise, I submit, “the one characteristic that connects” most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as “conservatism,” and which I choose to call “regressivism.” “Absence of empathy” is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich.

In contrast, empathy, the capacity to recognize and cherish in other persons, the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself, is the moral cornerstone of progressive politics. It is a principle recognized and taught in all the great world religions, reiterated by numerous moral philosophers, and validated by the scientific study of human personality.

Empathy is the foundation of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In that most-quoted New Testament verse, the golden rule, Jesus said: “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” (Luke 6:31, also Matthew 7:2). Also, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39, also Leviticus 19;18). Both commandments imply recognition in others of the human dignity and worth that one recognizes in oneself. In a word, empathy.

The golden rule is echoed in the moral teachings of Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And as Mohamed taught in his last sermon, “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” (Mohamed, last sermon). And Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, taught “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.”

And yet, how much empathy is to be found among self-proclaimed “Christian” end-times preachers, such as James Hagee and Tim LeHaye, who eagerly anticipate “the rapture” and the eternal torment and damnation that awaits virtually all of humanity, as punishment for the sin of failing to agree with the preachers’ theology? How much empathy is evident in the late Jerry Falwell’s on-air remark to Wolf Blitzer, about Islamic militants, “If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord,” and Ann Coulter’s infamous outburst, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Because they explicitly renounce Jesus’ injunction to “love thy enemies” these hate-mongers are, in a literal and moral sense, “anti-Christs.”

Regressivism and the Absence of Empathy

Empathy is conspicuously absent in the off-hand remarks of George Bush, his family, and his political allies. For example,

• Bush himself, to an ordinary citizen after a campaign event: “Who cares what you think?” And to Bob Woodward: “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
• The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” (March 18, 2003).
• Dick Cheney, in an exchange with ABC reporter, Martha Raddatz:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say [the Iraq War] is not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No….

• John McCain: “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” And in response to the news that cigarettes are a major US export to Iran, McCain remarked that it might be “a way of killing ‘em.”
• Former Senator Phil Gramm, economic advisor to John McCain, in an interview with the Washington Times, remarked that the American economy is in “a mental recession.: “We’ve sort of become a nation of whiners,” he added.

The foundational doctrines of regressivism are equally devoid of empathy. For example, Ayn Rand: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.. the process of setting man free from men.” (The Fountainhead) And “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (The Virtue of Selfishness)

Furthermore, “economic Man” (Homo economicus), a central concept of neo-classical economic theory favored by regressives, is an uncompromising egoist, whose sole motivation is to “maximize personal utility” or “preference satisfaction.” A “perfect market” of fully informed, non-colluding, uncoerced “economic men,” free of government interference, the theory tells us, will invariably produce better results for all than any governmental system yet devised. Never mind that “economic man” and “the perfect market” are fictions, that never have been and never can be realized in any human society. (For a defense of this claim, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality”).

The unfounded yet undiminished right-wing faith in the “wisdom” of the free-market and in the superiority of the pursuit of individual “utility maximization” as the engine of social progress, was starkly summed up by “Gordon Gekko” (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie, Wall Street: “Greed … is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

In fact, history teaches us that greed is not good, and greed does not work. Homo economicus is, in fact, a moral monster, for he is a being devoid of empathy and even of conscience. A mere bundle of “consumer preferences” can not add up to personhood, much less moral agency. When greed (call it “the profit motive”) reigns supreme, “others,” be they employees or fellow citizens, are reduced to impersonal objects. If these “others” are employees, they are regarded as units of “human capital” to be replaced by less costly “units” (e.g. “outsourced”) whenever possible. And if they are fellow citizens, they are prospective customers, to be relieved through “creative marketing” of their disposable wealth. Human, social, environmental “external costs” be damned. Witness the tobacco industry.

A “society” of private, egoistic, “utility maximizers,” devoid of empathy and unregulated by law and popular government, without shared values, loyalties and aspirations, is no society at all. It is a Hobbesian state of nature – a “war of all against all,” wherein life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹

As we are now discovering, to our great regret and sorrow.

Progressivism and Empathy

In stark contrast, empathy — awareness of the needs, sufferings, aspirations, rights, and dignity of others — is the unifying theme of the progressive agenda, and of the history of political/economic liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word). The elite and wealthy delegates to the Continental Congress, when they demanded recognition of their rights, did not fail at that time to acknowledge the rights of all persons:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

True, at the outset the full “rights” of citizenship were restricted to white, male, landowners. But through time and constant struggle, those rights were extended to include all adult citizens, regardless of gender, race or creed. These struggles, which continue today, were led by “liberals,” and resisted by self-described “conservatives.”

Joe Conason eloquently describes these struggles and achievements:

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a forty-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights — you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable — you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family — you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn’t black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green — you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same pubic facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society — you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism — with the support of the American people.²

That public support and the consequent liberal reforms issued from empathy: from the awareness throughout the general public that oppressed minorities and economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals, possess the same sentiments, needs, aspirations and rights that more fortunate citizens recognized in themselves.

Regressivism as Psychopathology

Empathy is never totally absent in any functioning human being. A recognition that other persons with whom one deals have functioning minds with ideas, emotions, and aspirations is implicit in game playing, in negotiations, and even ordinary conversation. Self awareness, even that of a thoroughly egoistic, narcissistic and sociopathic self, can only arise out of childhood interaction with others. The self is a social construct.

Thus even such sociopaths as George Bush and Dick Cheney will acknowledge that the bombs dropped on Iraq cause “collateral damage” and thus profound suffering to innocent civilians. They likewise are aware of the suffering in New Orleans caused by the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster. They are, after all, at least minimally sane. Such an awareness of others that is also devoid of feeling we might call “abstract empathy.” The misery to innocent others that they cause simply does not matter to the Busheviks. They do not care, unless these moral atrocities exact political costs to themselves.

This “abstract empathy” is not the sort of “empathy” that Dr. Gustav Gilbert found absent among the Nuremberg defendants. The empathy that he had in mind combines awareness with feelings of concern and with respect for the rights and integrity of the other.

In contrast, the regressivism of the Bush-Cheney administration would have us ignore the economic, social and environmental consequences of unregulated commerce, and also have us dismantle Social Security, impoverish public education, tolerate inadequate health care for millions of our fellow citizens, abolish fundamental constitutional rights, and engage in aggressive wars against unthreatening countries, all of this with minimal regard for the human misery caused by these policies. To do all this, requires a deliberate stifling of feelings of empathy, and what David Hume called the “natural moral sentiment” of benevolence: a genuine concern for the well-being of others.

Regressives who support such policies are, at worst, simply amoral: without moral restraint, “rotten to the core.” At best, they are profoundly mistaken: possibly fundamentally decent individuals, trustworthy, law-abiding, charming friends, devoted spouses and parents, but bewitched by false dogmas. The former are, by and large, beyond redemption and are best isolated from political influence and from positions of public responsibility. The latter might be amenable to evidence and rational persuasion.

How can such an ideology captivate and take political control of a nation once renowned and admired for its generosity and compassion and for its devotion to democracy and human rights?

In part, the rise and dominance of regressivism is the result of a deliberate and opulently funded public relations campaign, supported for the past forty years by wealthy individuals and corporations. This campaign included the establishment of ideological “think tanks” such as The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the abolition of The Fairness Doctrine and the consolidation of most of the mass media into six “conservative” mega-conglomerates, enormous expansion of corporate lobbying of Congress, and a vastly increased corporate involvement in campaign financing, of both major parties. With conservative Republicans in control of the White House for all but eight of the past twenty-eight years, the federal courts have become dominated by right-wing judges.

With these formidable propaganda resources, the resurgent Right has exploited “natural sentiments” equally fundamental to human nature as empathy; namely, ethnocentrism (identification with and loyalty to “our group”) and its negative complement, xenophobia (fear, distrust, and hatred of “outsiders”). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 intensified these prejudices, objectifying and depersonalizing the new enemy (so-called “Islamo-Fascists”) while, at the same time, neutralizing empathetic sentiments toward the residents of these “alien” nations.

With the captive media exploiting and intensifying public fear of “terrorism,” the Bush regime formulated, and the intimidated Congress readily assented to, assaults upon our traditional civil liberties such as the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and now the revised FISA Act.

Finally, regressivism feeds upon greed: the relentless corporate drive for still more profits and political control, and the perpetual cultivation of consumer demand by the multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations industries.

But greed is pitiless and blind to the side effects (“externalities”) of the unconstrained appetite for the consumption of consumer goods and for profit: effects such as poverty, pollution, disease, and the “collateral damage” of war upon innocent civilians.

A political economy based upon unregulated greed has been tried numerous times in the past, and has failed in each and every occasion: the French and Russian Revolutions, the era of the robber barons in the late Nineteenth Century, the Great Depression of the Thirties. They failed because when greed rules, the nation’s wealth inevitably flows from those who produce the wealth to those who own and control the wealth until, eventually, the toleration of the increasingly miserable masses for this economic injustice collapses, and the oligarchic regime is overthrown.

Once again, regressivism is on the brink of collapse.

• Time magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation reported last week that 85% of US population is unhappy with the US economy.
• In April, 80% of Americans believed that the “country is moving in the wrong direction.”
• “During the first six months of 2008, 343,159 Americans lost their homes, up 136% from 145,696 recorded during the same period in 2007.” (CNNMoney.com).
• An alarming and under-reported increase in unemployment and inflation is underway. (US government cost of living statistics do not include food and fuel prices).
• The latest Gallup Poll reports that Democratic party affiliation leads Republican by ten points (47% to 37%).
• George Bush’s approval ratings are at an all-time low at 28% (disapproval from 61%-69%).

This public sentiment should suffice to overthrow any regime that maintains power “with the consent of the governed” and subject to recall by election. Under normal circumstances, these statistics would indicate a landslide repudiation of the regime in the coming national election.

But these are not normal circumstances, for this regime is supported by a formidable array of resources: virtually unlimited financial support, a captive media including a cadre of right-wing pundits, a proven ability to rig elections along with a refusal of the media to investigate and report election fraud, oppressive laws, a ruthless GOP campaign organization unconstrained by facts, fair-play, or even on occasion, by the law. All these resource might once again overwhelm the “consent of the governed,” and prolong the regressive regime for another four or even eight years. But eventually, it must fall. The longer it holds on, the greater the misery and repression that will ensue, and the more violent the eventual overthrow.

Best to end it now.

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Three top scientists have once again contradicted the claim that a “consensus” exists about man-made global warming with research that indicates CO2 emissions actually cool the atmosphere, in addition to another peer-reviewed paper that documents how the IPCC overstated CO2’s effect on temperature by as much as 2000 per cent.

Professor George Chilingar and Leonid Khilyuk of the University of Southern California, and Oleg Sorokhtin of the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have released a study that they claim completely contradicts the link between CO2 and global temperature increases.

“The writers investigated the effect of CO2 emission on the temperature of atmosphere. Computations based on the adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect show that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere results in cooling rather than warming of the Earth’s atmosphere,” states the preamble to the paper.

The full study, which appears in the Energy Sources journal, is sure to cause ire amongst climate cult adherants.

No global warming has been observed for the past 10 years as temperatures have gradually declined and studies indicate that there will be no further warming for the next 10 years.

In a related development, the peer-reviewed Physics and Society journal has published evidence proving that the UN IPCC’s 2007 climate summary “overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%.”

According to the paper, “Computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.”

The paper also outlines evidence to confirm that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed, a factor attributed to the Sun having been more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

The paper concludes, “CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100.”

Paul Joseph Watson

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Like an idiot savant parroting the words of his master, Bush tells us the faltering economy and gas prices over $4 a gallon are the fault of the Democrats. “On Saturday, President Bush tried to pin the blame on Congress for soaring energy prices and said lawmakers need to lift long-standing restrictions on drilling for oil in pristine lands and offshore tracts believed to hold huge reserves of fuel,” reports the Associated Press. “It’s time for members of Congress to address the pain that high gas prices are causing our citizens,” said the decider-commander. “Every extra dollar that American families spend because of high gas prices is one less dollar they can use to put food on the table or send a child to college. The American people deserve better.”

Astronomical gas prices have nothing to do with Democrats or Anwar — sky-high prices are the direct result of a devalued fiat currency and the inflationary polices of our rulers. Blame can be placed at the doorstep of the Federal Reserve, as in Federal Express, and can be attributed to the bankers. Bush would have you believe it is all about supply and demand, never mind U.S. consumption of fuel has dropped by millions of gallons since last year. It’s about inflation, a deliberate policy of the Fed at the behest of the global elite.

Recall, back in 2005, the global elite, under the guise of the Bilderbergers, called for oil prices to rise, from $40 a barrel at the time to $150, a scheme reported by Bilderberg researcher and American Free Press editor Jim Tucker. During the 2005 conference, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees the elite wanted oil prices to go through the ceiling. The following year in Ottawa, Canada, it was decided at the Bilderberg conference the price of a barrel of oil would go to $105 by the end of this year, a plan so far not only realized but exceeded.

“The global elite are conspiring to send oil prices crashing through the $200 dollar a barrel mark as part of an organized agenda to hike profits, bring about a global economic crash and torpedo the middle class, and they’re not afraid to attack Iran as a means of achieving their goal,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote last September. “By pushing peak oil theories and tying them in with the man-made global warming fraud , Bilderberg seeks to jack up oil prices to the point where the living standards of the middle class become unsustainable and the west is lowered into second world status while fat cat elitists reap the financial and political bounty.” Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. forecasted that oil prices will reach $150 to $200 dollars a barrel within 2 years, according to Bloomberg.

“It’s been a difficult time for many American families,” said Bush.

Indeed — and times will be more difficult in the months ahead as the global elite deliberately bring the economy to a crashing halt, as they have done elsewhere.

“The fact that America’s downward financial spiral started in earnest shortly after the Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not incidental,” explains the August Review. “The very policies that brought us the ‘New International Economic Order’ (their own phrase) have wrecked our country…. In 30-40 short years, America has gone from the strongest and most stable nation in the world, to one of the weakest and unstable. Poor Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and had a great fall, but few people will see the real truth that Humpty was actually pushed” by a plundering global elite.

Unfortunately, far too many people are unable to see Humpty Dumpty’s fall and instead buy into the flaccid explanations offered by the globalist puppet George Bush.

Kurt Nimmo

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Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation.

And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared in the past year, driving the world’s poor - who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food - into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits.

Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months to the end of February had more than doubled over the same period last year, from US$543 million ($695 million) to US$1.12 billion. Its profits increased from US$1.44 billion to US$2.22 billion.

Cargill’s net earnings soared by 86 per cent from US$553 million to US$1.030 billion over the same three months.

And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from US$363 million to US$517 million.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, saw its income for the three months ending February 29 rise more than 12-fold, from US$42.2 million to US$520.8 million.

Let’s see. Oil companies are making some of the largest profits ever and Agribusiness is making huge gigantic profits while people around the world stand in food lines. Hmmm…

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Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

[Read more →]

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Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.

Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing — an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals — must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.

If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation’s widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?

Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation as a senator, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.

By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. president ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed.

Is it too much to imagine that Americans might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush’s vice president, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect?

But even still, after almost eight years, there is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney’s old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.S. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.

It’s just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Sen. McCain might have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.

Robert Sheer

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Before you open a door and enter into the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a large bronze sculpture of a strapping cowboy greets you, with the wide-eyed optimisim of the mythic west, a handkerchief dangling from the back pocket of a pair of jeans, and cowboy hat in hand.

It’s called "After the Ride" and it is a tribute to Ronald Reagan.

Or make that the myth of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as the fawning exhibition area that paints a flattering, blemish free portrait of his life unintentionally reveals, went from a childhood and small college upbringing in Illinois to a Hollywood "B" film career, to spokesperson for the GE corporation, to Death Valley Days, to the political life that led him to the White House.

The key transition, not noted as such by the library narrative, is when Reagan became the hired front man for GE, hosting a program for them but also going around the country selling the concept that the corporation is a benevolent and positive force in our lives, without any downsides.

Reagan went from a "B" movie career to an "A" career as a political salesman for corporate wealth and control of the government. In the turbulent social climate of the ’60s, his wealthy backers (who regarded him as a prize race horse for a right-wing coup for the super rich and corporate welfare) watched as Reagan won the governorship and masterfully was guided in the use of wedge issues such as "Guns and God" to lure the emerging displaced middle class into voting Republican.

Aside from the "October Surprise," when Reagan negotiators allegedly convinced the Iranian mullahs to hold onto our hostages until Reagan’s inauguration day (they were literally released after he was sworn in), the GOP had perfected the selling of a myth about America — and they had the hale and hearty actor to sell the product.

The myth of "morning in America" obscured the emerging theft of jobs from the middle class by creating emotional hot buttons for rural and working class voters to gravitate toward: Their values were under attack by liberal extremists, they were repeatedly told. Only the Republicans could save the nation from further moral degradation, the myth went — and only the GOP could guarantee victory in foreign conflicts (even if the conflicts were often unnecessary and the GOP failed to achieve "victory," however it might be defined).

Because our perceptions today are so dependent upon television as a source, how one acts as president or senator has superseded, in large part, what one does.

Ronald Reagan made many working class and rural voters proud to be Americans again, but meanwhile, behind the scenes, corporate lobbyists and Reagan’s aides (who were really running the show) went about dismantling factories in places like central Pennsylvania and moving them overseas, sometimes — literally — in the dark of night.

It was the Republican version of "Let them eat cake." Only, in this case, it was: "Let them eat God, Guns, and Patriotism."

This process that began with Reagan’s election continued through Bush I — and even on to the Clinton Administration, as he aggressively pursued NAFTA and followed the neo-liberal economic agenda of opening up the gates of exporting jobs in return for larger corporate profits — and it rocketed ahead in the administration of Bush II into a juggernaut of betrayal of the middle class.

Hunting and faith are important to many people in rural America and small towns — as faith is throughout America — but there has and will be no threat to those core "values." There is no gun control measure with any remote possibility of passing in any state that would affect hunters — and Democrats and civil libertarians are ardent supporters of the right to follow one’s religious beliefs without government interference.

So, Barack Obama’s remarks in San Francisco, as borne out by a true understanding of the Ronald Reagan myth, are ultimately true. His mistake was that he said what he said in a way that allowed the twin corporate D.C. insiders — McCain and Clinton — to once again demagogue the issue into one of emotion, rather than fact.

And that is what the attack on Obama is about: demagoguery.

I can’t save workers from voting against their own economic interests when they vote to defend values that no one is going to take away from them. And I understand that Clinton and McCain are playing on the pride of such displaced members of the middle class. No one wants to be told that they have been duped for nearly 30 years by the wealthy backers of the Republicrats. Rural and small town Pennsylvanians want to feel proud about America and themselves — and the uproar from the McCain and Clinton camps once again presses the hot button of dignity, while privately believing in (whatever Clinton is saying on the campaign trail today) policies that will continue to erode the earnings and standard of living of the very people that they claim to be championing.

The media owned by corporate elites has a role in this, too. Last month, the conventional wisdom of the media, for the most part, was that the deteriorating rust belt of Western Pennsylvania had left many former decently paid workers angry and bitter. But, on a dime, the new conventional wisdom, after Obama’s remarks, was that it was insulting to say that these same people are angry and bitter. Nothing says more about the non-factual based reporting of the mainstream press than that sudden conversion, because the mainstream media represents the global corporate interests of its multinational parent companies who reap the profits of moving jobs overseas.

What Obama said was shorthand for this grim reality: no one is really threatening the traditions of hunting, or anyone’s faith, or heterosexual marriage. But there are plenty of politicians among the Republicrats — usually the Republicans, but Hillary Clinton has joined with them on this one — who exploit the fear that conspiratorial "leftist" forces are conspiring to end hunting and religious belief in America. This is the heart of being a demagogue, because it is an appeal to emotion that has no basis in fact. It is how Republicans have won many an election, and how Senator Clinton is now trying, in a last gasp, to obtain the office she has compromised so much of her life pursuing.

As someone who was born and raised in Illinois, and having lived here my adult life, I was always surprised by how little connection Reagan appeared as an adult to have with his home state. During his presidency, he rarely returned here, and his persona was tied to the myth of the cowboy, the triumphant rugged conqueror of the West. Illinois was just part of his early biography. He seemed to have no strong emotional attachment to the very Midwest roots that he so championed. It just didn’t fit in with the mythic figure that came out of his films, Western ranch (which was the inspiration for Rove getting Bush to buy his Crawford spread and do a Reagan "cut the brush" imitation), and heroic GI movie roles during WW II (which he never actually fought in.)

So we understand that some of the working class who buy clothes at Wal-Mart that they used to make — because the price is right — only the blouses and shirts are made in China now — we understand that they feel insulted by some politician telling them that they’ve been taken for a ride, that no one is going to stop them from hunting or going to their church, but that the people who peddle that nonsense to them are allowing corporations to steal their jobs and wallets from right in front of their noses. That’s a tough pill to swallow, that you’ve been swindled for 30 years.

Mark Karlin

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There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann’s Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo

And all because Obama mentioned something we’ve known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation’s heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.

To quote Obama:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

So what the hell else is new?

Then Obama adds:

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

While not precisely correct, it’s a good enough generalization for an American audience not really listening anyway. Obama’s remarks were not in the least controversial and just plain boring in terms of content. Certainly not newsworthy. (But don’t forget Ward Churchill)

Yet he had no sooner closed his mouth than this media manufactured hell broke loose. "Oh my gawd," they screamed. This guy has the unmitigated gall to suggest that their might be some bitterness out here in the lily white realms of Grant Wood, grange halls and Methodist church suppers! Right here in River City!" where the combination of God rhetoric and Chamber of Commerce boosterism have managed to ban the word from public discourse. Even the mention of it can be explosive, simply because there is so much if it stuffed inside working folks, inside the lockbox of denial that comes with being the citizen of a culture in collapse.

Put more simply, the self-serving "blogger-reporters" and Hillary Clinton media machine had managed to kick Obama in the balls from behind.

Along with the bitterness charges came the guns and God stuff. Well, we Red State rubes out here in the working world do own a lot of guns, though very few of us "cling" to them in the desperate sense the speech implied. As to what Obama described as our clinging to religion, we do not so much cling to it as it clings to us as a vestige of our heritage. It’s neither a good nor bad thing in and of itself, but mighty damned useful to fear mongering politicians and the screen writers of television crime shows.

For me, listening to politicians talk, then listening to the media talk about politicians talking, rates right up there with swapping spit with a gingivitis victim. I do not like nor trust nor much listen to Hillary, McCain or Obama. And I wouldn’t vote for any of the three even if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a bottle of Jack Daniels. However, after hearing Obama’s March "race speech," in Philadelphia, I can understand the Obama cult a little better. Those people are desperate.

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

I’m from Winchester, Virginia, the very kind of place and people Obama was talking about when the rotten tomatoes started hailing down. So allow me to say this: we white members of the sweating class have been working alongside laboring immigrants, legal and illegal, for decades and have not been killing them with our personal arms in a rage of antipathy, in so far as I know. The reason, near as I can tell, is that we do not give a happy shit one way or another because most of us do not have interest or knowledge enough to fester on the topic. Nor the time. When we fester on stuff, it’s about making car payments and trying not to default on our mortgages. Working two and sometimes three jobs per household does not leave much time to develop political opinions, much less informed ones. I’d be willing to bet there is not a working class person within four blocks of where I now sit who has even heard of this media manufactured Obama fracas. Yesterday Smokey, the apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama thing.

"Huh?" he said.

He spoke for millions.

Nobody out here that I know particularly "hates niggers", blames Mexicans or is willing to use their personal firearms against any of those people, unless they find one of them crack crazed and coming in through a bedroom window at 2 AM, in which case there will be a loud boom, and the perp is gonna look like a pizza splattered up against the wall. Otherwise we just stand before the incompressible system that fucks us blind. And in that there is certain bitterness.

Let’s get to the nub of this thing here: Obama, Hillary and McCain are farting through silk while playing out their roles in our theatrical state’s false drama called presidential elections, while smug and media sanctioned pundits snark from the edge of the proscenium arc of politics, each hoping to draw enough attention to have his or her own proscenium in that national cathedral of the American consciousness — television.

Before too long this earth shaking "incident" will be drowned out by the accumulating noise of the election year. Then even the election’s hoopla will all be wiped away when Oprah Winfrey, in one of her ever grander spectacles of televised largess, gives away the city of Detroit to the sixth grade author of the most heart rending essay on black poverty.

November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand, much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn’t know any other way of life.

One of these days, when it comes to the thundering non-controversy of Obama’s remarks, the blogosphere and the media may start asking the right kinds of questions. The kind Smokey asked me after I explained the Obama controversy to him:

"Who the fuck cares?"

Joe Bageant

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There is no doubt that AIDS erupted in the U.S. shortly after government-sponsored hepatitis B vaccine experiments (1978-1981) using gay men as guinea pigs. The epidemic was caused by the "introduction" of a new retrovirus (the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV for short); and the introduction of a new herpes-8 virus, the virus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, widely known as the "gay cancer" of AIDS. The taboo theory that AIDS is a man-made disease is largely based on research showing an intimate connection between government vaccine experiments and the outbreak of "the gay plague"

The widely accepted theory is that HIV/AIDS originated in a monkey or chimpanzee virus that "jumped species" in Africa. However, it is clear that the first AIDS cases were recorded in gay men in Manhattan in 1979, a few years before the epidemic was first noticed in Africa in 1982. It is now claimed that the human herpes-8 virus (also called the KS virus), discovered in 1994, also originated when a primate herpes virus jumped species in Africa. How two African species-jumping viruses ended up exclusively in gay men in Manhattan beginning in the late 1970s has never been satisfactorily explained.

Researchers who claim AIDS is a man-made disease believe it is much more likely that these two primate viruses were introduced and spread during the government’s recruitment of thousands of male homosexuals beginning in 1974.

Large numbers of gay men in Manhattan donated blood for the experimental hepatitis B vaccine trial, which took place at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan in 1978. Extensive evidence supporting the man-made theory of AIDS is easily found on the Internet by Googling: man-made origin of AIDS; and in my two books, "AIDS and the Doctors of Death" and "Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot."

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