Former Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, wrote in his blog recently:
The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
Reich's point - while valid - is only partially correct.
It is the GOP and Democratic hierarchy - on behalf of the globalists who control them - who are steering America into a divide-and-conquer Class War.
It is a war designed to allow us to destroy ourselves, while America's real enemies on Wall Street and at the Pentagon escape unscathed, with their funding intact.
We the People fight over dirty needles, while They the Enemies keep their bailout, deregulation and warmongering mainlines flowing.
Let's not forget that Reich was part of a Clinton Administration that brought us NAFTA.
NAFTA has become a symbol for the mounting insecurities felt by blue-collar Americans. While the overall benefits from free trade far exceed the costs . . . The costs fall disproportionately on the losers -- mostly blue-collar workers who get dumped because their jobs can be done more cheaply by someone abroad who’ll do it for a fraction of the American wage. . . . Even though the winners from free trade could theoretically compensate the losers and still come out ahead, they don’t. America doesn’t have a system for helping job losers find new jobs . . . There’s no national retraining system. Unemployment insurance reaches fewer than 40 percent of people who lose their jobs . . . We have no national health care system to cover job losers and their families. There's no wage insurance. Nothing. And unless or until America finds a way to help the losers, the backlash against trade is only going to grow.
For a decade, it has been acknowledged that NAFTA has been a disaster for workers across North America. But, Reich is right on his point that fixes to help the 'losers' are needed. Backlash and rage is not enough. There needs to be a plan for this complex problem.
So what can be done?
If labor and the American population in general want to fend off the Globalist Austerity Pimps on Wall Street and their prostitutes in Washington D.C., Madison, Lansing and elsewhere, they will need to have a plan.
Webster Tarpley, a noted economist and author, offers up a very good one along with an analysis about the current situation in Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond.
. . . it is the financial transactions of banks, hedge funds, and brokerages, in the form of derivatives, foreign exchange, stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments which are universally exempted in this country from the state sales taxes which everyone else pays when they purchase the necessities and amenities of daily life, from consumer electronics to a car or a pair of shoes. A 1% tax on all financial transactions, which is well within the power of the state of Wisconsin to impose, would provide hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of new revenue and remove any pretext for the current assault on state workers. Right now, we repeat, bankers and hedge fund operators pay absolutely no tax on their daily turnover of trading volume, which can easily reach into trillions of dollars, even in a state like Wisconsin. They need to start paying a Wall Street Sales Tax.
Germany, France and Britain had serious "Bank Tax" plans on the table last summer. As of this year, 10 European countries have put bank taxes into effect. And Germany, has banned Naked Credit Default Swaps entirely.
But other than talk, the U.S. has done nothing to reign in Wall Street, their impotent mirage of a 'reforms' last year notwithstanding.
In fact, it now appears that the UK is set to give the banksters more, not less.
Meanwhile in Iceland, the "Little Nation That Could," actually did tell the banks to go to hell - for a second time - by voting down the plan to repay $5 Billion to British and Netherlands' banks after those banks engineered the crash of Iceland's economy.
The global private central banks are the people's common enemy. They have always been the enemy. The IMF Riots that struck Europe last year, have now spread to the Middle East. And now it appears they are on the verge of happening in our own backyard.
So what is an IMF (i.e. International Monetary Fund) Riot? Well, the former head of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, coined the term, after his ouster (aka firing) as World Bank Chief Economist in 1999, and his conscience got the better of him.
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
. . . After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
. . . The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
. . . A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.
Progressives and Libertarians Must Unite
The time has come for We the People to stop allowing our politicians and the corporate media to divide and conquer us. It is time that we put aside the differences that we have in regard to taxes, guns, health care, social issues and morality, and instead unite against our common enemy.
It is time that the left and right sides of Main Street join together to fight Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that it spawned during World War II.
Break the old chains the corporate media and politicians have used to keep us on our respective political reservations for decades. It's time for the youth of America - conservative and liberal alike - to finish the job the Baby Boomers failed to finish.
It's time for union-backing Progressives to join globalist-hating Libertarians in an 'Americans First' effort and defeat those who planned the destruction of American Industry and our way of life four decades ago.
There is no more time for the liberal versus conservative garbage. The globalist austerity buzzards are circling and they don't give a damn' whether your carcass is red or blue - you, your wealth, your pensions, your assets and your children's future earnings will feed their bloodthirsty bellies just the same.
And if some Boomers with fight left in them want to join in and help Gen X, Gen Y and the Millennials complete Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dreams of brotherhood and peace, let's welcome them. If they want to join the younger generations in heeding President Eisenhower's warning about the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, we should make space for them. The Boomers have been down this road before and their knowledge and lessons would be an asset as we fulfill the promise of the American Republic.
Dr. King said 44 years ago in his historic Beyond Vietnam speech that:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
We cannot let that death happen by letting our politicians buy bailouts and bombs instead of school books and bread. We cannot settle for austerity over prosperity. For if we do . . . then Dr. King . . . and the promise of our Republic's founding doctrine will have truly died in vain.
There is room for everyone in this fight against the banksters and MIC. And don't you let a conservative carnival barker or a left-wing gatekeeper tell you otherwise.
Be wary of those politicians who pretend to be on the side of We the People in this battle. LAll you need to do is look at their recent votes on real Constitutional issues like the Patriot Act extension, where Michelle Bachmann, Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, even a former POW, found common ground when it came to dismantling the U.S. Constitution.
And let's not forget Lansing's local milquetoast GOP Congressmen, Tim Walberg and Mike Rogers voted for tyranny too. Rogers, by the way, co-sponsored the un-Patriotic extension.
The Patriot Act keeps none of us safer, except the entrenched status-quo and their tyrannical ambitions.
Make no mistake, the Patriot Act was created - not for fighting foreign terrorism - but for enabling government terrorism against those that dissent against their actions.
Dissent is not unpatriotic. Being a community organizer is not a bad thing either - provided you are organizing for the betterment of humanity rather than its enslavement.
The Founding Fathers were dissenters and community organizers. Thomas Paine was both. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Jesus Christ . . . all dissenters and organizers. And all were branded terrorists during their respective times.
All of the above were also hungry for freedom and justice - and all were sworn enemies of tyranny - just like another American 'terrorist,' Saul Alinsky who once wrote:
"We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution. If it were possible for the Have-Nots of the world to recognize and accept the idea that revolution did not inevitably mean hate and war, cold or hot, from the United States, that alone would be a great revolution in world politics and the future of man. This is a major reason for my attempt to provide a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or a capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics. My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and use it. I will argue that the failure to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution."
The above quote comes from Alinsky's 1971 masterpiece, Rules for Radicals. It's a book that status-quo puppets like Glenn Beck bash. Beck and many others often cite, accurately, that Alinsky pays tribute to Lucifer in the opening pages of the book. What is funny is that the bashers always forget the two quotes that come before the Lucifer reference. . .
"Where there are no men, be thou a man." - Rabbi Hillel
"Let them call me a rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul. . . " -Thomas Paine
I have to admit, after hearing every conservative from here to Kingdom Hell bash Alinsky during the 2008 campaign, I had to go out and find a copy of his book. . . . Let's just say that Alinsky is anything but what conservatives make him out to be.
After reading Rules for Radicals, I have a feeling that Thomas Jefferson would have been proud to call Alinsky a friend.
Glenn Beck is a shill. Just like Rachael Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, etc. They are corporate media snake-oil peddlers whose job it is to divide-and-conquer the masses and keep the status-quo intact.
Conservatives, if you believe your Tea Party is led by Michelle Bachmann, Dick Armey, Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin - you're getting screwed.
And I'm not talking about the fun kind of screwing either. I'm talking about the kind of screw that leaves you with venereal disease, puss-oozing sores and a deflated sense of self esteem.
And for you Liberals, if you're going to get hung up on MSNBC telling you that Ron Paul and his son are going to bring back Jim Crow and burning crosses, then this revolution is going to pass you by too.
You see, those of us who came of age during the MTV era don't give a damn' about racism or anyone who tries to resurrect it. We like white rappers and black golfers. We dig Jungle Fever. We like our Public Enemies served with Anthrax. AND we hate, I mean we really hate, race pimps and racists.
And we will stand against anyone, including the Pauls, if they want to replant that cancer on our soil.
Jim and Jane Crow are dead. They are not coming back. And when we Xers, Yers and Millennials end the globalists' War on Drugs. Jim and Jane's bastard child will be dead too.
The Pauls want to end the Drug War, the Federal Reserve and the MIC's International Offense. That's why we younger folks like the Pauls. And that is why the banksters and warmongers fear them. And as hard as they try, no amount of media race-baiting is going to make us change our minds.
Taking on and eradicating all the evil the International Banking Cartel has brought to the planet will be the battle that will decide the fate of free humanity over the next decade.
It's time for Libertarians and Progressives to unite and throw off the economic, military-industrial and political chains that bind us.
After all, we have a lot more in common with each other than the status-quo would have us believe.
It's time to turn off your politics, tune in your brains and UNITE!
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