The Republican coup d'état is well underway.  But there's a deadline.

    The GOP is hurrying to impose its harsh political agenda before the second inauguration of Barack Obama and the seating of a new Congress in January 2013.  By that time the election landslide coming in November will give Democrats command of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.  And with a premature retirement on the Supreme Court, maybe control of the Judiciary, too.  

    Lacking a committed rebel military force, the Party is effecting the coup through governmental procedures.  The most obvious tactic has been to wreck the national economy by encouraging the Great Recession while doing everything possible to create a second Great Depression.  How else to explain three years of complete obstructionism in treating the President's economic policies.  For the first time in history, the ruling party needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass legislation because the opposition threatens to filibuster, and it requires 60 votes to quash this political stunt.  We no longer govern by majority rule.  Now, the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate needs a super majority for even the most mundane legislative effort.  So, the GOP has clogged the levers of government that deal with the nation's economy making it very difficult for responsible legislators to resolve our economic problems.

    Related to crashing the economy is the attempt by Big Money Republicans like the infamous Koch Brothers to turn the USA into the new China.  This is seen in the wage-lowering policies in Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio where bought-and-paid-for Republican governors are attempting to kill public-sector trade unions, then go after private-sector unions.  The obvious goal is to lower the salaries of American workers.  If those wages could be trimmed substantially, American business would be in better shape to compete with the slave-wages paid in China and other impoverished nations.  Of course, management salaries and bonuses would not be lowered, don't be foolish.  Nor would the distribution of profits to shareholders.  We are a capitalist country.

    The suppression of voters is another aspect of the coup d'état that's underway.  The goal here is to create a permanent Republican majority by disqualifying Democratic voters.  Specifically, the targeted bloc here is African-Americans and Latinos who traditionally support Democratic candidates.  Under the pretense of protecting against voter fraud, people who are already registered with the state must now show a photo identification card in order to vote.  Obtaining that card is cumbersome, inconvenient, expensive, and unnecessary.  But it's an effective roadblock that will disenfranchise at least five million citizens--the vast majority of them Democrats.

    Significantly, there is no voter fraud.  Voter fraud is only a smokescreen for the reversal of democracy.  An Alabama legislator recently justified this attack on the franchise by claiming Alabama has endured three cases of voter fraud in the past three years.  Even though at least one of the three involved a state election official, not a voter.  Whatever.  

    Three instances in three years doesn't make an epidemic.  How may millions of people voted during that period in Alabama?  Divide three into the total number of votes over those years, and you come up with a very low crime rate--so low as to be non-existent.  But remember, this is only a ruse to cloak the de-democratization of America.  As proof, please note that no one is asking for a photo identification card to vote in the ongoing primary elections.  Only in November will they be required in many states.  

   The United States Supreme Court is in on the coup d'état.  Its decision by one vote to unfetter rich corporations and allow them to spend unlimited dollars in financing election campaigns has debased the entire electoral system.  Corporations are the same as people, the Court decreed.  

    So, we get the phenomenon of deadman-walking Newt Gingrich staying in the Republican primaries because one billionaire wants to waste his money and fund Newtie's Super Political Action Committee.  Rick Santorum has his Super PAC Sugar Daddy, too.  And Mitt Romney has several corporations that fund his Super PAC, more informally known as his air force for negative advertising.  Very wealthy individuals, pouring massive amounts of cash into Super PACs via their corporations has turned our elections into propaganda contests funded by the undertaxed wealthy.

   Another aspect of the coup is the Party's attempt to strangle the beast that Republicans feel government has become.  By this they mean cut funding for government expenditures on programs that help common people.  Cut Social Security, Medicare, student loan programs, housing assistance, public education.  But don't touch the corporate welfare system which gives enormous tax breaks to industries such as Big Petroleum and Big Agriculture.  

    The goal is to create a "Social Darwin" nation where survival of the fittest is the operative theme.  This notion puts you on your own competing against everyone else.  It's a purist capitalist's ideal scenario.  No social safety net, not compassionate conservatism because this is not conservatism, it's reactionary politics.  It's also a recipe for revolution because in such a situation fewer and few will inevitably own more and more--as is the case in so many Central American nations.  Then one day you wake up to confront an American version of a revolutionary like Fidel Castro or elected radical reformer like Hugo Chavez.  The U.S. government must work for ALL AMERICANS, not just for the wealthy few.  To structure government otherwise is to court disaster.  But, the Republicans don't seem to care.

   The coup d'état is being fought as well on moral grounds.  The neo-Puritans are particularly focused on sex.  Led by absolutists like Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh, the goal is to apply strict Roman Catholic and evangelical Christian tenets to the nation as a whole--to abolish abortions, to end the availability of contraception, turn sex into a procreative act only.  And homosexuality?  Back in the closet!  No gay rights, no marriage equality, no hate crimes laws--the right-wingers driving the GOP war tanks want the LGBT community to go away and shut up, or else.   

    The flip side of this is the re-domestication of American women.  Back to Kuchen, Kirchen, und Kinder--Cooking, Church, and Children.  Because the Republicans at base fear liberated women, their policies drive females from the workplace, away from competition with men, away from all "unfeminine" activities, back to their rightful place which is the home.  From the "slut" and "prostitute" verbal slurs, to restrictions on a woman's control of her own body, to the defunding of women's health care coverage, the War on Women is punishing careerist, liberal, and emancipated American womanhood.  The goal is to put the genie back in the bottle--or, more approriately, put Jeannie back in the bottle--before it's too late.  Republican know that another generation of liberated females means the women's movement will have won the gender struggle.

   The attack on Obamacare is still another aspect of the GOP's assault on progress.  Long overdue in a Western democratic industrial country, national insurance had been opposed for more than a century before it was finally passed into law in 2010.  But it was approved only over the corpses of Congressional Republicans who gave their last full measure of devotion to the Lost Cause.  But the Party hasn't conceded.  Spurred on by their breathtaking fear of government--except when government sends money to Big Business--the Republicans scramble over one another to see who can say "Repeal Obamacare" the loudest.  Even Mitt Romeny who designed the national health law denies his birthright in order to demonstrate his affinity with the misinformed radical right.

    So, watch the battlefront, and pay attention to your flanks.  The Republican plotters are out there scheming to change the United States in a regressive way.  They have until the next Congress and re-elected President Obama are installed.  Like a dying serpent, the Party of the Right still has toxic venom left in its fangs.  Don't get too close or you may be bitten.  The antidote won't be available until next January.  

    And watch your rear.  They can bite you in the butt, too. 

J. Fred MacDonald
contact@iLiberal.US

    THIS IS WAR!  

    Make no mistake about it, there is a militant offensive underway against the current condition of American women.  It is being waged by the Republican Party on the state and federal levels.  And the candidates for the Party's presidential nomination are aiding and abetting the attacking warriors.

    The once-proud Grand Old Party, the powerful representative of American business interests and small-government believers, has increasingly adopted the values of the Radical Right to the point that nowadays it has become the political wing of the John Birch Society.  One of the core beliefs of the JBS is that a woman's place is in the home.  I recall a Bircher propaganda film from the 1960s in which a housewife declared that all she wanted in life was to be at the center of a protective cocoon of home and husband and family.  Hers was an idealized feminine realm in which she was queen of the household.  Let the men-folk worry about careers and football, she was warmly ensconsed in domesticity.

    Take that attitude, turn it into a political goal, and you quickly find motivation for the contemporary attack on modern American women.  Simply stated, the right-wing assault is intended to return women to the home to raise babies, do the laundry, vacuum, and cook dinner.  

    Like King Canute ordering the ocean not to roll in and drench his dry feet, the reactionary GOP today stands against a rising tide of female accomplishments commanding it to stop.  

    The problem for the party is that women are taking over American society.  More women are in college and graduate schools than men.  Women are now on the front lines in our several wars.  A woman nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and will actually win it in 2016 if she wants it.  Women are increasingly shattering the glass ceiling that used to hinder their advancement in U.S. business corporations.  And the soaring number of single-parent households is making American women overwhelmingly the shapers of the next generation.

    This latter fact has prompted one Wisconsin state legislator to introduce a bill citing single parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse.  As you might expect, that legislator is a Republican.

    Consider the vocabulary the Republicans use to describe modern women: uppity, feminazi, slut, prostitute, bitch--and these are the less-salacious terms.  Such words are weapons fired at women who rise too high and threaten the historic privileges of the boys club.  These terms inflict wounds of humiliation on women who act as equals or, dare I say it, superiors to the rightful heirs of the hunter-gatherer patrimony.

    The true nature of the Republican War on Women is recognizable in the great contraception debate presently underway.  In the GOP view, women who use birth control are doing it for reasons of sexual promiscuity.  And as good Puritans, the Party members must struggle against such debauchery.  As is marriage, sex is for procreation only.  Recreational sex is destructive.  So, if you're not going to have a baby, keep that aspirin tablet tightly between your knees.  Rush Limbaugh even offered to buy aspirins for all the women at Georgetown University who feel abused by the school's failure to offer birth control as part of its student health care coverage.

    Then there's the fight over abortion.  Reinforced by Roman Catholics and Protestant evangelicals, Republican leaders are rapidly turning the Party into an anti-abortion advocacy group.  Defund Planned Parenthood, require vaginal probes for women seeking abortions, require ultrasound readings so fetal heartbeats can be played before an abortion, extend waiting periods for women seeking abortions, mandate medical procedures that are unnecessary and violate the physician's professionalism, pass laws that place the life of the fetus above that of the mother: such are the Republican victories thus far.  The Big One, a Supreme Court reversal of Roe vs. Wade, is perennially on the GOP's Christmas list.

    No matter that abortion is legal.  No matter that women make their decisions in consultation with medical professionals.  Republicans feel that government has a monitoring role in this personal female process.  

    Of course this anti-modern Republican putsch is manifest in order areas of Amercian life.  There is the War on Democracy recognizable in the voter-suppression laws that are passed or under consideration in 34 states.  Under the bogus claim of protecting against electoral fraud, Republican legislators are demanding state-issued identification cards, restricting early voting, and limiting access to the polls in urban areas.  And who will feel the impact most?  Racial minorities, poor people, students, the immobile elderly, and people who cannot access their birth certificates or naturalization papers--none of them strong sources of Republican votes.  

    The Birchers always feared democracy.  To them, the civil rights movement was a Communist crusade they linked to Castro's victory in Cuba, the nationalist anti-French uprising in colonial Algeria, and Mao's brutal Red China.  The fact that civil rights legislation destroyed Jim Crow apartheid and enfranchised millions of abused American citizens was destabilizing and dangerous.  I suspect that such an interpretation is still a part of the right-wing Republican interpretation of history.

    Then, there's the GOP's War on the Environment.  It is manifested in many ways.  Verbal slurs such as "junk science" are intended to diminish the importance of serious scientific research proving that human reliance on burning petroleum is one of the factors in heating the atmosphere and altering global weather patterns.  

    The Republicans would drill often and everywhere while offering almost complete immunity for the oil companies that pollute the seas, the air, and the soil.  Drill in Northern Alaska.  Drill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Drill in Canada and ship the natural gas via a garish and dangerous pipeline erected from North Dakota to Louisiana.  This uncritical Republican policy would give the United States to the Gods of Oil to do with as they wish, the citizenry be damned.  

    This is where the GOP stands.  Reactionary and on the far right of the American political continuum, the ideologically-driven Republican Party is as unrealistic as it is unprepared to lead this great nation.  And when the Party is buried after the November elections, it will be American women holding the shovels, ready to do the appropriate honors. 

J. Fred MacDonald
contact@iLiberal.US

    Time to set the record straight about Republican lies.  So many to choose from, so little space.  But, here are five of the most prevalent falsehoods trumpeted by the GOP candidates seeking their Party's presidential nomination.


1)  CHINA BUYS U.S. DEBT...CHINA OWNS AMERICA:   WRONG!

         Indeed, China owns about $1.16 trillion of the U.S. debt--but Japan owns $882 billion, the United Kingdom owns $272 billion, and oil exporters own $212 billion.  Among the top ten debt-holders--which includes Brazil, Taiwan, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Russia, and Caribbean banking interests--China holds less than 34 percent of the U.S. debt.  So, if American debts are called in, maybe it will be the Japanese or the British or even the Swiss who will own our country, not the Chinese.

    And as for that national debt: as of August 2011, Obama policies in fighting a near-Depression in the U.S. economy, raised the nation's debt by $2.4 trillion.  But George Bush raised it by $6.4 trillion--almost 48 percent of the total increase since Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981.
    

2)  AUSTERITY, THE KEY TO ECONOMIC GROWTH:   WRONG!

       This just doesn't work.  Look at Europe where austerity has been imposed by conservative governments in Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.  These economies are tanking.  When you take money out of circulation by spending less, it enhances recession.  It's like taking air away from a gasping patient so he can learn to breath on his own.

    The answer has been know for a long time: deficit finance, pump money into the economy by placing it where there is a propensity to spend.  That means put the money into the hands of consumers.  Rich people bank their extra cash.  Poorer people spend it.  Spending cash stimulates; hoarding, even investing in stocks, does nothing to create demand.  You can increase supply all you want; but if no one is buying, why do it?  Increase demand and suppliers will produce more inventory to meet that demand.

    The Republican "trickle down" philosophy says feed the rich and money will trickle down to the less fortunate.  BOGUS!  DOESN'T WORK.  Just ask George Bush II.


3)  ATOMIC IRAN + OBAMA REELECTED = THERMONUCLEAR WAR:  
                                 PHONEY SCARE TACTICS!

   Watching Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum talk about Iran at the recent Republican debate in Mesa, Arizona, I was reminded of another political crackpot: Lyndon LaRouche.  As a self-promoted candidate for president in 1976, he bought TV time to offer his views on foreign policy.  I recall his intensity as he guaranteed viewers that "if Jimmy Carter is elected President, we will have thermonuclear war within six months."

    Now, switch to Mesa and remember the certainty in the faces of the three candidates, and especially  Romney.  He seemed to be channeling LaRouche when he said, "We must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.  If they do, the world changes.  America will be at risk.  And someday nuclear weaponry will be used.  If I am president, that will not happen.  If we reelected Barack Obama, it will happen."

    Nothing but Amens came from Gingrich and Santorum.  Poor old Ron Paul: the best he could muster was to claim that we can't afford another war, and if you do go to war, please file the proper papers--get a formal declaration from Congress.  

    This is the brains trust of the Republican Party, cheerleaders for another U.S. war in the Middle East.  Makes one think of historic parallels beside the mad LaRouche.  Maybe Peter the Hermit urging Britons to a Crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the Moslem defilers.  Maybe Joan of Arc--or, in this case, Mitt of Arc--rallying peasant folk to expel the British invaders from sacred France.  Or more recently, it parallels Condi Rice with her "mushroom cloud" reference--or all that yellow cake, aluminum tubes, mobile launch sites, and weapons of mass destruction.  All of it lies leading to death in Iraq: U.S. and "coalition of the willing" soldiers, plus 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.


4)  GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE LEADS TO DICTATORSHIP:  BOGUS!

        This was Newt Gingrich's unfounded claim.  And he calls himself a historian?  I don't think he a very good one if he believes this nonsense.  The fact is national health  care goes back to the 1880s in Germany when the government passed health laws affecting insurance for health, accidents, old age, and disabilities.  The British began as early as 1911.  But following World War II, as European nations rebuilt their shattered economies, the notion of universal health care coordinated or run by the state became a staple of every capitalist system.  

    So, if government health care leads to dictatorship, then Canada is a dictatorship.  France, Denmark, Bulgaria, Moldova, Norway, Poland, in fact all of Europe must be run by dictators.  How about Japan, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Peru, Brazil?  All are dictatorships?  

    Oh, one thing more: by the terms of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, health care is a human right:

    ARTICLE 25:  Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.  Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.  All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.


5)  OBAMA IS FOREIGN, NOT ONE OF US:  RIDICULOUSLY STUPID!

    Genetically, one-half of President Obama is Kansan.  He may have been born in Hawaii, the 50th state, but his mother was from Kansas.  Moreover, he was raised collectively by his mother and her parents.  Daddy was a university exchange student from East Africa.  He left his child a few months after the birth and never exercised any influence over the president's rearing and inculcation of social values.  

    Newt Gingrich has declared that the best way to understand President Obama is to "understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."   Super silly because who in the USA opposes the end of colonialism.  Ah, but if you know Kenyan history, then you know Gingrich's ulterior purpose in saying this.  The nationalist Mau Mau movement drove the British from East Africa and made Kenya an independent nation state.  So, Gingrich was really saying Obama sees the world like a Mau Mau.  And that is flatly RACIST and TOO INANE FOR COMMENT.  And, Tulane University, please revoke this guy's Ph.D.  Your doctoral program can't be this bad.

    Oh, by the way there are other foreigners in our midst--people from other countries who have infiltrated American government with their exotic perspectives: twice-governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm has a Canadian perspective.  Congresswoman Lleana Ros-Lehtinen sees things from a Cuban point of view--more specifically, from a pro-Batista Cuban perspective.  

    Arnold Schwartzenegger, the weightlifter embraced by Republicans as our next president were it not for our nasty old Constitution, was born in Austria--and his father has been linked to the Nazi Party.  I shudder to think what Gingrich would say about Arnold's viewpoint.  George Romney was a U.S. citizen at birth, but he was born, nevertheless, in Chihuahua, Mexico.  Should we understand him as a Mexican?  How about his son, Mitt?  A closeted Mexican?  And Senator John McCain must see world affairs through a Canal Zone or Panamanian lens, even though he is a U.S. citizen, naturally.  Foreigners all!  Untrustful all!  At least if Gingrich's logic is carried to its conclusion.

J. Fred MacDonald
contact@iLiberal.us