The WAWG Blog

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
— Revolutionary activist Thomas Paine

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not fearful men, not descended from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
— US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow

“McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.”
— Journalist John Wight

Assassinating the messengers to void their message is a very common tactic. Women claiming assault or abuse are blamed for being victims. Members of the communist party were victimized to satisfying the fears of the right. Journalists are imprisoned and KILLED to keep their words from revealing the terror they witness. Now RT is slandered and requested to register as a foreign agent without regard to freedom of the press. When blaming/killing the messenger includes limiting constitutional freedoms, we are likely to lose those freedoms too.

Other than changing “liberal media” to “profit-centric corporate media,” I concur with this article: “As for those on the so-called left who have remained silent, or worse are gloating over the moves to shut down Russian media, they are like people feeding a crocodile hoping it will eat them last.”

This growth must go beyond reversing voter suppression, improving public education, and expanding civic participation. Maximizing the rule of democracy for our government of, by and for the PEOPLE must also include democratizing our economy. Record economic inequality must be reversed and it will take more tan tweaking the current economic system.

Expanding the democratic concept will require minimizing our century’s long acceptance of authoritarian economic domination. One place where this authoritarian domination has increasingly worked against we the PEOPLE is the workplace.

Can you imagine a workplace without managers, without a small group of extremely wealthy individuals making all the key decisions on products, employees, benefits, suppliers, and the best use of profits? This non-authoritarian workplace is foreign to most, but it exists, it is growing, and it’s been in place since WWII in some parts of the free world.

Read more about the THE FULL PARTICIPATION ECONOMY in this five part series from Democracy at Work:

PRISON WORKERS, THE AMERICAN WORKER AND THE POWER OF COOPERATIVE WORK [PART I]

Social Exclusion [Part II]

Viable Models — Looking Abroad and in the US [Part III]

The Worker Cooperative as a Bulwark against Social Exclusion [Part IV]

New York City — Where to go next? [Part V]

How effective was Russian propoganda on social media? Who many votes were switched? What other voter numbers are more significant?

But just how many Facebook users who saw this propoganda, actually bothered to vote? A 2010 study of Facebook users showed a small increase of 340,000 votes, nationwide, based on a direct get out the vote plea.

Then there were tens of millions who just didn’t vote, and Texas was worse than the nation, see table below.

Also, there was the GOP Operation Cross Check that eliminated upto 7 million minority votes from the 2016 election results.

And what about the large increase for third party candidates. In Galveston county Texas third party vote went from a historical average of 1.4% to 4.5%. Nationally the vote change for third party went from 1.7 in 2012 to 4.1 in 2016. And according to WikiPedia election results, the change in third party votes from 2012 to 2016 was 4,962,440 additional votes.

Many factors affected the 2016 election. This also includes media favoritism. Remember the CEO of CBS saying that DJT may be bad for the country but he’s great for the bottom line – profit. Tens of millions were spent on TV campaign ads telling voters what they already knew about DJT instead of investing in ground troops to make calls or go door-to-door to encourage voting. According to Steve Phillips in his book Brown Is the New White, some $20 million spent on TV ads for a 2014 losing Democratic Senatorial candidate could have resulted in 56,000 more votes for the loser if that money had instead been spent on the GOTV ground game.

Metrics on voting results show that voter turnout is increased by 5% with that kind of ground game. Add to that all the new voter suppression laws past by Republican controlled states with the help of ALEC and since SCOTUS ransacked the Civil Rights Act.

Elections are complex, multi-variant processes and blaming the results on one thing is grossly problematic and suspiciously distracting.

From the last chapter of Democracy In Chains, by Nancy MacLean, here is how the Koch Brothers and their elite Libertarian cadre are increasing their, white, billionaire, veto power over govt and majority rule:

1. By mandatory and ubiquitous Arbitration Clauses that allow corps to opt out of America’s justice system. Corporations can abuse Americans without reproach regardless of the harm they inflict.

2. By promoting Federal Judicial Activism which ranks Koch’s Economic Liberty over greater equity for the American majority. ” … one must be cognizant of the fact that no matter what those who have good intentions say, any decision that consolidates power in the national government is an attack on the foundation of self-government and liberty.”

3. By reinstating Jim Crow & expanding disenfranchisement: Massive minority Voter Suppression via Interstate Cross Check. After the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United and prior to the 2012 election, GOP Voter Suppression was expanded by 180 bills in 41 states. Massive Election Fraud = Elite minority rule

4. By states passing Preemption Laws to keep municipalities from protecting & empowering citizens: Fight For 15, Marriage Equality, Fracking. All with the help of SPN, ALEC, millions in KochKash, corporate lobbyists, and significant lower eligible voter participation. United States ranks 138th out of the world’s 172 democracies for voter turnout.

5. By “most audacious gerrymander in U.S. history …” to allow legislators to select their voters. After the unfathomable (for the extreme right) election of Obama, this elite right wanted to chose their electorate. The GOP (Koch) evil plan for massive voter control is documented in Redistricting Majority Project. Even though more Democratic votes are cast, more Republicans get elected/re-elected. More Voter Suppression.

To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form. – Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, page 233.

I’ve been reading Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. Yesterday, I read about some of the lessons learned by James Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan is the main subject of the book and the key producer of 20th Century Libertarian (Koch/Mercer/Friedman/Rand) ideas behind the stealth takeover of America to maximize their elitist, individual, liberty and minimize the freedoms of everyone else.

In the late 50’s, Buchanan and his team from the University of Virginia, were developing and sharing a plan to help the state of Senator Harry Byrd mount a major resistance to the Brown v Board of Education decision by SCOTUS. These good old white boys would rather close all Virginia public schools that attempted integration, and provide vouchers for private schools, than integrate. However, their ideas were no match for state Legislators who were more worried about getting reelected, many more citizens that supported the decision, and the court rulings that found their attempts to resist unconstitutional.

What Buchanan took from these losses, and started working on solutions for, was:

– Ameliorating the re-election fears of state legislators for both resisting federal intervention in state business and, at the same time, ignoring the wishes of their constituents. (Think Gerrymandering.)
– Making sure that our Constitution could no longer be used to block their “state’s rights” efforts to maximize their individual liberties and to force others to adhere to their minority view. (Think Constitutional Convention.)

After decades of refining his extreme, right-wing, ideas on control by the wealthy, James McGill Buchanan, professor at the University of Virginia and head of his very own Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy department, joined forces with the Koch Brothers, other Libertarians, and vast amounts of KochKash (funds from excessively wealthy, right-wing extremists from around the world) to stealthily and nonviolently:

• Minimize the freedoms of America’s majority through collective endeavors or federal government intervention, and
• Maximize the “economic liberties” of their Libertarian minority through suppression.

We all know from reading about The Powell Memo, the Kochs were, and still are, key to funding ALEC, The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other extreme right-wing organizations since the early 70s. What this books adds is how they developed all their extreme ideas in the late 50s before promulgation by all these right-wing propaganda outlets.

Part of this coup has been the takeover of the Republican party through the primary process. Two members of their minority cadre are Mike Pence and Ted Cruz. So, these Libertarian billionaires now own the GOP, and coincidentally are corporate leaders. Their corporations are just a tool for funding their stealth, non-violent, Libertarian coup.

Watch as Amy Goodman interviews Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy In Chains. This new book details this coup of America by a minority of Libertarians who know their ways will never be accepted by a majority of Americans, and is based on a recently discovered, long forgotten, and extensive archive at the University of Virginia and other historical records as annotated in its 60 pages of notes and 19 page bibliography.

Read a review of MacLean’s book at Slate.com.

At the birth of our nation, we rebelled against an external, wealthy, oligarchy that blatantly and violently minimized our freedoms. Now a new, well-organized, internal oligarchy, led by a minority of extremist Libertarians with fine tuned ideas and hordes of KochKash, are stealthily minimizing our freedoms and neutering our federal government.

Voter Suppression: Legalized, Rationalized, and Self-inflicted

Right-wing extremists have been promoting voter suppression since the founding of America.

Since Brown vs Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act, it was started anew with the Nixon’s war on drugs and using three strikes to get more convictions on felony charges. Now, after SCOTUS killed part of the Civil Rights Act, we’ve seen Voter IDs laws, shorter early voting periods, the end of same day registration, closed polling locations in minority neighborhoods, malfunctioning voter equipment sent to poor neighborhoods, lost voter registration forms, shutdown of minority voter registration efforts, and most recently voter roll purges of millions of minority voters in 30 states with the Interstate Cross Check actions.

And behind all this is Kochcash (any funds from right-wing billionaires) to pay for getting state laws written via ALEC, funding of the Tea Party to inspire right-wing extremist voters, and compilation of minority voter lists for purging those with similar names.

This and MORE has helped to bring Democratic legislative losses to almost 1,000 since 2008, with the largest jump in 2010.

The ‘MORE’ includes a profit-centric media that puts profit before public service. As the CEO of CBS said, DJT may be bad for the country, but he’s great for the company’s bottom line. This is a media that ignores those who discuss issues, gives free air time to those who lie fabulously, and helps suppress the vote further as voters tire of political waring.

The ‘MORE’ includes decades of right-wing messaging that promotes tax cuts for the wealthy to cripple government functions and then blaming government for failures. Messaging that promotes privatization of the government they have broken. Messaging that promotes me over we. Messaging that justifies inequality by promoting greed, individualism, self-discipline, self-made, and direct causation. Messaging that promotes war (punishment) on women, on poor, on LGBTQ, on people of color, on nations with dirty energy sources, on non-Christians, and on all those not like the right-wing ideal of white, successful, authoritarian men. All of this messaging makes voter suppression acceptable. ‘Those people’ don’t deserve to vote. They are morally inferior.

The ‘MORE’ includes excessive reductions in citizenship dues for those who meet this white, successful, authoritarian male ideal which means less funding for government to protect and empower its human capital. Their tax rates are reduced, especially for investment income. They also receive corporate welfare and can externalize corporate costs which maximizes both their profit and the harm done to the world’s citizens. The result of this wealth transfer it that most citizens spend all their time working. They don’t have time to vote and may lose their job if they take the time.

The ‘MORE’ also includes Democrats using Republican-lite messaging, https://www.thenation.com/article/jon-ossoffs-loss-should-be-a-lesson-to-corporate-democrats/. Right-wing voters have replaced most moderate Republicans with the more extreme brand of Republican or Libertarian by using effective messaging to support their extreme agenda. These voters have a mindset that affirmatively responds to this language. Democrats using Republican-lite, right-wing messaging, will only reinforce the mental frames that inspire right-wing voters to vote for the right-wing candidates. If the right-wing extremists won’t accept their moderate brothers and sisters, what makes Democrats think these voters will vote for a Republican-lite Democrat?

The ‘MORE’ includes suppressing Dem-leaning voters by ignoring the issues by which these voters are harmed. Issues are set aside in favor of speaking Republican-lite, sounding like your opponent, or asserting that you’re not your opponent, http://freebeacon.com/politics/study-nearly-all-hillary-clintons-tv-ads-didnt-discuss-policy/. As analysis of the 2016 election, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/move-left-democrats.html, shows there are far more Dem-leaning voters who either didn’t vote or voted third-party, than there are voters who switched from Obama to DJT.

Bottom line is: The right has fine tuned massive voter suppression and the left needs to stop helping them suppress the vote by imitating them.

Complaining about the idiocy of the opposition is such a distraction – a waste of time – and provides little incentive for Democratic voter turnout.

Democrats need to talk about how they will address the massive economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices perpetrated by the radical right-wing demagogues for the last four decades. Democrats need to speak to how they will equally empower and protect all citizens from the abuses of the extremely wealthy and the greedy multi-national corporations. Democrats need to speak to how they will equally maximize the freedoms of all citizens and stop others from maximizing freedoms for only the wealthy and the greedy multi-national corporations. Democrats need to speak to how they will reverse the destruction of our public infrastructure, which has occurred through both massive tax breaks for hedge fund managers, investors, and corporations, and through privatization. Democrats need to speak on how the profit motive supersedes the public interest, fabricates fake news, and destroys public infrastructure, which destroys the foundation for all that is private.

In other words, Democrats must maximize individual freedoms, rebuild our infrastructure, re-establish an independent free press, and take back our government from the oligarchs like Robert and Rebekah Mercer?

As an American Baby Boomer, I’ve lived under two different systems of government:

Post depression/post WWII and pre 1980s government:

Government of, by, and for the People requires:

• Government with the moral purpose to equally protect and empower ALL the People such that 1) People’s individual freedoms are maximized and 2) Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized, and
• Active participation (voting and paying citizenship dues) of a majority of the people to maintain such a government.

Post 1980’s government:

Government of, by, and only for the successful requires:

• Government with the focused purpose to protect and enrich only the successful such that their individual freedom and wealth are maximized without concern for any resulting injustices, and
• Active participation (voting, lobbying and campaign payments) of just the successful, and their lackeys, to maintain such a government.

Fortunately, I benefited greatly from both the former system of government and many other factors. Unfortunately, even though my daughter, and others her age and younger, shared similar factors, they will continue struggling with the latter system of government.

The latter system, which is killing our middle class, will continue until we re-learn that government of, by, and for ALL the People is key part of the solution.

The following are from an article by Thom Hartman, where you can read more:

When Washington became president in 1789, most of America’s personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to build American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791.

By 1793, most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either Washington or the various states.

Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen, and were only abandoned, after more than 200 successful years, during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day, as President Obama prepares to further expand “free trade”).

China, instead of following our recent path, implemented most of Hamilton’s plan, and it brought about a remarkable transformation of that nation in just a single generation.

…

China has been following the lead of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea during the past half century, and has become an industrial powerhouse as a result. And, ironically, each of those countries got their strategy from us:

…

South Korea did all this in a single generation by closing its economy and promoting its export industries. A decade earlier Japan had done the same thing. Forty years earlier Germany had done it.

…

Consider the historical impact of Hamilton’s plan, which was adopted in a series of piecemeal legislative and executive action steps mostly by 1793: Tariffs became so important that they constituted pretty much the only source of revenue for the federal government until the Civil War, were the single largest source of federal revenue from then until World War I. And even when government had grown exponentially as we led up to World War II, fully a third of all federal revenues came from tariffs.     [Note: Free trade, by eliminating tariffs, is like excessive tax breaks for the wealthy, they rob the government of revenue to enforce the moral purpose of government to equally protect and empower all the people such that 1) Their individual freedoms are maximized and 2) Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized.]

…

After 34 years of Reaganomics, we’ve completely flipped this upside down. We’ve become the world’s largest exporter of raw materials, the world’s largest importer of finished goods, and the world’s largest debtor. We now export raw materials to China, and buy from them manufactured goods. And we borrow from them to do it. Our trade debt right now stands at over $11 trillion, and it’s the principle reason why one-seventh of all assets in the United States are foreign-owned.

See the full article for Thom’s recommendations.

Today Thom Hartmann reviewed this history on FreeSpeech TV.