A basic Pamphlet for Non-voters and Republicans alike

This is a work in progress. To say the least.  I tapped this out this morning. Basically, I can only feel my heart drop when I hear uninformed people making comments about what is going on in the country and about all of our futures.  I don’t even debate them. But I want to have something to hand them. A pamphlet. Something that paints the entire picture.

Below the flip is just the introduction to pamphlet I am creating. If you care to read through some or all of it (I know it’s long), I would appreciate any critiques or advice.  I got to where I stopped today… the part where I start to go into what the Bush Administration has been up to. I am going to have to tackle that more methodically; there are so many crimes!

For Your Eyes Only!

This is a manifest for the non-voting public who likely consider themselves conservatives. Now, if you think I will ultimately tell you to ‘vote democrat’ then your assumption is wrong.  There is no group or party in existence today that I could recommend you vote to vote for.  I can only hope for the American public to wake up so that we can evolve into a nation that cares enough to be informed about what our identity is and whether we might need to come together to create an ideal national identity. 

I live and work in a sea of ‘conservatives.’ Their pre-Great Depression ‘attitudes’ about race & gender, social welfare, taxes, unions, civics, law enforcement, civil rights, and the citizen role in a democratic republic is almost too much to take sometimes. The only consolation is that the majority of them don’t bother to vote.  It’s fair to say that 50% of those eligible to vote don’t bother.  Yet 65% of the population has claimed that they voted in national elections since the 1960s. That’s good news in a way. At least they feel they should have voted. So I am talking to that 15% of the population – or 15 million people — who say they vote, yet don’t .  Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote by ½ million votes.  What if the 15 million who feel they should vote had bothered?  I would bet that George W. Bush, Jr. would have won in a landslide.

“America is swinging to the right.”  So ‘they’ say.  That’s correct, an uninformed population tends to be more conservative than liberal.  It’s safer to oppose ‘progress’ if you don’t know the first thing about an issue. Just stop ‘progress’ in its tracks if you care not to indulge your civic obligation to be informed. 

Well, non-voters, I am here to say that if you knew anything about the issues, you might do a bit more than just vote.  You may just find yourself looking back at some the history in this nation such as the Continental Convention and the Declaration of Independence and at the US Constitution itself.

What are some the issues that an informed and decent American might look into?  In no particular order:

Medicare Reform
Bankruptcy Reform
Telecommunications Reform
Free Trade
Military Force
Tax Cuts & Fee-based Government Services
Taxpayer-subsidized Healthcare Reform
Social Security Reform
Unitary Executive vs Checks & Balances
Privileged State Secrets for “National Security”
Voting Reform (HAVA, Help America Vote Act)
Voter Disenfranchisement (www.fairvote.org)
Publicly-funded Elections
Judicial Reform
Outsourcing vs Illegal Immigration
Unions
Environmental Policy
Climate Change vs Petrochemical-dependent Industries
Science
States’ Rights
Public Lands
Open Government
Contempt of Congress
The Patriot Act
FISA and Surveillance of Americans
Food & Drug Safety
Corporate ‘Farmers’
Public Education – funding, programs & policies
Politicizing Government Institutions expressly for Electoral Advantage
Separation of Church and State
Treason
Bribery of Elected Officials
The United Nations
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund
The Federal Reserve (What is that anyways?)
The Budget, the Deficit and Use of your tax dollars
Tax & Spend vs Borrow & Spend
How a Congressional Bill Becomes Law
Corporatism and the Global Economy
Mortgage Crisis 2007 vs S&L Crisis in the 1980s
NAFTA

We will cover each of the above issues shortly. But, first, let’s take a trip down memory lane to view Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” for America and the environment that unified the masses to implement it.  Oh, history is so ‘yesterday’s news!’  Trust me, it isn’t.  Every single one of the above issues is an attack on The New Deal.  Why? Because the New Deal is what made America great. It created the healthiest middle class in the history of the world.  It gave a name to every country in the world on grounds of whether a country was 1st, 2nd or 3rd world nations.  (If you think the USA still covets the first place ribbon for being a First World Nation you are gonna be really pissed!)

Back to FDR and The New Deal.  From the Prologue of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1957.

1933

The White House, midnight, Friday, March 3, 1933.  Across the country the banks of the nation had gradually shuttered their windows and locked their doors.  The very machinery of the American economy seemed to be coming to a stop.  The rich and fertile nation, overflowing with natural wealth in its fields and forests and mines, equipped with unsurpassed technology, endowed with boundless resources in its men and women, lay stricken.  “We are at the end of our rope,” the weary President at last said, as the striking clock announced the day of his retirement.  “There’s nothing more we can do.”

Saturday, March 4, dawned gray and bleak.  Heavy winter clouds hung over the city.  A chill northwest wind brought brief gusts of rain. The darkness of the day intensified the mood of helplessness.  “A sense of depression had settled over the capital, “reported the New York Times, “so that it could be felt.”  In the later morning, people began to gather for the noon ceremonies, drawn, it would seem, by curiosity as much as by hope.  Nearly one hundred thousand assembled in the grounds before the Capitol, standing in quiet groups, sitting on benches, watching from rooftops.  Some climbed the bare, sleet-hung trees.  As they waited, they murmured among themselves, “What are those things that look like little cages?,” one asked.  “Machine guns,” replied a woman with a nervous giggle.  “The atmosphere which surrounded the change of government in the United States,” wrote Arthur Krock, “was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in war time.”  The colorless light on the cast-iron skies, the numb faces of the crowd, created almost an air of fantasy.  Only the Capitol seemed real, etched like a steel engraving against the dark clouds.

  . . .

  The fog of despair hung over the land. One out of four American workers lacked a job.  Factories that had once darkened the skies with smoke stood ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes.  Families slept in tarpaper shacks and tin-lined caves and scavenged like dogs for food in the city dump.  In October the New York City Health Department had reported that over one-fifth of the pupils in public schools were suffering from malnutrition.  Thousands of vagabond children were roaming the land, wild boys of the road.  Hunger marchers, pinched and bitter, were parading cold streets in New York and Chicago.  On the countryside unrest had already flared into violence.  Farmers stopped milk trucks along Iowa roads and poured the milk into the ditch.  Mobs halted mortgage sales [i.e., foreclosure sales], ran the men from the banks and insurance companies out of town, intimidated courts and judges, demanded a moratorium on debts.  When a sales company in Nebraska invaded a farm and seized two trucks, the farmers in the Newman Grove district organized a posse, called it the “Red Army,” and took the trucks back.  In West Virginia, mining families, turned out of their homes, lived in tents along the road on pinto beans and coffee.

  In January, Eward A. O’Neal, an Alabama planter, head of the Farm Bureau Federation, bluntly warned a Senate committee, “Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than twelve months.”  Donald Richberg, a Chicago lawyer, told another Senate committee a few weeks later, “There are many signs that if the lawfully constituted leadership does not soon substitute action for words, a new leadership, perhaps unlawfully constituted, will arise and act.”  William Green, the ordinarily benign president of the ordinarily conservative American Federation of Labor, told a third committee that if Congress did not enact a thirty-hour law, labor would compel employers to grant it “by universal strike.”  “Which would be class war, practically?” interrupted Senator Hugo Black.  “Whatever it would be,” said Green, “it would be that. … That is the only language that a lot of employers ever understand – the language of force.”  In the cities and on the farms, Communist organizers were finding a ready audience and a zealous following.

  . . .

  Elmer Davis reported that the leading citizens of one industrial city – it was Dayton, Ohio – had organized a committee to plan how the city and the country around could function as an economic unit if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running.  Over champagne and cigars, at the Everglades in Palm Beach, a banker declared the country on the verge of revolution; another guest, breaking the startled silence, advised the company to “step [outside] the [borders] of the United States of America with as much cash as you can carry just as soon as it is feasible for you to get away.”  “There’ll be a revolution, sure,” a Los Angeles banker said on a transcontinental train.  “The farmers will rise up.  So will labor. The Reds will run the country – or maybe the Fascists.  Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”

  . . .

  The images of a nation as it approached zero hour:  the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol Plaza.

“Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”  Well, he did.  He turned us into a nation that worked, that cared for the least among us, that ultimately became the richest nation on earth due to our agricultural and manufacturing might. Every (white) citizen stood a chance.  The promise of The American Dream would soon become a promise paid out strictly by virtue of one’s own sweat and tears.

The New Deal was put in place in the first 100 days of FDR’s presidency.  (Yes, the precedent for gauging the first 100 days of a new presidency was set by FDR, because of the incredible work he accomplished in his first 100 days.) 

FDR accomplished a few things:

• The Emergency Banking act
• The Economy Act
• Establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps
• Abandonment of the Gold Standard
• Federal Emergency Relief Act, setting up a national relief system (Remember, 25 out of 100 Americans had no work or real home or food.)
• Agricultural Adjustment Act, establishing a national agricultural policy
• Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, providing for the refinancing of farm mortgages (Take note that GWB’s solution to the foreclosure crisis that has only just begun was to hand $35 billion dollars over to the bankers who issued bad loans. That was to keep the banks afloat.  The homeowners who are being foreclosed?  They lose their house. But at least the banks won’t go under!  They get the taxpayer dollars and the houses!)
• Tennessee Valley Authority Act, providing for the unified development of the Tennessee Valley. (I know the folks in Appalachia love their phones and indoor plumbing, yet Tennessee didn’t go to Gore in 2000.)
• Truth-in-Securities Act, requiring full disclosure in the issue of new securities. (How did Enron get away with what they did?)
• The abrogation of the Gold Clause in public and private contracts.
• Home Owners’ Loan Act, providing for the refinancing of home mortgages. (supra, note the payoff to the banks instead of help for the people losing their homes in 2007. In 1932, Hoover passed some ‘relief’ for home owners. Oh yeah, his plan was similar to GWB’s: give the banks an incentive to give more loans.  In 1932, more than 250,000 Americans lost their homes. On inauguration day, foreclosures were taking place at 1000 per day.)
• National Industrial Recovery Act, providing for a system of industrial self-government under federal supervision and for a $3.3 billion public works program.
• Glass-Steagall Banking Act, divorcing commercial and investment banking and guaranteeing bank deposits. (Note, that FDIC sticker on your bank’s front doors is a lovely sight today.)
• Farm Credit Act, providing for the reorganization of agricultural credit activities.
• Railroad Coordination Act, setting up a federal coordinator of Transportation.

Now, I am not too fond of several of the Acts in the New Deal.  Abandoning the gold standard and giving the President the express power to print money (worth nothing more than Monopoly money and a promise) doesn’t strike me, in hindsight, as all too prudent.  These should have been temporary.  But, interestingly, the only New Deal items the Republicans haven’t touched are these. 

FDR got really radical.  Social Insurance.  Western Europe had that tackled a generation earlier.  It was a mere idea in the USA in 1933.  What is social insurance?  It encompasses the foundation of true economic security in a nation:  unemployment compensation, old-age assistance, health insurance, workers’ compensation, specialized assistance for certain populations. You know, ‘the least among us” like the blind and disabled, the mentally handicapped, the elderly, children).

Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman in a presidential cabinet, said:  “We shall have to establish in this country substantially all of the social insurance measures which the western European countries have set up in the last generation.” But she warned that there was no insurance more important than actual employment.

And Social Security was born.  It isn’t some entitlement program, folks.  All of us contribute to it everyday that we earn wages.  Remember the big brouhaha in D.C. for the better part of the Bush Jr. Administration?  Promises (threats!) of privatizing ‘Social Security?”  The Bush plan was to collect money from your paycheck (15%) and invest it in the stock market.  Ask all those professionals in this country who have tear-stained copies of their 401(k) statements stashed in their file cabinets if investing in the stock market is a good plan.  (We used to get pensions, btw, but that’s a whole other lonnnngggg essay).  Anyways, the single-most successful policy for the general security for the masses has been on the ‘conservative’ chopping block for decades.  So far, we have kept their grubby hands off our savings. I think. Who’s to say what the books look like?

Okay, enough of all that ‘ancient’ history.  It’s so boring anyhow but it was important to premise this manifest with FDR and the New Deal because the premier policy goal of conservatives in this country has been defined in one sentence by neoconservative Grover Norquist:

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” he says, “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

The Nation’s article entitled Grover Norquist: The Field Marshal of the Bush Plan  noted, “To Norquist . . . hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts.”  Lovely guy. And he has played a large role in the Bush ‘economic’ policies. 

It was Norquist’s idea to take the budget surplus that Clinton miraculously created after inheriting the Bush the First’s bankrupt treasury and turn that surplus over to ‘the people.’ What a populist that George Bush was for returning the $1.3 trillion dollars in checks.  Yeah, I remember the summer of 2001 and receiving my $300 check.  That was quite the ‘relief’ when I had to replace a $450 water heater in the house that was purchased with my now non-existent livable wages proffered by the William Jefferson Clinton economy.  Thanks George!  FDR turned an entire nation around, and you gave me a down-payment on a water heater!  Oh and cleaned out the treasury before implementing a plan for unending war that will be financed by our grandchildren and their children. What did you do with your $300?  I will tell you what you did with it. The very next tax day, April 15, 2002, you received $300 less in the standard deduction you normally take.  Get that?  It wasn’t a refund; it was an interest-free loan for a few months.  But was it interest-free?  Not if the government then had to ‘borrow’ money from around the world to pay for itself and pay interest to those foreign nations, it wasn’t.  He cleaned out the treasury to get back to the good ole days of Reagan when the only money the USA had to spend was money that was loaned to us by other nations!

Okay, so now we have a good picture of how the USA became a 1st World Nation and how the middle class was created. (I know… you have to take my word for it that it was the New Deal that made us strong.  If it takes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. two 500 page volumes to discuss FDR and the New Deal, I am certainly not going to try to cover it extensively.  Read it yourself .  Learn something about what made this country great.  Here’s a hint:  it isn’t because we were the first to get and twice use the nuclear bomb.  We weren’t great because the world was afraid of us. It was our productivity.  (Do we produce anything in this nation? Think about it. What do we produce in the USA?  And you think the illegals from Mexico is what threatens your economic security?  Au Contraire.)

No study of modern conservatism would be complete without covering the Cold War, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK, Jr., Vietnam, Watergate, and Reagan and Bush 1’s ‘compassionate’ conservatism and the savings & loan, manufacturing sector and deficit crises of the 1980s.  But the issues at hand that should be getting your attention under Bush the Younger are so much greater than any of the atrocities and crimes committed by his predecessors that we really need to launch right into the present day to see if you 15 million ‘non-voters with a conscience about not voting’ can realistically call yourselves ‘conservative’ or ‘republican’ with any sense of dignity. 

First, what do conservative power-holders want you to care about?  Homosexuals.  Anna Nicole Smith.  Survivor/Big Brother/So you think you can dance?/Lauren Conrad, Heidi and Spencer.  Missing white girls.  American Idol. Whether someone is a Christian and, if not, how to keep them away from your kids.  Ipods.  Remodeling your house so it will be the bling bling of the neighborhood.  Spending. Debt Accumulation.  Eating fast foods.  Abortion.  Welfare Moms soaking the system.  The damn illegal Mexicans stealing your jobs! Liberals.  God.  Scary Muslims that want to kill you.

What do I and other progressives want you to care about?  The issues.  The ones listed above.  There are countless more. 

I can’t say that I can cover every single issue but I hope that by covering some, you might come to the same conclusion I have, which is:

A radical group of anti-American, anti-democracy criminals have taken over the US Government. Their policies are designed to drive down the wage base of the American public and transfer as much or all of the wealth of the nation into the hands of a very, very few.  They are succeeding.  They have visions of world domination via multi-national corporations.  They want a two class system comprised of the elite who will hold all of the wealth and power and a working class that will serve the elite.  (Put it this way, the conservatives are close to being communists.  Communism is defined simply as who controls or owns the means of production.  Karl Marx wanted the people to own it.  The conservatives in America want a few elite to own it.  Here’s a hint: you won’t be one of the elite owners of the means of production.)  This radical sect has made tremendous strides in moving the country in this direction with overt complicity of elected officials who are supposed to be their opposition and with the help of an complacent and sleeping populace. You. And me.

Will be adding info about what Bush and the neocons have been up to these past 6 years…..