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Forget D.C.—the Battle is in the States

By Nathan Newman and David Sirota

Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn’t talking about work they’d done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting… return to article

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    Testeng.

    United States Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:24 AM

    The rational majority in the USA does not share you leftist’s fascination with progressive policies. 

    The ultimate manifestation of progressive policy and action was the Soviet Union and international communism, which resulted in about 100 million innocent dead, and which itself died of corruption and inefficiency.

    Socialist Old Europe is not doing much better.  When progressives are not outright killing their own people, as in the SU, they are lacking in human passion and failing to reproduce, as in Europe today.  Europe’s passion for disastrous socialist policies, as opposed to their passion for each other, results in such progressive policies as multiculturism and rampant bureaucracy.  But the Muslim immigrants to Europe do have a passion for each other, and if something radical does not happen soon, Europe will soon be a Muslim monoculture, with essentially no economy, huge pension obligations for old native Europeans, and no means of satisfying its obligations; you think a bunch of uneducated, unemployed Muslim youth are going to pay pension benefits for a bunch of old white Europeans?  Probably not.

    At the time of the death of the Soviet Union, progressive influence in Latin America was at a nadir, but has since made a remarkable recovery following Gramscian socialist policies.  Not to worry; the LA economy with the greatest access to resources is Venezuela, with its oil.  Senor Chavez is rapidly wrecking the Venezuelan economy, and utterly wasting his countries valuable assets on socialist schemes worthy of Stalin himself.  Poor Venezuela, but there will be a reaction.  I hope the reaction comes before the price of oil drops, and the Venezuelans have income to begin to recover from the Chavez disaster.  But don’t count on it.

    This quote from the article above illustrates nicely the folly of progressive policies:

    The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right’s campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations—and a few religious conservative allies—as the only forces with significant resources in politics.

    There is an inherent assumption in the statement above that private institutions are corrupt and state institutions are not corrupt.  That is false, of course.  There were a number of high-profile scandals (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco) that developed during the Bubba Bubble and are being prosecuted by the Bush Administration.  But these cases, big as they were, are a small percentage of the American economy, and the perps are in jail or on their way to jail.

    Continued ...

    United States Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:33 AM

    The biggest case of corruption in world history, bigger by far than the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal, was President Johnson’s Great Society programs.  Welfare alone cost over $6 trillion, and the only practical effect was to destroy black families in America.  Using tax money to fund welfare necessarily meant that this money was not available for investment and job creation, and in fact there was a period of over a decade when the American economy did not grow. 

    During the Carter Catastrophe, the economy was stagnant, interest rates and inflation were sky-high, and employment was down.  Carter and his economists concluded that the American economy was in terminal decline, like the Soviet Union.  All because of the abuse of the American economy dating from the Great Society.  President Reagan corrected that in a hurry, and the American economy went into the greatest period of growth in history, briefly interrupted by the Clinton tax increases and the Bubba Bubble.

    In a free society, such as ours, progressive foolishness is recognized as such by the majority of citizens, who vote for free-market capitalist democracy, the proven system that generates wealth rather than destroys it, as progressive policies do.  But good rational people stare in wonder at the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and utter useless destruction generated by progressives.  Such as described in this article.

    United States Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:33 AM
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