The Moral Rot of America’s Two Major Political Parties (from Karl Gabbey)

“The poisoning of an entire city by a Republican governor is a tragic object lesson for the entire country of why we should never entrust any public offices to members of a political party who have no interest in governing. This is the result when we elect people who only have the singular interest of enriching their big campaign contributors at the expense of everyone else…

“Let’s call a spade a spade: Snyder, Michigan’s self-appointed Republican dictator, is a criminal. One need only see his modus operandi of removing constitutionally elected public officials with whom he disagrees and replaces with his hand-picked ‘emergency managers’ who do his bidding. Snyder’s recklessness and callousness in this incredible environmental catastrophe and generally as governor is beyond shocking. Then, he blames the EPA. Typical of Republicans is never accept responsibility for the all the messes that they’ve created. The primary responsibility of poisoning the people of Flint, Michigan, particularly of its children was Snyder’s fault. Period! The buck stops in his office in Lansing.

“Snyder is but a microcosm of Republican governance everywhere. The leadership of the Republican Party, not only in Michigan, but across the country is a pack of criminals supported by the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson, and the rest of America’s 400 richest families while the party’s generally older white middle and lower income voter base is composed of suckers and useful idiots.

“Republican governance with its virulent strain of Ayn Rand / Milton Friedman / Alan Greenspan / Reaganomics (tax cuts for the rich) / Voodoo economics / deregulatory / ‘free market’ orthodoxy is destroying not only Flint, Michigan but the entire country. This Republican ideological mishmash of terrible ideas is wrecking our economy and laying waste to our environment. It’s decimating America’s middle class and creating a society of only the very wealthy and the poor. That’s the description of a third-world country and the end result for our nation if Republican governance is allowed to continue.

“Check the governorships of Sam Brownback, Rick Scott, Scott Walker, Bruce Rauner, John Kasich, Paul LePage, the governorships of the 11 former states of the Confederacy, and the rest of this disastrous criminal gang of Republicans running and ruining a majority of states. There’s a terrible pattern to how these guys ‘govern.’ Collectively, these Republican governors have caused more destruction with their ideology than ISIS terrorists could ever dream of doing, but who sends drones after them?

“Then, we have our illustrious Republican majority Supreme Court with its Citizens United, McCutcheon, and other terrible decisions. ‘Corporations are people’ and ‘money is speech,’ the Republican majority of five justices told the people of the United States that the more money ‘you’ have, the more speech ‘you’ have. Did our Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court deal a death blow to American representative democracy by putting it on the billionaires’ auction block where 99% of Americans have no chance of an opening bid?

“An obstructionist / destructionist Republican Congress has made the lives of ordinary Americans considerably more difficult. For many, it has created misery. A Republican-controlled Congress is still trying to repeal Obamacare, originally a Republican idea, and leave millions without health insurance. If the American people really understood the extent of disastrous Republican governance, the Republican Party would be consigned to the ‘dust bin of history’ where it belongs and its criminal leadership would rot in prison.

“Unfortunately, this pack of criminals has Fox News, Limbaugh, Clear Channel, and the rest of the corporate media, including NBC with Chuck Todd, and CNN constantly running interference for this despicable political gang that bears the title, ‘Republican Party.’ Our ‘mainstream media’ are a farce and a disgrace for not reporting the full extent of willful Republican recklessness, callousness, incompetence, and naked stupidity. As a result, a disturbing number of uninformed citizens get sucked into the spinning vortex of the Republican maelstrom.

“This is no exoneration of the leadership of the Democratic Party, particularly Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, nor corporate Democratic governors like Andrew Cuomo, nor mayors like Rahm Emanuel who have either adopted some of the Republican Party's odious ideas like so-called ‘education reform’ (No Child Left Behind / Race To The Top), charter schools, or Trans Pacific Partnership and have done little or nothing to rally popular opposition against Republican criminality. 

“Some of our top Democratic leaders have also sold their souls to the corporate juggernaut. Hillary Clinton sat on the board of Walmart and then, we have her unholy friendship with Wall Street. She needs to renounce publicly these dark relationships. President Obama is enthusiastically promoting ‘education reform’ and TPP. Like Don Quixote, the Democratic leadership under President Obama is still looking for the ‘impossible dream’ of politics called ‘bipartisanship’ while the Republican leadership is laughing its collective ass off. Unlike the Republican Party, there’s still hope for the Democratic Party. It has a healthy and growing progressive wing.

“The Republican Party of the United States of America thrives exclusively on ignorance, fear, hatred, racism, bigotry, misogyny, voter suppression, election fraud, gerrymandering, deception, distortion, lies, unlimited corporate money, and I dare say, voter apathy. It does not and can never exist through the ‘strength’ of its shoddy ideas: eliminate or privatize Social Security; eliminate or privatize public as well as private pensions (the latter is a Republican success story); eliminate or privatize Medicare; eliminate and privatize public education; eliminate and privatize our national parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Sequoia National Forest; privatize and eliminate / liquidate the rest of the nation’s public assets that belong to all Americans; privatize our entire water supply; privatize the air we breathe; eliminate the IRS; eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.); do the bidding of the NRA and oppose all sensible gun measures; eliminate anyone or anything that stands in the way of the ruthless corporate juggernaut of which the Republican Party is the primary tool. Finally, eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and we’ll experience the likes of Flint, Michigan a thousand fold across America.   

“The circumstances surrounding the lead poisoning of Flint's citizens, particularly its children through recklessness, incompetence, and callous indifference is just the tip of the iceberg of Republican criminal behavior through its governance across the United States. If not now, what will it take to hold the entire Republican Party and their warped, if not deadly, ideology accountable for this disaster of disasters in Flint? Under continued Republican governance, Flint will be the future of the United States of America. Good night, Flint, Michigan. Good Night, America! Sleep well…

Originally published in Fred Klonsky’s blog: Good Night Flint by Karl Gabbey

Commentary (Redux)

Indeed, we live in a country where the Democratic/Republican Party System is failing us; where venture capitalists and hedge fund billionaires are buying and destroying our democracy; where 401(k) s are fraudulent games of theft and greed played within the wealthy financial sector; where numerous senators and representatives are pawns of the American Legislative Exchange Council; where “the privatization of health services has corresponded closely with skyrocketing costs, leaving millions of Americans without access to care or deeply in debt for seeking treatment for their illnesses.” 

We live in a country where a major credit-rating agency was accused of “manipulating pension data”; where “Koch-supported groups have strongly worked behind the scenes on the federal and local levels to eradicate Social Security and Medicare as overly costly entitlements given to working class people,” and where the Koch Brothers and major corporations sponsor pension reform seminars for judges.

We live in a country where Moody’s Investors Service, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s “gave out AAA ratings to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. The securities, of course, turned out to be toxic, but the agencies were paid anyway. What's worse, when Wall Street ran out of questionable mortgages to securitize, it created a whole new market based on bets on those securities, bets called ‘derivatives.’ The Big Three kept on handing out AAA ratings to these complicated new products, and were again paid handsomely to do so. The rating agencies made hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the end, it was American taxpayers who paid the price -- losing their savings, their homes and their jobs in addition to having to pay billions to bail out banks…” 

We live in a country where breaking a constitutional contract with retirees and public employees is deemed morally and legally justifiable by legislative liars and thieves; where public employees and retirees are victims of plutocratic, concentrated economic privilege and power that accommodates and reinforces an enormous inequality of organizational resources for corporate self-seekers; where public schools are for sale; where public school teachers have been assaulted by a barrage of attacks on their autonomy, dignity and self-respect; where labor unions have lost political power and influence; where there is no pay equity or job security for college adjunct faculty, and where “memories of the university as a citadel of democratic learning have been replaced by a university eager to define itself largely as an adjunct of corporate power.” 

We live in a country where the plutocratic free market theory caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of millions of Americans, while promising “freedom and prosperity;” where Free market principles advocate that the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; where education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized to reap in more profits; where publicly-owned companies, services and their assets are auctioned off to private investors; that besides allocating vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, there is a transfer of private debts to the public sector while public ownership and service are systematically dismantled.

—Glen Brown