November 2^nd, 2004. 

I remember it well. Some good, loving, liberal friends threw a post-election ‘wake’, giving us all an opportunity to mourn the electoral defeat of John Kerry, a good man, an intellectual, a war hero and a terrible candidate, to George W. Bush, who possessed the exact opposite characteristics. We all correctly feared more war, more economic demise in the coming years and wondered what could have been done differently.

The food was wonderful. The kinship was enjoyable. The determination to do what it takes to actually beat the massive machine that Movement Conservatism had become was tragically self-defeating.

Getting fed up with Democrats and Liberals from Carter to Mondale, from Dukakis to Gore and finally to Kerry, I told everyone that we had to stop apologizing for what we believe. We must stop allowing ourselves to be defined by this powerful message machine comprised of conservative think tanks, Rush Limbaugh and all his wannabe talk radio mimics, and the nascent and newly powerful conservative force, Fox “News”.

The title wave was only going to get bigger and more powerful. I told everyone that we had to stop being nice. We had to force Conservatives to defend themselves as being a threat to individual rights, working class Americans and families struggling to get by.

The push back I received was what I expected. “We don’t want Republicans to think we hate them. We just want them to try to understand where we’re coming from.”

Sigh.

The 2006 and 2008 elections were victories won the only way modern Democrats have been able to win in the last 30 years; with Republicans having governed for more than 2 years. Democrats won those elections mainly because Republicans in full power had governed the way we knew they would and their governing was having a traumatic effect on our nation and its economy.

Having Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate didn’t hurt our cause either.

The Iraq War was, in 2006, a full blown humanitarian disaster. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were being slaughtered and millions were forced to move from their homes, never to return.  American soldiers were losing their lives by the hundreds while going back to tour after tour of duty. Al Qaeda, a non-presence in Iraq before the war, was now fully present and operational, adding violence and terror to an already vicious mix.

And the economy was starting to crumble. Warnings of a pending housing crisis were beginning to be realized, employment was getting worse and our national debt was piling up. The veneer of George W. Bush as a swashbuckling President creating an all-powerful America was falling apart with frequent verbal gaffes and extraordinary failure in Iraq, in the war on terrorism and the economy. Dick Cheney’s lies were becoming more and more exposed.

The Bush/Cheney failure, the economic disaster that was unfolding and the Republicans weak candidates opened a path for a young and unproven Barack Obama to take the election in 2008 with positive messages of hope and change.

Then after the 2008 election Democrats and Liberals went back to their apathetic and apologetic political zone. They and our new President once again settled into to my friends’ operational belief that if we offer an olive branch of peace to conservatives they’ll work with us to forge a great American partnership.  They believed that conservatives would see the history of the disastrous Bush/Cheney administration and realize they could not repeat it.

Then disaster struck once again. Every effort by President Obama—doing  his best John Kerry impersonation—to find middle ground with Republicans was met with a stab in the back.  In fact, a newly published book by journalist Robert Draper, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do”, reveals that Republicans leaders past and present and pollster Frank Lutz, gathered on the night of inauguration and conspired to simply block every item on Obama’s agenda through his entire term using any means possible. Not surprisingly Newt Gingrich led the discussion.

A growing force that emerged as the Tea Party began to dominate the conversation. Tea Party sympathizers and members started believing the lies of an angry Sarah Palin, that there were death panels in Health Care Reform. Millions believed in the strategically created lie that Barack Obama may not be an American citizen and that he surely must be a closet Muslim who, as Palin asserted, “pals around with terrorists.”

Obama’s Health Care Reform plan was going to force millions of Americans into a plan they didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

None of it was true of course. These were carefully crafted lies repeated over and over on talk radio, on Fox News and in conservative newspapers.

The mainstream media, after 30 years of being frightened at being labeled “liberally biased”, treated every false accusation as if it might be true, just as they had with the buildup to the Iraq War, just as they had during Clinton’s impeachment, just as they had with the Swift Boat Liars who successfully turned war hero John Kerry into a coward with questionable patriotic credos.

This was a tried and true method of the Movement Conservatives; turn your political opponent into a hated figure. That way, the people whom your opponent’s policies will most surely benefit—in this case working class and middle class professionals—will be blinded to the policies by their anger and hatred of the man.

The examples are abundant.

Dukakis and the furloughs of frightening black murderers.

Gore and his ties to an immoral President.

Mondale promised to raise taxes and make us weak.

 Liberals believed in free sex and allowing gays to ‘recruit’ young people into their world threatening family’s nation-wide.  Remember the era of the “angry white male” in the early 80s? They were angry at all the efforts to bring equality into our nation after 350 years of slavery and another century of minority disenfranchisement.

Obama was an easy mark;  a mixed race man with the middle name of our enemy and a full name that reeked of Muslim terrorist ties. I’ll never forget a video I saw during the 2008 election. A young man with a home video camera asked more than 50 people waiting in line for a McCain-Palin event what they thought of Senator Obama. Every single one of them said he was a Muslim. Every one of them!

The foundation of the Tea Party was born. Large corporations and health insurance companies knew that once they had the hatred of middle class Americans on their side, they could get away with creating policies that would cause great harm to those same people while generating huge profits and tax cuts for large corporations and wealthy individuals.

In 2010 all those factors created a big victory for right wing conservatives nationwide.

States like Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and Florida elected far right wing Tea Party supported governments that began to strip away voting rights, reproductive rights and workers’ rights, while giving huge tax cuts to large corporations.

Right on cue.

Today former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney stands poised to be the next Republican to benefit from these false stereotypes and the historical amnesia of middle class America. He promises to enact economic and foreign policies that are not just similar to the Bush/Cheney model but far more destructive.

Romney has shown during the Republican primary and at the beginning stages of the general election campaign a willingness to make statements that are blatantly false, the most egregious being that he never supported “Obamacare” for the nation and that the statement about Romney’s wife, made by a CNN pundit, was most certainly attributable to the entire Obama nation.

That was then….

This is now.

Take that one statement by Hillary Rosen. She said that Anne Romney “never worked a day in her life,” and therefore doesn’t understand what life is like for middle and low income working moms. Romney’s campaign lashed out at Obama, falsely claiming that Rosen was speaking for the Obama campaign. For several days the Romney/conservative message machine was gaining traction with this phony “war on moms”.

This time the response was different. It was swift and it was destructive. Instead of a compliant media and apathetic liberals apologizing for, well for nothing, the truth came bursting through.

Facebook liberals started posting a video and quotes from Romney speaking in New Hampshire in January. “While I was governor,” Romney said, “85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work.  I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”

Facebook Nation erupted. The hypocrisy of Romney’s statements was impossible for the formally compliant and frightened corporate media to ignore. They, too, had to play the quote. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell all chimed in, exposing this huge hypocrisy before the entire nation.

Their satire, their reporting, their quick wit were instantly copied and posted on Facebook by the tens of thousands, opening up formerly complacent liberal eyes with their morning coffee.

Women who were already furious with state legislatures and Governors in Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states forcing women who chose an abortion to take medical procedures that were medically unnecessary and as invasive as invasive gets, understood immediately what was happening.

This time they fought back with a vengeance.

For the first time since Lyndon Johnston’s era, liberals have found a fighting voice. They have found their muscle and they are ready to punch back. Even more challenging for Romney is where that muscle is derived; Social Media.

Facebook has changed our world. For many it’s a way to stay in touch with old friends and deliver family news to friends.

But Facebook has been a powerful force for change. Take Virginia for instance.

When the Commonwealth’s right wing legislature and Governor passed the law calling for invasive medical procedures on women who were about to have an abortion, a Facebook protest was organized in less than a week, resulting in more than a thousand ‘silent’ protesters in front of the Governor’s mansion and making national headlines. Governor Bob McDonnell was compelled to remove the invasive procedure provision in the law. His opportunity to become Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate was severely hampered.

A bigger picture is August of 2011. This was arguably President Obama’s weakest point in his office. The huge mid-term victories by the Tea Party were still serving as fresh evidence that Obama might just be 21^st century version of Jimmy Carter. Those Tea Party candidates who were about to govern had yet to implement some of the extremist agenda that would quickly sour most people’s impression of the movement.

So the Republicans, with the media still frightened, with the Muslim/Birther issue still strong within their base, with the nation not happy with the economic recovery, decided to put the hammer down.

They took the debt ceiling to the brink. They forced President Obama into a weeks-long negotiation to prevent the American people and our entire economy from defaulting on our debt obligations. They believed they could force this weak president, and convince this weak generation of journalists, that the only way to cut debt was to cut spending and allow for a continuation of the Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy.

This time the compliant liberal base was no longer compliant. With social media providing the muscle they punched back.

Every news story on Eric Cantor and the Republicans’ effort to look like the true deficit busters was met with massive social media digging up the stories and the facts not seen on Fox or on Sarah Palin’s mythical “lamestream media”.

Facebook, web logs (Blogs), YouTube all became windows to a truth that had been effectively covered for decades by an aggressive conservative movement echo chamber.

As Cantor tried to position himself as the hero of debt reduction, his own record of voting to raise more than $5 trillion in debt during the Bush years was thrown right back into his face. The Daily Kos was one of thousands of sites that pounded on the proverbial bully.

Eric Cantor and the "tea party" Republicans …turned the raising of the debt limit—nearly a yearly occurrence, under Bush, and with zilch in the way of fanfare—into some new unholy amalgamation of the Battle of the Bulge, Custer's Last Stand, and a particularly plotless Michael Bay film. We must balance the budget! We must not raise taxes! And it must happen right now, because after ten years of sitting on our collective asses and ballooning the deficit with our own ridiculous demands, we conservatives finally realized all of this the very moment a Democrat moved into the White House!

This kind of language, repeated millions of times on social media sites gave formerly disheartened liberals factual ammunition and a powerful voice. They forced journalists to dig up archival stories they used to be too lazy or too frightened to do; like  Cantor & Co. raising the debt limit regularly for the better part of a decade.

Polls reflected this new-found strength in a year that should have been disastrous for liberalism.

The CBS/New York Times poll conducted in August of that year revealed, “A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995.

More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt-ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.”

That poll was followed by the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People young and old but mostly young, occupied valuable New York City territory for weeks, displaying their grave concerns over Wall Street and large corporations running government at all levels; leaving ordinary working Americans little voice and little economic benefit. The Occupy movement spread across the nation and the world. Suddenly the national conversation wasn’t about cutting spending but economic equality.

Occupy was fully organized with lightning speed on social media.

And it’s remained that way ever since. Republicans will continue to talk about spending cuts but they now are forced to fight the fight of economic fairness. This is, to say the least, an uncomfortable battle for them. When it became public that their shiny new presidential candidate is building a car elevator in one of his mansions, Facebook nation has revealed that, as Governor, Romney vetoed a $65,000 bill to enhance a few elevators to make them more accessible for people with disabilities.  

The biggest battle this new generation of muscular liberals will have to fight will be against the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that allows millions to be spent on behalf of candidates secretly.

Progressives must keep up the fight, keep talking and ignore those who say we’re not being polite enough to our fellow conservatives. Otherwise we will be enjoying delicious food at yet another progressive ‘wake’.

The marathon buildup to Mitt Romney’s apparent nomination to the Republican ticket revealed through more than 25 debates one very clear thought the candidates wanted Republican primary voters to understand; they planned to run the federal government just like their political deity Ronald Reagan ran things.

 Low taxes. Small government. Freedom & flags as far as the eye can see.

The fact that the Gipper grew government to huge levels and raised more middle class taxes on more Americans than any other president were, like so many facts in the distorted reality of the Fox and friends era, irrelevant to these proceedings.

The ghost of Reagan permeated the debates. A January Washington Post analyses of the Republican debates revealed that Republican candidates mentioned the Gipper 221 times at that point. Newt Gingrich was, by and far, the most anxious to associate himself with Reagan, though he was a huge critic of the man when Reagan was president.

And yet through all the debates; from 9-9-9 to the Department of…uh…oh well…, to Newt’s constant proclamations of the Holocaust like horror if Obama continues his reign of terror, we didn’t really hear the names of two people who came long after Ronald Reagan retired his presidency to sunny California.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. While Reagan garnered those 221 mentions in those debates Bush was only mentioned 56 times.

Can anyone remember any of the candidates saying, “I want to return America to the days of “W”? Or, “remember the wise words of that great leader, Dick Cheney…”

I certainly don’t.

And yet when it comes to policy, if Mitt Romney succeeds in defeating President Obama and the Republicans take over all of Congress, we will likely see a very clear look at a Bush/Cheney III term on steroids and something quite different than a Reagan presidency. After all Reagan raised taxes a lot, negotiated with terrorists and the Soviet Union and said often that he believed in a progressive tax code.

Romney’s announced economic plans are far different. They reflect the deepest of movement conservatives’ commitment to the idea that when all benefits go to the very top of the pile—the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations—then those entities would take their tax cuts and newfound regulatory freedom and shower it on the people with jobs and economic expansion.

First and foremost Romney wants to extend the Bush-Cheney tax cuts including those for the very wealthiest and make them permanent. Those tax cuts added more than $1 trillion to the debt at the beginning of the century and another $800 billion when Obama reluctantly signed a 2 year extension into law in the December of 2010, when Republicans threatened to cut unemployment insurance for the 5 million Americans who lost their jobs and the health care of 9-11 Responders (you know, the people who ran toward the crumbling buildings to rescue their fellow citizens?)

Then the Governor wants to take those tax cuts to another level.

Added up, the Romney cuts would increase the national debt by more than $10 trillion over ten years, more than twice what the Bush tax cuts cost our nation. He and Paul Ryan, his boy wonder tax cutting pal and possible VP candidate, say they will slash Medicare and other spending on, well they haven’t said what they’d cut, to offset that $10 trillion in revenue cuts.

Like Bush and especially like Cheney, Romney wants to rattle the cages of war with yet another Middle Eastern country and continue the steady buildup of our military might and all the costs associated with that. The former Massachusetts governor is ominously bringing on some of the architects of the Bush/Cheney neo-Conservative foreign policy including, State Department counter- terrorism coordinator Cofer Black, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. These are the guys who were part of the team that brought you torture, phony WMD warnings, phony terror alert warnings and phony theories about Sadaam having a hand in 9-11 attacks.

Like Bush and Cheney, Romney found a way out of the Vietnam War while supporting the war. In fact as a student, Romney protested against the protesters, demanding the Vietnam War continue. Then he was off to a palace in Paris where he served as a Mormon missionary, exempting him from being drafted and going off to war himself.

Sound familiar?

The truth is, while so many Republicans refused to utter Bush or Cheney’s names because they know most Americans blame W and the Shooter for the economic and foreign policy disasters from which we are working to recover, they want to continue those policies long into the future.

This is like Philip Morris, makers of deadly cigarettes, changing their names to Altria while still adding addictive chemicals to their products. A cancer stick by any other name will still make breathing a challenge.

Despite this all-out effort to keep the Bush/Cheney brand silent during this campaign, the former leaders of the free world may make that quite difficult.

On the day Rick Santorum effectively ended his race, Bush himself made a speech before his own Bush Institute in New York lamenting only the name of the tax cuts he enacted that began the collapse of our economy. “I wish they weren’t called the ‘Bush tax cuts,’…If they were called some other body’s cuts, they’re probably less likely to be raised.” Such lovely prose.

Then just weeks after receiving a heart transplant, Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, the man who failed to figure out how to catch Osama bin Laden, the man who said “deficits don’t matter”, the man whose Halliburton stock option prices skyrocketed during a war in which more than 100,000 human beings were slaughtered, called President Obama an "unmitigated disaster."

While Bush has remained somewhat quiet since the unmitigated disaster of his own presidency, you can be assured that Cheney, with his fresh new heart and his huge ego, will keep pounding home the idea that the Iraq War, the torture, the tax cuts for the rich, the war profiteering, were all better than what Obama has to offer.

My guess is Governor Romney will try very hard to avoid having his name and face associated with Cheney and Bush, while channeling Reagan every chance he can get.  But his ideas, his policies and his biggest supporters will do all they can to ensure that a Romney first term will be more like a Bush/Cheney third term than anything even resembling what Ronald Reagan produced.  

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It was a scene nearly 40 years in the making. The famous Las Vegas strip. The place that forgives all sins. Donald Trump who used inherited wealth to build a real estate business that included harassing tenants and discriminating against minorities, endorsing for President Mitt Romney, who used his inherited wealth to build a business that tossed thousands of innocent people out of their jobs.

Both are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  

2,000 miles away, a third man, Barack Hussein Obama, who chose Christianity as his religion, used it to guide his career and his personal family values, quotes biblical scripture at the National Prayer Breakfast. “John tells us,” The President says, “that ‘if anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?’”

And there it is; the great crossroads in American culture. A 30 year pivotal moment in which the candidates being supported by the fervent Christian right, live lives of personal sin and the kind of greed that devours entire segments of our population, while displaying vitriol and anger toward a man who lives his personal life with a powerful devotion to his the family he values above all else.

I really thought this was going to happen, in one form or another much sooner. It’s been building for more than 3 decades…

Let me take you back to the beginning of it all; when Christian leaders decided to abandon the values of standing up for the poor and vulnerable among us and Conservatives abandoned their libertarian values of keeping government out of the private lives of American citizens.

In 1980 Jerry Falwell, creator of the nascent political organization “The Moral Majority” decided the group should endorse Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who rarely practiced his religion, either before or after this marriage with Falwell’s group, knew he was getting a political ally who could attract an enormous number of evangelical, religious Christian voters and, unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. and the religious left, would convince his followers that top down economics, and an immense military machine, somehow fit into the Christian credo.

Besides they were good at sending checks they really couldn’t afford to causes that mirrored their beliefs.

Reagan agreed that speaking Falwell’s language of family values, homophobia, and evangelical Christian dogma would give him an enormous political boost.

They were both considered then and lionized today as people who truly defined morality.

I guess it depends on your definition of moral.

Both Regan and Falwell had histories of fervent objection to the civil rights movement and its goal in the 1960s. Running for Governor of California in 1966, Reagan promised to toss the Fair Housing Act in the dustbin of history. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," said the most revered Republican in modern history, "he has a right to do so."   

Falwell was even more blunt. After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended discrimination in schools, Falwell, a fervent segregationist, said this; "If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Moral?

While both Reagan and Falwell wisely cooled off their racist rhetoric as it became politically toxic they clearly came to an agreement that would cement the power of their two institutions. The highly profitable political religious right, and the Movement Conservative ideology that calls for soaking the rich even at the expense of the middle class and the working poor, would abandon their core moral values.

Falwell rejected Jesus’ lifelong commitment to lifting the poor and vulnerable in society and Reagan washed his hands of the libertarian roots of Conservatism.

And in Reagan and Falwell’s America, commitment to Christ equaled a commitment to unhinged and unregulated Capitalism, no matter what trail of destitution was left in its wake. 

Falwell fully supported every one of Reagan’s efforts to cut effective anti-poverty programs, raising taxes on middle class Americans, and creating an astonishing 43% increase in spending on building up a powerful, deadly military machine.

Falwell and his followers fully supported Reagan’s economic theology called Supply Side Economics; the theory that slashing taxes on the very rich and deregulating the Financial Services industry and the biggest polluters, would trickle down to the middle class and the poor. And why not? Falwell himself was beginning to reap enormous profits from his leadership of the Moral Majority and Lynchburg’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, now home to a TV empire. Falwell’s wealth grew exponentially, worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of his 2007 death.  

This of course flies in the face of Jesus’ depiction of wealth as written in the gospels. “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  In the same conversation Jesus had with a young man he said, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

In today’s conservative America, if a Democrat made a statement like that he would be condemned to eternal political purgatory and damned as a godless socialist. In fact at a recent Republican debate, when Ron Paul suggested our foreign policy should follow the Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—he was booed by the crowd of Tea Party conservatives who polls show  overwhelmingly consider themselves religious Christians.

The roots of this rejection of Jesus’ statement can be found in Calvinist thinking that transformed the humility and abiding concern for the poor and impoverished into a justification for greed. A 2005 article by Gordon Bigelow in Harper’s Magazine lays it out quite clearly.

“These [evangelicals] were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.”

In other words, if you are poor or struggling then you must have done something to deserve it.

As Falwell grew more and more wealthy, working class Americans were headed in the opposite direction. From putting the hammer down on unions, to raising middle class taxes multiple times, to nearly defunding successful anti-poverty programs like Aid to Families and Dependent Children, Reagan began what has become a 30 year process of inflating the wealth of the top 5% while the middle class and poor lose ground; creating in 2009 the greatest gap between the top  5% and the rest of the country since the Great Depression. According to the new Christian Conservative dogma, that meant 95% of all Americans must have been doing something to deserve their loss of wealth and economic security.

During the Clinton years Falwell and his followers, which now included powerful radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, vigorously opposed abortion reduction programs that were rooted in ending poverty and teaching prevention. Abortion rates and unwanted pregnancy rates declined significantly after Clinton promoted prevention, education and an economy that benefitted both the middle class and the impoverished.   

George W. Bush, the converted evangelical Christian, abandoned those policies while promoting more deregulation and more tax cuts for the rich. In 2009, as poverty increased, both abortion and unwanted pregnancies began to increase after a long steady decline.

Using hatred and bigotry toward gays and lesbians and shouting ‘family values’ at the top of their lungs, this combination of Conservative economic greed and Religious dogma created the most powerful political force in American history. This allowed Conservative politicians to put forward economic policies that decimated the middle class, while the middle class continued time and time again to vote for the people who were laying waste to the foundations of our economy. It was no surprise then that Bush became a favorite of the evangelical right. His 2004 campaign included an enormous effort to make gays and lesbians second class citizens across the country. This further entrenched evangelicals to his side and brought out more than 4 million voters who wanted to cement ant-gay marriage laws in 18 states.

Bush of course called himself pro-life and based it on his religious beliefs. Yet he had no problem lying lied to the nation to get us into a war in which hundreds of thousands of God’s children were slaughtered while companies like Halliburton profited immensely.

And so the former Libertarian Conservative movement, in cahoots with the formerly compassionate Christian movement, became purveyors of greed, bigotry and anger. Writer and actor John Fugelsang put it best recently when he said, "Only in America can you be Pro-Death Penalty, Pro-War, Pro-Unmanned Drone Bombs, Pro-Nuclear Weapons, Pro-Guns, Pro-Torture, Pro-Land Mines, and STILL call yourself 'Pro-Life'."

As our nation’s economy tilted toward a second Great Depression the American people elected a man named Barack Hussein Obama. This mixed race man with the middle name of a Muslim dictator was an easy target for people who were frightened of Islamic terrorism and not too many years removed from the days of Falwell’s beloved segregation. Vicious lies about Obama permeated the churches and religious based elements of American society; many of whom have been led to believe Obama was a closet Muslim who sympathized with terrorists and in fact, wasn’t even an American.

Proof had no chance against the power of faith.

In 2010 one in five Americans believed Obama was a Muslim. Even those powerful religious leaders, the second generation of Falwell’s movement, when confronted with undeniable facts, still found a way to tie President Obama to a religion they considered evil. Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon Billy Graham, said this about Obama, "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim; his father gave him an Islamic name."

And so we end up back in Vegas. Mitt Romney, the man who promised even bigger and more permanent tax cuts for millionaires like himself, while calling for the decimation of Medicare and tax increases on Americans earning $50,000 a year or less, will once again get the support of the religious right, albeit reluctantly because he’s Mormon. Not as bad as the man with the Muslim seed I suppose.

And Barack Obama, a true Christian, a man who lives Christian values in his family and in his policies, will be rejected by the religious right. They will recoil at his calls for asking those same millionaires to pay their fair share to support education, increased jobs for working class Americans and programs that take care of our elderly population, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

And unlike the commercial, what happens in Vegas will not stay there. Romney and Trump and the rest of the crowd that sees economic greed as part of their religious dogma, will continue to tell the American people that Barack Obama is not one of us, that he just doesn’t understand the values of Christ or America.

                                                                              

©Eric Allan Futterman/EAF Custom Communication

The Startling Success of the Occupy Movement-December 15, 2011

“OK so I still don’t understand what this Occupy Wall Street movement is all about.”

While the criticisms of Occupy from the Limbaughs and Gingrichs of the world are typically insulting; calling the protesters dirty thieves and rapists, and suggesting they bathe, many independents and even moderate Democrats are still trying to wrap their arms around the movement, looking for some sort of definition.

Journalists are doing the same thing; asking the same questions.

For those busy with their lives; raising kids, going to work, trying to get something out of life, it’s certainly understandable to have a sense of confusion about the millions of protesters across the world, braving cold weather, batons and pepper spray to occupy the streets, parks and public spaces across the world for a cause that so many see as indefinable.

 Journalists, however, should know better. They have the ability to go into the crowds and talk to people and compare the protests with the alarming statistical trend of the distribution of wealth and power in the United States and across the world from the middle class to the top 1 or even .001 percent of the population.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist recently wrote, “The O.W.S. protesters, on the other hand, haven’t even settled on concrete political objectives. As two of the movement’s more perceptive conservative critics —Matt Continetti in the Weekly Standard and James Panero in The New Criterion — have said, many protesters seemed more interested in founding a kind of Paris Commune or Oneida Community in Zuccotti Park than in actually participating in public-policy debates.”

What these journalists and conservative critics have missed wildly is that the Occupy Movement is doing far more than finding people with nice suits and ties and seasoned Public Relations teams participating in debates on packaged talk shows.

The new reality is simple: The Occupy Wall Street Movement is now defining the economic debate in our nation. That alone makes the movement, still in its nascent stages, an extraordinary success.  

 How is that possible? They’ve inspired no real legislation or policy that has transformed our economy or brought wealth and power back to the middle class. They’ve elected no government leaders and have barely put out any press releases giving journalists the answers they are too lazy or too budget-constrained to figure out themselves.

In an earlier Muscular Liberalism Column I talked about the “Conventional Wisdom” and how Conservatives have done a masterful job of creating context for debate that creates a winning outcome before the conversation starts. They took control of the direction of the American economy when Ronald Reagan announced at his 1981 inaugural that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  

For thirty years of well funded conservative think tanks have pushed forward millions of derivates of that Reagan mantra and created an alternate reality that has resulted in the largest distribution of American wealth from the middle class to the top 1 percent, since the Great Depression. (See link to stats on that at the end of this column).

And I believe many conservative leaders believed as recently as last August that they still had full control over the conversation. After all the Democrats, complicit in their Mondale/Dukakis/ Kerry/Gore model of “we’re not all that bad” branding of liberalism, allowed the Limbaughs of the world to walk all over them with the heavy feet of distortions, distractions and outright lies.

Barack Obama, inspiring in his election win in 2008, yet victorious mostly because the country’s economy was spiraling out of control, has in many ways reverted back to a position of trying to convince Republicans that liberals were more open to conservatism than the accusations against him claimed. 

In fact just three months ago Conservatives had full control of that conversation. During the summer of 2011 debt ceiling debacle—an effort by Republicans in the House to bring the nation to the brink of economic default  in order to win a political victory—all the talk; among Democrats and Republicans, Journalists and pundits, was how we should cut spending to get rid of the debt.

Many were even rapidly advancing the idea the most of the debt we now have in this nation was the exclusive fault of President Obama through the Stimulus and the Affordable Health Care Act. The two wars, Medicare Prescription Drug Act and massive tax cuts—unpaid for by the GOP led Congress and President Bush—were virtually ignored in their role in creating our ever growing debt.

“How much should we cut?” was the question.

Republicans asked it. Democrats asked. Anchor people asked it.

The answer came in John Boehner’s “98%” victory in those disappointing negotiations with President Obama.

Massive spending cuts in everything from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were on the table for chopping up and spitting out into the trash bin of history.  Once again middle class and impoverished Americans were to shoulder the burden for Wall Street greed and government deregulation.

Not today.

After 4 months of global Occupy protests there’s a new question driving the economic debate of our times.

“How can we achieve economic equality?”

Make no mistake; this is a massive and pivotal shift in the national conversation. Millions of Americans are waking up to the idea that the top 1% in the country have been playing a 30 year trick on the middle class and they are, at long last, connecting their struggling economic fortunes to the policies that created them.

For decades middle class Americans believed that their taxes were going to lazy, poor people who just wanted to feed off the public teat with their hard earned tax dollars. There’s no easier political promise than to ‘cut your taxes.’

And there’s no easier political point scoring than ‘they want to raise your taxes and give your money to people who just don’t want to work for it.’

There’s no more effective scapegoat than the fictional character created by Reagan called the ‘welfare queen’.

Yet since the Occupy Wall Street protests began, Americans are tossing out the stereotypes of the lazy good for nothing recipient of free tax dollars and coming to the harsh realization that they cannot educate their children successfully without good public schools, that they will never save the million dollars or more it will take to retire with decent health care and a roof over their heads if Medicare and Social Security are gone.

The Occupy Protests were followed directly by the Wisconsin and Ohio Tea Party supported governments seeming to blame the economic collapse of 2008 on Teachers, Firefighters and Police Officers.

The Occupy Protests were followed by Tea Party conservatives deliberately trying to keep elderly citizens, impoverished citizens and college students from voting.

And now across the landscape of both journalism and public debate the idea that we must cut, cut, cut to reduce our debt is being replaced with the clear-eyed realization that income and power inequality is now front and center at the debate.

The canary in a coalmine for the demise of the Conservative conventional wisdom came from none other than our dignified yet, far too polite President, Barack Obama. It was both shocking and refreshing to hear him say this in early December, pushing for the continuation of a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans, paid for by a small tax increase on people earning more than $1 million a year.

"Let your members of Congress know where you stand," Obama said last week in his weekly radio and Internet address. "Tell them not to vote to raise taxes on working Americans during the holidays. Tell them to put country before party. Put money back in the pockets of working Americans.”

A couple of months ago President Obama even dared to call for the wealthiest Americans to “pay their fair share. We can't just cut our way out of this hole…If we're going to make spending cuts, many of which we wouldn't make if we weren't facing such large budget deficits, then it's only right that we ask everyone to pay their fair share,"

That’s tough talk from a President who many supporters believe has backed down far too many times.

Democrats in the House and Senate are slowly but surely unwrapping their inner FDR and with less and less fear going after adding more welfare for the rich.

In fact I think many Progressives were happily shocked that none of the Democrats on the so-called ‘Super Committee’ caved into the Republicans on that committee. They refused to agree cuts without revenue increases.

Since the Republicans in the Senate used the filibuster to prevent the American people from getting a fair vote on the entire jobs bill, President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to put it in front of the Senate in a piecemeal fashion. First was the $35 million package that would have gone directly to states and localities to hire teachers and schools workers and police officers, firefighters and first responders.

With the Tea Party giving orders in the House and Mitch McConnell adding to his historic record of filibustering in the Senate, there’s little chance any provision would be passed. But for once the Democrats are pushing forward and President Obama is talking the talk.

"For the second time in two weeks, every single Republican in the United States Senate has chosen to obstruct a bill that would create jobs and get our economy going again," Obama said in a statement after the vote. "Every American deserves an explanation as to why Republicans refuse to step up to the plate and do what's necessary to create jobs and grow the economy right now."

A breakthrough did happen however because even the Republicans couldn’t deny tax breaks for businesses that hire Iraq and Afghanistan Vets. And while some booed Michelle Obama for appearing at a NASCAR race to promote the hiring of America’s returning soldiers and Rush Limbaugh called her “uppity” in his daily dog whistle to white racist working class voters, few others in the Fox-right wing political movement joined in on the critique of our most dignified First Lady.

Poll after poll shows large majorities of Americans, 60% and more, favor raising taxes on the Americans making more than $200,000 a year to balance the budget and pay for jobs programs to jump start the economy.

Occupy is both responsible for this change in attitude and at the same time represents a very clear reflection of the sense that Americans are no longer in lock step with the ‘my-tax-dollars-are-going-to-lazy-people-who don’t-want-to-work’ attitude that prevailed in America since the Reagan Revolution against the middle class.

Furthermore the Occupy movement has put wind the sails of formerly frightened Democrats who are now going into the Christmas holiday fighting for the payroll tax cut and millionaire tax increase.

Even Frank Lutz, the pollster who has helped create much of the deceitful language of the right for the last 20 years, sees the effect of the Occupy movement. Lutz said recently that he is “scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.” The pollster warned that the movement is “having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” 

And the American people are waking up to very clear and undeniable evidence of the massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the top 1%.

No one can say for sure whether the Occupy movement inspired President Obama’s striking December 5^th Kansas speech promoting Progressive economics and demanding the end to Supply Side Economics, but it’s become quite clear he feels much more secure about painting a broad picture of the failure of Conservative economics.

“The theory of “trickle down economics…It’s a simple theory — one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

I cannot imagine Walter Mondale, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis and Al Gore circa 2000 making that kind of bold statement.

The Occupy movement has compelled even the most frightened Democrats to finally stand up for the truth of Progressive Economics and the failure of Conservative economics.

Occupy may not put out well crafted press releases delivered by men and women in sharp suits and coiffed hair-dos. But these protesters are now occupying the American debate and beginning to drive the American conventional wisdom toward a far more truthful and factual debate.

That will translate into something very different when 2012 comes around.

(FOR A GOOD LOOK AT THE TRENDS IN ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE LAST 30 YEARS CHECK OUT THESE STARTLING STATITSTICS ON THE RISE OF INCOME INEQUALITY IN AMERICA)  

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph