Hi Roma,
Received yet another piece of info from a friend....I'm not sure what to make of this, but it DOES sound noteworthy enough to pass along to people who may want to know some "behind the scenes" stuff going on.
You know my thoughts these days about all of it ~ I'm working on my world from another angle, but it does make me stop and go hmmmm.....
Much love,
Lynn
Click here: Obama and ACORN GPS Marking EVERY Front Door in America...
Friday, May 8, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Is The Republican Party Over
The following is from KJ
Hi Roma,
I cant post this to the Blog since i am at work , but this is a very good article!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599189658800;_ylt=AiZvDvkZQALi8USyGNyxYr2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTJpYnRvNGlnBGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAwOTA1MDcvMDg1OTkxODk2NTg4MDAEY3BvcwM3BHBvcwMxNARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3J5BHNsawNyZXB1YmxpY2Fuc2k-
Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD Michael Grunwald – 34 mins ago
These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian - in short, less demographically Republican. GOP officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are vowing to "regain our status as a national party" and creating woe-is-us groups to resuscitate their brand, while Democrats are publishing books like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John McCain's campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest.
So are the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as powerless, leaderless and rudderless - the new Donner party - are not very illuminating. Minority parties always look weak and inept in the penalty box. Sure, it can be comical to watch Republican National Committee (RNC) gaffe machine Michael Steele riff on his hip-hop vision for the party or Texas Governor Rick Perry carry on about secession or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann explain how F.D.R.'s "Hoot-Smalley" Act caused the Depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act, a Republican tariff bill, was enacted before F.D.R.'s presidency), but haplessness does not equal hopelessness. And yes, the Republican brand could benefit from spokesmen less familiar and less reviled than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, but the party does have some fresher faces stepping out of the wings. (Read seven clues to understanding Dick Cheney.)
The Democratic critiques of the GOP - that it's the Party of No, or No Ideas - are not helpful either. It's silly to fault an opposition party for opposition; obstructionism helped return Democrats to power. Republicans actually have plenty of ideas.
That's the problem. The party's ideas - about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else - are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.
As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues - even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree. The RNC is about to vote on a kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage, which gives the base even more influence - and the death spiral continues. "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice - the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch. "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."
Some conservatives think that in the long run, the party will be better off without squishes like Specter muddling the coherence of its brand; a GOP campaign committee celebrated his departure with an e-mail headlined "Good riddance," and Limbaugh urged him to take McCain along. Inside this echo chamber, a center-right nation punished Republicans for abandoning their principles, for enabling Bush's spending sprees, for insufficient conservatism. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has refused to accept $700 million in stimulus cash for his state despite bitter opposition from his GOP-dominated legislature, argues that Chick-fil-A would never let its franchisees cook their chicken however they want; why should the Republican Party let its elected officials promote Big Government? "We're essentially franchisees, and right now nobody has any clue what we're really about," Sanford tells TIME. "You can't wear the jersey and play for the other team!" (See pictures from the view of the floor of the DNC.)
No one seems to deny that many Republicans abandoned their principles - especially fiscal responsibility - while in power, but even some across-the-board conservatives see enforced homogeneity as a sure path to oblivion. "Chick-fil-A can get fabulously wealthy with a 20% market share," scoffs Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, President Ronald Reagan's political director. "In our business, you need 50% plus one." It's probably true that since 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans have switched parties, Specter followed them to save his own political skin, but it's hard to see how the mass exodus bodes well for the GOP. You can't have a center-right coalition when you've said good riddance to the center.
Of course, politics can change in a hurry. Three years ago, books like One Party Country and Building Red America were heralding Rove's plan to create a permanent Republican majority. President Barack Obama is popular today, but Democrats in general are not, and they will all face a backlash if they can't reverse this economic tailspin now that they own all the Washington machinery. Tom Cole, a longtime Republican operative turned Oklahoma Congressman, recalls that shortly before the Reagan Revolution, the GOP was in such dire straits, it ran ads declaring that Republicans are people too. "We've lost our way, but we'll find our way back," Cole says. "We'll get back into the idea business, and the Democrats will overreach."
With his dramatic plans to restructure Wall Street and Detroit, overhaul health care and create a clean-energy economy, Obama is certainly taking political risks, even if he hasn't gotten around to replacing the almighty dollar with some new, one-world currency the black-helicopter crowd keeps warning about. But it's not clear that the Republicans in their current incarnation would be a credible alternative if he falters. "We've got to be at least plausible, and I worry about that," says GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. Republicans never really left the idea business, but Americans haven't been buying what they're selling, and their product line hasn't changed. They're starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already rejected. Our two-party system encourages periodic pendulum swings, but given current trends, it's easy to imagine a third party in the U.S.
At this rate, it could be the Republican Party.
"What Have We Got to Lose?"House Republicans, eager to shed the Party of No label, recently unveiled an alternative to Obama's 2010 budget. It was the kind of fiasco that shows why Washington thinks Republicans are in trouble - and why they really are in trouble.
The disaster began when GOP leaders, after calling a news conference to blast Obama's numbers, released a budget outline with no numbers - just magic assumptions about "reform." The mockery was instantaneous. Then Republicans began blaming one another for the stunt, which generated only more mockery about circular firing squads. And when they finally released the missing details on April 1, the notion of an April Fools' budget produced even more mockery; the substance was ignored. "The President's dog got more attention," recalls Paul Ryan, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.
But if you pay attention, the GOP alternative is not just a p.r. disaster. It's a radical document, making Bush's tax cuts permanent while adding about $3 trillion in new tax cuts skewed toward the rich. It would replace almost all the stimulus - including tax cuts for workers as well as spending on schools, infrastructure and clean energy - with a capital gains–tax holiday for investors. Oh, and it would shrink the budget by replacing Medicare with vouchers, turning Medicaid into block grants, means-testing Social Security and freezing everything else except defense and veterans' spending for five years, putting programs for food safety, financial regulation, flu vaccines and every other sacred government cow on the potential chopping block.
Ryan is one of the smart, young, telegenic policy wonks who have been hailed as the GOP's future, and his budget includes relatively few the-Lord-shall-provide accounting gimmicks by D.C. standards. He knows its potential cuts could sound nasty in a 30-second ad, but he wants Republicans to stop running away from limited-government principles. "We've got to stop being afraid of the politics," he says. "At this point, what have we got to lose?"
Well, more elections. Big Government is never popular in theory, but the disaster aid, school lunches and prescription drugs that make up Big Government have become wildly popular in practice, especially now that so many people are hurting. Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party - and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid - which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits. It's no coincidence that many Republicans who voted against the stimulus have claimed credit for stimulus projects in their district - or that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stopped ridiculing volcano-monitoring programs after a volcano erupted in Alaska. "We can't be the antigovernment party," Snowe says. "That's not what people want."
Not even in South Carolina, not now. Sanford has gone further than any other governor in passing up the Democrats' stimulus money, but he's turning down only 10% of his state's share, about 2% of his state's spending. He is still being portrayed as Scrooge, a heartless ideologue who wants to close prisons, fire teachers, shutter programs for autistic kids and ultimately shut down state government during a recession. And those portrayals aren't coming from Democrats. "The governor has one of the most radical philosophies I've ever seen," says state senator Hugh Leatherman, 78, the Republican chairman of the finance committee. "I'm a conservative, but this could be the most devastating thing our state has ever seen." To Sanford, Leatherman is a fraudulent Republican franchisee, but to most Republicans in the legislature, the governor is the one tarnishing the brand. "Most of us are Ronald Reagan Republicans, Strom Thurmond Republicans," grumbles Senate majority leader Harvey Peeler. "Republicans control everything around here. It would be nice if we could accomplish something."
Sanford was once a lonely voice for fiscal restraint in Congress, one of the few Republican revolutionaries of 1994 who kept faith with the Contract with America. Back then, his bumper stickers said "Deficit" with a Ghostbusters-style slash through it, and his apocalyptic speeches chronicled how debt had destroyed great civilizations like the Byzantine Empire. I watched him give an updated version at a tea-party rally in Columbia, S.C., on April 15 as the crowd screamed about Obama's tyranny and waved signs like "Keep the Government Out of Our Health Care" and "USA 1776-2009, RIP." Sanford himself is not a screamer; he's a provocateur. "We've become a party of pastry chefs, telling people they can eat all the dessert they want," he says. "We need to become a party of country doctors, telling people that this medicine won't taste good at all, but you need it."
It's principled leadership, but only the tea-party fringe seems to be following. "Nobody likes Dr. Doom," Sanford says with a smile. Leading a state with the nation's third highest unemployment rate, he understands the Keynesian idea that only government spending can jump-start a recessionary economy: "I get it. I'm supposed to be proactive." But if spend-and-borrow is the only alternative to a depression, he says, "then we're toast."
The Old Issue SetHis party could be too. Hispanics, Asians and blacks are on track to be the majority in three decades; metropolitan voters and young voters who skew Democratic are also on the rise. This is why Rogers recently decided to quit being a talking head: "I had a meeting with myself, and I said, Do we really need more white lobbyists with gray hair on TV?" But it's not clear that more diverse spokesmen or better tweets can woo a new generation to the GOP; support for gay rights is soaring, and polls show that voters prefer Democratic approaches to health care, education and the economy. "The outlook for Republicans is even worse than people think," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. "Their biggest problem is that they really believe what they believe."
So Republicans need to decide what Republicans need to believe. What does their three-legged stool of strong defense, traditional values and economic conservatism mean today? Does strong defense mean unqualified support for torture, outdated weapons systems and pre-emptive wars? Do traditional values mean no room in the tent for pro-choicers like Specter and Snowe? Even Joe the Plumber - who opposes abortion and homosexuality and considers America a "Christian nation" - wants the party to drop its "holier than thou" attitude on divisive social issues.
The most urgent question is the meaning of economic conservatism. Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set." Snowe recalls that when she proposed fiscally conservative "triggers" to limit Bush's tax cuts in case of deficits, she was attacked by fellow Republicans. "I don't know when willy-nilly tax cuts became the essence of who we are," she says. "To the average American who's struggling, we're in some other stratosphere. We're the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich." In the Bush era, the party routinely sided with corporate lobbyists - promoting tax breaks, subsidies and earmarks for well-wired industries - against ordinary taxpayers as well as basic principles of fiscal restraint. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint's Republican alternative to the stimulus included tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy; at this point, the GOP's reflexes are almost involuntary.
Now that they've lost their monopoly on power, many Republicans are warning that spending-fueled deficits will cause inflation, reduce demand for U.S. Treasuries and shaft future generations. They don't seem so worried about an imminent depression, which would explode deficits in addition to the shorter-term pain, and their newfound fear of borrowing has not cooled their ardor for budget-busting tax cuts. "They talk about fiscal restraint, but they've got an atrocious record, and they've still got atrocious plans," says Robert Bixby, executive director of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition.
Still, a 2012 presidential candidate could catch lightning in a bottle, Reagan-style or Susan Boyle–style - although when you think about it, Republicans found a nationally admired war hero with proven bipartisan appeal in 2008, and he lost to an inexperienced black liberal with a funny name. Outside Washington, moderates like Charlie Crist in Florida and Jodi Rell in Connecticut as well as pragmatic conservatives like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Jon Huntsman in Utah have remained popular despite their brand. They all share an aversion to ideological rigidity: Rell signed a bill legalizing same-sex unions, Crist has pushed an ambitious environmental agenda, Daniels proposed a tax increase, and Huntsman has cautioned Republicans not to obsess about social issues.
There's always the chance that some new issue - immigration? Iran? cap and trade? something nobody has thought of yet? - will blow up and bring the GOP back to life. Maybe one of the new GOP chin-stroking groups will come up with some killer new ideas to help the party reconnect with ordinary Americans. But Republicans know their best hope for recovery, whether they say it like Limbaugh or merely think it, is Democratic failure. Now that Democrats control both Congress and the White House, hubris is a real possibility; it's hard to imagine Obama floating his pitiful plan to cut $100 million in waste - a mere 0.0025% of federal spending - if he had to worry about a formidable opposition.
The problem for Republicans, as the RNC's Steele memorably put it in a TV appearance, is that there's "absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions." Republicans, after all, proclaimed that President Clinton's tax hikes would destroy the economy, that GOP rule would mean smaller government, that Bush's tax cuts would usher in a new era of prosperity; now the House minority leader says it's "comical" to think carbon dioxide could be harmful, and Steele says the earth is cooling.
Polls show that most Republicans who haven't jumped ship want the party to move even further right; it takes vision to imagine a presidential candidate with national appeal emerging from a GOP primary in 2012. DeMint, the South Carolina Senator, greeted Specter's departure with the astonishing observation that he'd rather have 30 Republican colleagues who believe in conservatism than 60 who don't. "I don't want us to have power until we have principles," DeMint told TIME after firing up that tea-party crowd in Columbia. Voters certainly soured on unprincipled Republicans. But it's not clear they'd like principled Republicans better.
hasEML = false;
Hi Roma,
I cant post this to the Blog since i am at work , but this is a very good article!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599189658800;_ylt=AiZvDvkZQALi8USyGNyxYr2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTJpYnRvNGlnBGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAwOTA1MDcvMDg1OTkxODk2NTg4MDAEY3BvcwM3BHBvcwMxNARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3J5BHNsawNyZXB1YmxpY2Fuc2k-
Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD Michael Grunwald – 34 mins ago
These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian - in short, less demographically Republican. GOP officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are vowing to "regain our status as a national party" and creating woe-is-us groups to resuscitate their brand, while Democrats are publishing books like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John McCain's campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest.
So are the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as powerless, leaderless and rudderless - the new Donner party - are not very illuminating. Minority parties always look weak and inept in the penalty box. Sure, it can be comical to watch Republican National Committee (RNC) gaffe machine Michael Steele riff on his hip-hop vision for the party or Texas Governor Rick Perry carry on about secession or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann explain how F.D.R.'s "Hoot-Smalley" Act caused the Depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act, a Republican tariff bill, was enacted before F.D.R.'s presidency), but haplessness does not equal hopelessness. And yes, the Republican brand could benefit from spokesmen less familiar and less reviled than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, but the party does have some fresher faces stepping out of the wings. (Read seven clues to understanding Dick Cheney.)
The Democratic critiques of the GOP - that it's the Party of No, or No Ideas - are not helpful either. It's silly to fault an opposition party for opposition; obstructionism helped return Democrats to power. Republicans actually have plenty of ideas.
That's the problem. The party's ideas - about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else - are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.
As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues - even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree. The RNC is about to vote on a kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage, which gives the base even more influence - and the death spiral continues. "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice - the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch. "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."
Some conservatives think that in the long run, the party will be better off without squishes like Specter muddling the coherence of its brand; a GOP campaign committee celebrated his departure with an e-mail headlined "Good riddance," and Limbaugh urged him to take McCain along. Inside this echo chamber, a center-right nation punished Republicans for abandoning their principles, for enabling Bush's spending sprees, for insufficient conservatism. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has refused to accept $700 million in stimulus cash for his state despite bitter opposition from his GOP-dominated legislature, argues that Chick-fil-A would never let its franchisees cook their chicken however they want; why should the Republican Party let its elected officials promote Big Government? "We're essentially franchisees, and right now nobody has any clue what we're really about," Sanford tells TIME. "You can't wear the jersey and play for the other team!" (See pictures from the view of the floor of the DNC.)
No one seems to deny that many Republicans abandoned their principles - especially fiscal responsibility - while in power, but even some across-the-board conservatives see enforced homogeneity as a sure path to oblivion. "Chick-fil-A can get fabulously wealthy with a 20% market share," scoffs Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, President Ronald Reagan's political director. "In our business, you need 50% plus one." It's probably true that since 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans have switched parties, Specter followed them to save his own political skin, but it's hard to see how the mass exodus bodes well for the GOP. You can't have a center-right coalition when you've said good riddance to the center.
Of course, politics can change in a hurry. Three years ago, books like One Party Country and Building Red America were heralding Rove's plan to create a permanent Republican majority. President Barack Obama is popular today, but Democrats in general are not, and they will all face a backlash if they can't reverse this economic tailspin now that they own all the Washington machinery. Tom Cole, a longtime Republican operative turned Oklahoma Congressman, recalls that shortly before the Reagan Revolution, the GOP was in such dire straits, it ran ads declaring that Republicans are people too. "We've lost our way, but we'll find our way back," Cole says. "We'll get back into the idea business, and the Democrats will overreach."
With his dramatic plans to restructure Wall Street and Detroit, overhaul health care and create a clean-energy economy, Obama is certainly taking political risks, even if he hasn't gotten around to replacing the almighty dollar with some new, one-world currency the black-helicopter crowd keeps warning about. But it's not clear that the Republicans in their current incarnation would be a credible alternative if he falters. "We've got to be at least plausible, and I worry about that," says GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers. Republicans never really left the idea business, but Americans haven't been buying what they're selling, and their product line hasn't changed. They're starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already rejected. Our two-party system encourages periodic pendulum swings, but given current trends, it's easy to imagine a third party in the U.S.
At this rate, it could be the Republican Party.
"What Have We Got to Lose?"House Republicans, eager to shed the Party of No label, recently unveiled an alternative to Obama's 2010 budget. It was the kind of fiasco that shows why Washington thinks Republicans are in trouble - and why they really are in trouble.
The disaster began when GOP leaders, after calling a news conference to blast Obama's numbers, released a budget outline with no numbers - just magic assumptions about "reform." The mockery was instantaneous. Then Republicans began blaming one another for the stunt, which generated only more mockery about circular firing squads. And when they finally released the missing details on April 1, the notion of an April Fools' budget produced even more mockery; the substance was ignored. "The President's dog got more attention," recalls Paul Ryan, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.
But if you pay attention, the GOP alternative is not just a p.r. disaster. It's a radical document, making Bush's tax cuts permanent while adding about $3 trillion in new tax cuts skewed toward the rich. It would replace almost all the stimulus - including tax cuts for workers as well as spending on schools, infrastructure and clean energy - with a capital gains–tax holiday for investors. Oh, and it would shrink the budget by replacing Medicare with vouchers, turning Medicaid into block grants, means-testing Social Security and freezing everything else except defense and veterans' spending for five years, putting programs for food safety, financial regulation, flu vaccines and every other sacred government cow on the potential chopping block.
Ryan is one of the smart, young, telegenic policy wonks who have been hailed as the GOP's future, and his budget includes relatively few the-Lord-shall-provide accounting gimmicks by D.C. standards. He knows its potential cuts could sound nasty in a 30-second ad, but he wants Republicans to stop running away from limited-government principles. "We've got to stop being afraid of the politics," he says. "At this point, what have we got to lose?"
Well, more elections. Big Government is never popular in theory, but the disaster aid, school lunches and prescription drugs that make up Big Government have become wildly popular in practice, especially now that so many people are hurting. Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party - and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid - which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits. It's no coincidence that many Republicans who voted against the stimulus have claimed credit for stimulus projects in their district - or that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stopped ridiculing volcano-monitoring programs after a volcano erupted in Alaska. "We can't be the antigovernment party," Snowe says. "That's not what people want."
Not even in South Carolina, not now. Sanford has gone further than any other governor in passing up the Democrats' stimulus money, but he's turning down only 10% of his state's share, about 2% of his state's spending. He is still being portrayed as Scrooge, a heartless ideologue who wants to close prisons, fire teachers, shutter programs for autistic kids and ultimately shut down state government during a recession. And those portrayals aren't coming from Democrats. "The governor has one of the most radical philosophies I've ever seen," says state senator Hugh Leatherman, 78, the Republican chairman of the finance committee. "I'm a conservative, but this could be the most devastating thing our state has ever seen." To Sanford, Leatherman is a fraudulent Republican franchisee, but to most Republicans in the legislature, the governor is the one tarnishing the brand. "Most of us are Ronald Reagan Republicans, Strom Thurmond Republicans," grumbles Senate majority leader Harvey Peeler. "Republicans control everything around here. It would be nice if we could accomplish something."
Sanford was once a lonely voice for fiscal restraint in Congress, one of the few Republican revolutionaries of 1994 who kept faith with the Contract with America. Back then, his bumper stickers said "Deficit" with a Ghostbusters-style slash through it, and his apocalyptic speeches chronicled how debt had destroyed great civilizations like the Byzantine Empire. I watched him give an updated version at a tea-party rally in Columbia, S.C., on April 15 as the crowd screamed about Obama's tyranny and waved signs like "Keep the Government Out of Our Health Care" and "USA 1776-2009, RIP." Sanford himself is not a screamer; he's a provocateur. "We've become a party of pastry chefs, telling people they can eat all the dessert they want," he says. "We need to become a party of country doctors, telling people that this medicine won't taste good at all, but you need it."
It's principled leadership, but only the tea-party fringe seems to be following. "Nobody likes Dr. Doom," Sanford says with a smile. Leading a state with the nation's third highest unemployment rate, he understands the Keynesian idea that only government spending can jump-start a recessionary economy: "I get it. I'm supposed to be proactive." But if spend-and-borrow is the only alternative to a depression, he says, "then we're toast."
The Old Issue SetHis party could be too. Hispanics, Asians and blacks are on track to be the majority in three decades; metropolitan voters and young voters who skew Democratic are also on the rise. This is why Rogers recently decided to quit being a talking head: "I had a meeting with myself, and I said, Do we really need more white lobbyists with gray hair on TV?" But it's not clear that more diverse spokesmen or better tweets can woo a new generation to the GOP; support for gay rights is soaring, and polls show that voters prefer Democratic approaches to health care, education and the economy. "The outlook for Republicans is even worse than people think," says Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. "Their biggest problem is that they really believe what they believe."
So Republicans need to decide what Republicans need to believe. What does their three-legged stool of strong defense, traditional values and economic conservatism mean today? Does strong defense mean unqualified support for torture, outdated weapons systems and pre-emptive wars? Do traditional values mean no room in the tent for pro-choicers like Specter and Snowe? Even Joe the Plumber - who opposes abortion and homosexuality and considers America a "Christian nation" - wants the party to drop its "holier than thou" attitude on divisive social issues.
The most urgent question is the meaning of economic conservatism. Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set." Snowe recalls that when she proposed fiscally conservative "triggers" to limit Bush's tax cuts in case of deficits, she was attacked by fellow Republicans. "I don't know when willy-nilly tax cuts became the essence of who we are," she says. "To the average American who's struggling, we're in some other stratosphere. We're the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich." In the Bush era, the party routinely sided with corporate lobbyists - promoting tax breaks, subsidies and earmarks for well-wired industries - against ordinary taxpayers as well as basic principles of fiscal restraint. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint's Republican alternative to the stimulus included tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy; at this point, the GOP's reflexes are almost involuntary.
Now that they've lost their monopoly on power, many Republicans are warning that spending-fueled deficits will cause inflation, reduce demand for U.S. Treasuries and shaft future generations. They don't seem so worried about an imminent depression, which would explode deficits in addition to the shorter-term pain, and their newfound fear of borrowing has not cooled their ardor for budget-busting tax cuts. "They talk about fiscal restraint, but they've got an atrocious record, and they've still got atrocious plans," says Robert Bixby, executive director of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition.
Still, a 2012 presidential candidate could catch lightning in a bottle, Reagan-style or Susan Boyle–style - although when you think about it, Republicans found a nationally admired war hero with proven bipartisan appeal in 2008, and he lost to an inexperienced black liberal with a funny name. Outside Washington, moderates like Charlie Crist in Florida and Jodi Rell in Connecticut as well as pragmatic conservatives like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Jon Huntsman in Utah have remained popular despite their brand. They all share an aversion to ideological rigidity: Rell signed a bill legalizing same-sex unions, Crist has pushed an ambitious environmental agenda, Daniels proposed a tax increase, and Huntsman has cautioned Republicans not to obsess about social issues.
There's always the chance that some new issue - immigration? Iran? cap and trade? something nobody has thought of yet? - will blow up and bring the GOP back to life. Maybe one of the new GOP chin-stroking groups will come up with some killer new ideas to help the party reconnect with ordinary Americans. But Republicans know their best hope for recovery, whether they say it like Limbaugh or merely think it, is Democratic failure. Now that Democrats control both Congress and the White House, hubris is a real possibility; it's hard to imagine Obama floating his pitiful plan to cut $100 million in waste - a mere 0.0025% of federal spending - if he had to worry about a formidable opposition.
The problem for Republicans, as the RNC's Steele memorably put it in a TV appearance, is that there's "absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions." Republicans, after all, proclaimed that President Clinton's tax hikes would destroy the economy, that GOP rule would mean smaller government, that Bush's tax cuts would usher in a new era of prosperity; now the House minority leader says it's "comical" to think carbon dioxide could be harmful, and Steele says the earth is cooling.
Polls show that most Republicans who haven't jumped ship want the party to move even further right; it takes vision to imagine a presidential candidate with national appeal emerging from a GOP primary in 2012. DeMint, the South Carolina Senator, greeted Specter's departure with the astonishing observation that he'd rather have 30 Republican colleagues who believe in conservatism than 60 who don't. "I don't want us to have power until we have principles," DeMint told TIME after firing up that tea-party crowd in Columbia. Voters certainly soured on unprincipled Republicans. But it's not clear they'd like principled Republicans better.
hasEML = false;
****Protect the Amrican Farmer Before too Late
If you have ever tried the local American grown farm food (organic and other) such as tomatoes, eggs, beef, fruit and vegetables you know how superior it is to the commercially grown stuff. Government regulation could soon make that unavailable to you. Please look at the following video:
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090506/ARTICLES/905061005/1002?Title=Down-on-the-farm-
That is Sam and Jerry Williams from Cognito farms speaking. To often we have looked the other way when the American Farmer has asked for our help while Government promises healthier and cheaper food. But the facts are the commercial food has demonstrated to be unhealthy, and that is why many Americans now prefer to buy from farmers like Sam and Jerry. Let us please listen to them before we loose all farming in the U.S.
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090506/ARTICLES/905061005/1002?Title=Down-on-the-farm-
That is Sam and Jerry Williams from Cognito farms speaking. To often we have looked the other way when the American Farmer has asked for our help while Government promises healthier and cheaper food. But the facts are the commercial food has demonstrated to be unhealthy, and that is why many Americans now prefer to buy from farmers like Sam and Jerry. Let us please listen to them before we loose all farming in the U.S.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Good News: Update on Audit the Federal Reserve
May 5, 2009
Dear Friend of Liberty,
With each passing day, Ron Paul is winning people over to the cause of Federal Reserve transparency and sound money.More and more Congressmen have been signing onto Dr. Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, HR 1207, and it is now up to a whopping 124 cosponsors. That cosponsor list now includes over half of the House Republican Caucus. Dr. Paul is truly leading the GOP back to its roots of sound money and fiscal conservatism.In fact, The Washington Independent’s David Weigel just wrote an important article about how Ron Paul’s message is resonating with Republican lawmakers. All I can say is, "It's about time!"
Click here to read the article -- “Ron Paul's Economic Theories Winning GOP Converts”.
And today, Dr. Paul proved the case for Federal Reserve transparency to people across America by grilling Ben Bernanke on national television.
Chairman Ben is running scared now that HR 1207 is gaining steam. He even tried to appease Dr. Paul by offering transparency on everything except monetary policy -- the Fed's sole function!
It is clear we are winning this fight, and I believe that ultimately we will see it through to victory. But this is no time to rest on our laurels.Keep writing and calling your congressman if he has not already cosponsored HR 1207 (click here to find out). Circulate more petitions and Audit the Fed literature to your friends and neighbors to recruit them to this winning effort.
Thank you for all you have done and all you will do. With your continued support, Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty will return the GOP to its conservative roots, and America back to its founding principles.In Liberty,John TatePresident, Campaign for LibertyP.S. Unlike the Fed, Campaign for Liberty cannot print money out of thin air. Only your ongoing financial support allows us to do the work we do. Please click here to donate to Campaign for Liberty.
Dear Friend of Liberty,
With each passing day, Ron Paul is winning people over to the cause of Federal Reserve transparency and sound money.More and more Congressmen have been signing onto Dr. Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, HR 1207, and it is now up to a whopping 124 cosponsors. That cosponsor list now includes over half of the House Republican Caucus. Dr. Paul is truly leading the GOP back to its roots of sound money and fiscal conservatism.In fact, The Washington Independent’s David Weigel just wrote an important article about how Ron Paul’s message is resonating with Republican lawmakers. All I can say is, "It's about time!"
Click here to read the article -- “Ron Paul's Economic Theories Winning GOP Converts”.
And today, Dr. Paul proved the case for Federal Reserve transparency to people across America by grilling Ben Bernanke on national television.
Chairman Ben is running scared now that HR 1207 is gaining steam. He even tried to appease Dr. Paul by offering transparency on everything except monetary policy -- the Fed's sole function!
It is clear we are winning this fight, and I believe that ultimately we will see it through to victory. But this is no time to rest on our laurels.Keep writing and calling your congressman if he has not already cosponsored HR 1207 (click here to find out). Circulate more petitions and Audit the Fed literature to your friends and neighbors to recruit them to this winning effort.
Thank you for all you have done and all you will do. With your continued support, Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty will return the GOP to its conservative roots, and America back to its founding principles.In Liberty,John TatePresident, Campaign for LibertyP.S. Unlike the Fed, Campaign for Liberty cannot print money out of thin air. Only your ongoing financial support allows us to do the work we do. Please click here to donate to Campaign for Liberty.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Rose Mary on Immigration
This was sent in by Mary W.
Orange County California Newspaper This is a very good letter to the editor. This woman made some good points. For some reason, people have difficulty structuring their arguments when arguing against supporting the currently proposed immigration revisions. This lady made the argument pretty simple.
NOT printed in the Orange county Paper ..................... Newspapers simply won't publish letters to the editor which they either deem politically incorrect (read below) or which does not agree with the philosophy they're pushing on the public... This woman wrote a great letter to the editor that should have been published; but, with your help it will get published via cyberspace! From: 'David LaBonte'
My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the OC Register which, of course, was not printed. So, I decided to 'print' it myself by sending it out on the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. Written in response to a series of letters to the editor in the
Orange County Register :
Dear Editor:
So many letter writers have based their arguments on how this land is made up of immigrants. Ernie Lujan for one, suggests we should tear down the Statue of Liberty because the people now in question aren't being treated the same as those who passed through Ellis Island and other ports of entry .
Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like Mr. Lujan why today's American is not willing to accept this new kind of immigrant any longer. Back in 1900 when there was a rush from all areas of Europe to come to the United States, people had to get off a ship and stand in a long line in New York and be documented. Some would even get down on their hands and knees and kiss the ground. They made a pledge to uphold the laws and support their new country in good and bad times. They made learning English a primary rule in their new American households and some even changed their names to blend in with their new home. They had waved goodbye to their birth place to give their children a new life and did everything in their power to help their children assimilate into one culture.
Nothing was handed to them. No free lunches, no welfare, no labor laws to protect them . All they had were the skills and craftsmanship they had brought with them to trade for a future of prosperity. Most of their children came of age when World War II broke out. My father fought along side men whose parents had come straight over fromGermany, Italy, France and Japan .. None of these 1st generation Americans ever gave any thought about what country their parents had come from. They were Americans fighting Hitler, Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan . They were defending the United States of America as one people.
When we liberated France , no one in those villages were looking for the French-American or the German-American or the Irish-American. The people of France saw only Americans. And we carried one flag that represented one country. Not one of those immigrant sons would have thought about picking up another country's flag and waving it to represent who they were. It would have been a disgrace to their parents who had sacrificed so much to be here. These immigrants truly knew what it meant to be an American. They stirred the melting pot into one red, white and blue bowl. And here we are in 2008 with a new kind of immigrant who wants the same rights and privileges o nly they want to achieve it by playing with a different set of rules ; one that includes the entitlement card and a guarantee of being faithful to their mother country . I'm sorry, that's not what being an American is all about.
I believe that the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900's deserve better than that for all the toil, hard work and sacrifice in raising future generations to create a land that has become a beacon for those legally searching for a better life .. I think they would be appalled that they are being used as an example by those waving foreign country flags. And for that suggestion about taking down the Statue of Liberty, it happens to mean a lot to the citizens who are voting on the immigration bill . I wouldn't start talking about dismantling the United States just yet.
(signed) Rosemary LaBonte
Orange County California Newspaper This is a very good letter to the editor. This woman made some good points. For some reason, people have difficulty structuring their arguments when arguing against supporting the currently proposed immigration revisions. This lady made the argument pretty simple.
NOT printed in the Orange county Paper ..................... Newspapers simply won't publish letters to the editor which they either deem politically incorrect (read below) or which does not agree with the philosophy they're pushing on the public... This woman wrote a great letter to the editor that should have been published; but, with your help it will get published via cyberspace! From: 'David LaBonte'
My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the OC Register which, of course, was not printed. So, I decided to 'print' it myself by sending it out on the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. Written in response to a series of letters to the editor in the
Orange County Register :
Dear Editor:
So many letter writers have based their arguments on how this land is made up of immigrants. Ernie Lujan for one, suggests we should tear down the Statue of Liberty because the people now in question aren't being treated the same as those who passed through Ellis Island and other ports of entry .
Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like Mr. Lujan why today's American is not willing to accept this new kind of immigrant any longer. Back in 1900 when there was a rush from all areas of Europe to come to the United States, people had to get off a ship and stand in a long line in New York and be documented. Some would even get down on their hands and knees and kiss the ground. They made a pledge to uphold the laws and support their new country in good and bad times. They made learning English a primary rule in their new American households and some even changed their names to blend in with their new home. They had waved goodbye to their birth place to give their children a new life and did everything in their power to help their children assimilate into one culture.
Nothing was handed to them. No free lunches, no welfare, no labor laws to protect them . All they had were the skills and craftsmanship they had brought with them to trade for a future of prosperity. Most of their children came of age when World War II broke out. My father fought along side men whose parents had come straight over fromGermany, Italy, France and Japan .. None of these 1st generation Americans ever gave any thought about what country their parents had come from. They were Americans fighting Hitler, Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan . They were defending the United States of America as one people.
When we liberated France , no one in those villages were looking for the French-American or the German-American or the Irish-American. The people of France saw only Americans. And we carried one flag that represented one country. Not one of those immigrant sons would have thought about picking up another country's flag and waving it to represent who they were. It would have been a disgrace to their parents who had sacrificed so much to be here. These immigrants truly knew what it meant to be an American. They stirred the melting pot into one red, white and blue bowl. And here we are in 2008 with a new kind of immigrant who wants the same rights and privileges o nly they want to achieve it by playing with a different set of rules ; one that includes the entitlement card and a guarantee of being faithful to their mother country . I'm sorry, that's not what being an American is all about.
I believe that the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900's deserve better than that for all the toil, hard work and sacrifice in raising future generations to create a land that has become a beacon for those legally searching for a better life .. I think they would be appalled that they are being used as an example by those waving foreign country flags. And for that suggestion about taking down the Statue of Liberty, it happens to mean a lot to the citizens who are voting on the immigration bill . I wouldn't start talking about dismantling the United States just yet.
(signed) Rosemary LaBonte
Swine Flue by Dr. Ron Paul
This was sent in by Melanie. It is well worth watching. Dr. (and Congressman) Ron Paul puts the Swine Flue in perspective. Pay close attention to what he says about tuberculosis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB5-Y08qbjo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB5-Y08qbjo
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Enraged About Corporate Greed? Kidnap your Boss
Enraged About Corporate Greed? Kidnap Your Boss
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet
Posted on April 30, 2009, Printed on May 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/139052/
In answer to their own economic crisis, the French have taken up "bossnapping."
Here's how it works: An executive of a company, perhaps the CEO, stands before a group of his employees, puts his hands together, sighs, and then, with regret as smooth as brie, explains the fact that downsizing is needed to meet the exigencies of economic crisis (read: the preservation of profits in downturn).
The employees get pissed off -- and bum-rush the boss. They trap him in his office, barricade the door, feed him espresso and baguette, and demand a fair deal.It's a sort of soft-touch storming of the Bastille.
And lo, it works. A few weeks back, this happened at the FM Logistics Co. in Woippy, France, as 125 workers charged into a meeting of five company managers and held the poor creatures hostage for a day. At least 475 workers at FM Logistics, which is owned by Hewlett-Packard Co., were facing the specter of "redundancy" as HP sought to move its printer packaging operations to the cheaper labor pool in Malaysia.
By midnight, the company had turned tail, promising "new proposals on redundancy talks," according to Reuters. The news service quoted one of the bossnappers: "We've had enough. We have been negotiating for a year, if you can call it negotiating, and we haven't managed to make ourselves heard."
At 3M's pharmaceutical factory in Pithiviers, 50 miles from Paris, workers exploded upon hearing that 110 of them were to lose jobs. They surrounded the manager and forced him into his office, where he was held hostage for 24 hours until 3M agreed to resume negotiations.
The president of Sony France in March was locked in his office by employees who barricaded the doors and windows with tree trunks.
Angry factory workers at the Caterpillar plant in Grenoble took four managers hostage on April Fool's Day.
In the last month across France, at least a dozen such incidents have been reported, with no less than five CEOs of major corporations held in what the French are calling, with typical delicate aplomb, "sequestration." In each case, the sequestered bosses have been well-fed and well-treated -- though sometimes, alas, forced to sleep on the floor.
I called my family in France -- my ex lives in Paris with our daughter -- to get the home-fire take on these outrages.
"Most people are for it," my ex told me. "Because of les inegalites" -- the inequalities of the rich doing well as the rest of the country immolates.
I e-mailed her sister-in-law, a schoolteacher, who wrote back, "These bossnappings seem to be peaceful most of the time, and I'm not so shocked. Workers are totally desperate, and I don't blame them for wanting to be heard, as long as no one is hurt." (She also noted that she personally knows a company boss in the south of France who has taken to keeping a bedroll and extra food in his office, just in case.)
A poll this month found that 45 percent of French agree with the practice of bossnapping, while only 7 percent condemned it. A second poll found that 55 percent of French believe that "radical protest" under the current circumstances was justified, while 64 percent said that bossnapping should be depenalized. And perhaps most compelling is that authorities are listening: In most cases, they are declining to prosecute the bossnappers.
It's lovely to behold all this, and even lovelier to think my daughter is growing up weaned on the grand French tradition of raising hell. The habit goes back to the revolution -- its call signs, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite -- to the Paris commune, the resistance, the Soisante-Huitards toppling the republic.
This is a country where, two weeks ago, fishermen at the ports of Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk amassed a flotilla of 500 boats to blockade shipping in the major northern ports (their ire directed at European Union fishing quotas issued from on high for the benefit of corporate interests backed by the EU).The government answered the blockade by handing the fishing industry $66 million in loans to ride out hard times.
In January, over a million citizens on strike took to the streets in protest of government stimulus policies that appear to favor big business and special interests over average Frenchmen (sound familiar?). The country almost literally came to a halt: Flights canceled, the Paris metro paralyzed, commuter transit dead on the rails, schools and courts and post offices shut down.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently visited the small town of Chatellerault, he was met not by the typically American crowd of corralled sheep but by thousands of protesters who pelted with eggs his cordon of teargas-firing police.
There is a reason the French enjoy the best health system in the world (according to the World Health Organization), some of the best unemployment benefits, a free education system and some of the shortest work weeks and most productive worker-per-hour output among developed countries.
They make noise, they marshal in the streets, they bossnap, sometimes they set things on fire, barricade roads, demolish infrastructure (as in the recent rash of railway sabotage in France).
Sheldon Wolin, a professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, celebrates this kind of behavior among citizens as "the disorderliness that has always been the hallmark of a vibrant democracy" -- and in talking about "democracy," lame old word that it's become, he is cleaving to its earliest meaning in politics: rule and resistance by that dangerously unwashed thing the Greeks called the demos, the people themselves.
In his troubling book, Democracy Incorporated, published last year, Wolin, who was a bomber pilot during World War II, laments that disorderliness in the U.S. has been on the wane since the 1960s, helped along by the widening reach of an anti-democratic corporate-state apparatus -- "highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, [and not least], the media" -- that encourages docility, depoliticization, the shrugging-off of participation.
"One of the reasons why the '60s continues to be a favorite punching bag of neocons and neoliberals," he writes in Democracy Incorporated, "is that it represented a decade of prolonged popular political education unique in recent American history. The most frequent topics were racism, foreign policy, corporate power, higher education and threats to ecology -- each in one form or another a domain of elitism."
What Wolin is saying is perhaps a hard dose of the obvious: When Americans protest -- and they're not protesting very much (on the eve of the Iraq war, the French had more people in the streets than did the whole of the citizenry of the United States) -- the system today isn't geared to listen, or, rather, is geared more handily to ignore the noise.
The goal, of course, is "to isolate democratic resistance, to insulate society from hearing dissonant voices, and to hurry the process of depoliticization," says Wolin.
Americans, it appears, are good at depoliticization, certainly no good at bossnapping.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer, is working on a book about secessionism and the dismantling of the United States government. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/139052/
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet
Posted on April 30, 2009, Printed on May 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/139052/
In answer to their own economic crisis, the French have taken up "bossnapping."
Here's how it works: An executive of a company, perhaps the CEO, stands before a group of his employees, puts his hands together, sighs, and then, with regret as smooth as brie, explains the fact that downsizing is needed to meet the exigencies of economic crisis (read: the preservation of profits in downturn).
The employees get pissed off -- and bum-rush the boss. They trap him in his office, barricade the door, feed him espresso and baguette, and demand a fair deal.It's a sort of soft-touch storming of the Bastille.
And lo, it works. A few weeks back, this happened at the FM Logistics Co. in Woippy, France, as 125 workers charged into a meeting of five company managers and held the poor creatures hostage for a day. At least 475 workers at FM Logistics, which is owned by Hewlett-Packard Co., were facing the specter of "redundancy" as HP sought to move its printer packaging operations to the cheaper labor pool in Malaysia.
By midnight, the company had turned tail, promising "new proposals on redundancy talks," according to Reuters. The news service quoted one of the bossnappers: "We've had enough. We have been negotiating for a year, if you can call it negotiating, and we haven't managed to make ourselves heard."
At 3M's pharmaceutical factory in Pithiviers, 50 miles from Paris, workers exploded upon hearing that 110 of them were to lose jobs. They surrounded the manager and forced him into his office, where he was held hostage for 24 hours until 3M agreed to resume negotiations.
The president of Sony France in March was locked in his office by employees who barricaded the doors and windows with tree trunks.
Angry factory workers at the Caterpillar plant in Grenoble took four managers hostage on April Fool's Day.
In the last month across France, at least a dozen such incidents have been reported, with no less than five CEOs of major corporations held in what the French are calling, with typical delicate aplomb, "sequestration." In each case, the sequestered bosses have been well-fed and well-treated -- though sometimes, alas, forced to sleep on the floor.
I called my family in France -- my ex lives in Paris with our daughter -- to get the home-fire take on these outrages.
"Most people are for it," my ex told me. "Because of les inegalites" -- the inequalities of the rich doing well as the rest of the country immolates.
I e-mailed her sister-in-law, a schoolteacher, who wrote back, "These bossnappings seem to be peaceful most of the time, and I'm not so shocked. Workers are totally desperate, and I don't blame them for wanting to be heard, as long as no one is hurt." (She also noted that she personally knows a company boss in the south of France who has taken to keeping a bedroll and extra food in his office, just in case.)
A poll this month found that 45 percent of French agree with the practice of bossnapping, while only 7 percent condemned it. A second poll found that 55 percent of French believe that "radical protest" under the current circumstances was justified, while 64 percent said that bossnapping should be depenalized. And perhaps most compelling is that authorities are listening: In most cases, they are declining to prosecute the bossnappers.
It's lovely to behold all this, and even lovelier to think my daughter is growing up weaned on the grand French tradition of raising hell. The habit goes back to the revolution -- its call signs, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite -- to the Paris commune, the resistance, the Soisante-Huitards toppling the republic.
This is a country where, two weeks ago, fishermen at the ports of Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk amassed a flotilla of 500 boats to blockade shipping in the major northern ports (their ire directed at European Union fishing quotas issued from on high for the benefit of corporate interests backed by the EU).The government answered the blockade by handing the fishing industry $66 million in loans to ride out hard times.
In January, over a million citizens on strike took to the streets in protest of government stimulus policies that appear to favor big business and special interests over average Frenchmen (sound familiar?). The country almost literally came to a halt: Flights canceled, the Paris metro paralyzed, commuter transit dead on the rails, schools and courts and post offices shut down.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently visited the small town of Chatellerault, he was met not by the typically American crowd of corralled sheep but by thousands of protesters who pelted with eggs his cordon of teargas-firing police.
There is a reason the French enjoy the best health system in the world (according to the World Health Organization), some of the best unemployment benefits, a free education system and some of the shortest work weeks and most productive worker-per-hour output among developed countries.
They make noise, they marshal in the streets, they bossnap, sometimes they set things on fire, barricade roads, demolish infrastructure (as in the recent rash of railway sabotage in France).
Sheldon Wolin, a professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, celebrates this kind of behavior among citizens as "the disorderliness that has always been the hallmark of a vibrant democracy" -- and in talking about "democracy," lame old word that it's become, he is cleaving to its earliest meaning in politics: rule and resistance by that dangerously unwashed thing the Greeks called the demos, the people themselves.
In his troubling book, Democracy Incorporated, published last year, Wolin, who was a bomber pilot during World War II, laments that disorderliness in the U.S. has been on the wane since the 1960s, helped along by the widening reach of an anti-democratic corporate-state apparatus -- "highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, [and not least], the media" -- that encourages docility, depoliticization, the shrugging-off of participation.
"One of the reasons why the '60s continues to be a favorite punching bag of neocons and neoliberals," he writes in Democracy Incorporated, "is that it represented a decade of prolonged popular political education unique in recent American history. The most frequent topics were racism, foreign policy, corporate power, higher education and threats to ecology -- each in one form or another a domain of elitism."
What Wolin is saying is perhaps a hard dose of the obvious: When Americans protest -- and they're not protesting very much (on the eve of the Iraq war, the French had more people in the streets than did the whole of the citizenry of the United States) -- the system today isn't geared to listen, or, rather, is geared more handily to ignore the noise.
The goal, of course, is "to isolate democratic resistance, to insulate society from hearing dissonant voices, and to hurry the process of depoliticization," says Wolin.
Americans, it appears, are good at depoliticization, certainly no good at bossnapping.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer, is working on a book about secessionism and the dismantling of the United States government. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/139052/
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