STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH | [print_link]

http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/185) with a whole bunch of powers spelled out in Articles I and II.  But hey, why should they confuse themselves with facts.  But then, is the debate really about “big government vs. small government?”  Isn’t it more about what the proper functions of government are without referring to its size?  After all, protestations and the wishful thinking of a few lefties to the contrary notwithstanding, polls show that the majority of Tea Partiers are GOPers.  Ron and Rand are GOPers, and the former has voted with his party in Congress on most issues other than the last President’s foreign war-making.  The GOPers in the Congress and those voters who identify themselves with that party, not with the Tea Party, are certainly GOPers.  And they all say that their common interest, at least with this President in office, is “small government.”  A nice, sort of libertarian thought, no?  Well, no.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/182).  That sounds like pretty big government to me.

 

SELECT COMMENTS

Stephen Scott Crockett 12:46 am

godblessfdr I totally agree. Republicans-tea baggers are against government when it hurts the rich and corporations but not when it hurts the common man which they consider to be peasants who need controlling. This is the essence of Republicanism control the common man so the elite can steamroll them, too bad the average American is too dull to see this.

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CROSSPOST:

Published on BuzzFlash/Truthout on Sun, 01/23/2011 – 1:31pm.

URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/215

LIBERAL BETRAYALS DEPT.—

Originally at: Newsmax (a rightwing site)

Big Government Is Dead — Even in New York

By: Wayne Allyn Root

[print_link] Thursday, January 20, 2011

That’s not a progressive agenda. It’s a bankruptcy agenda. These people aren’t liberals; they are fossils. It’s a far different world out there — perhaps they haven’t noticed. But the proof is found in my old home state of New York, and my new adopted home state of Nevada.
There is a dramatic and truly amazing lesson developing right now in New York. The newly elected governor of New York is Democrat Andrew Cuomo. He is the son of one of the heroes of big government “tax and spend” liberalism — former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Yet this new and improved Cuomo refuses to raise taxes one cent. He is demanding a “radical shift” in the way New York is run (headline quoted from the liberal New York Times). That radical shift is built around the idea of dramatic cuts in services, smaller government, far fewer government employees and agencies, and reigning in public employee unions.
As a lifelong fiscal conservative, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Cuomo promises to reduce the entire $10 billion deficit with $10 billion in spending cuts. He is pro-business and refuses to use “class warfare” to incite jealousy and hatred. Amen.
Most remarkable of all, even with a $10 billion budget deficit, this new generation of Cuomo is actually allowing a “wealth tax” (a higher tax on wealthy New Yorkers) to expire. Ending this wealth tax will cost the state of New York an extra billion dollars.
This Cuomo says that if New York doesn’t stop raising taxes on the rich and business, there will be no businesses or rich left to tax. Who does this guy think he is — me?
In short, the “progressive” agenda is dying before our very eyes. Even New York Democrats have had enough of high taxes necessary to pay toll takers $100,000 per year in retirement. Even New Yorkers have had it with sanitation workers who make $90,000 per year, but can’t manage to clear the streets in a blizzard. Even New Yorkers are in shock over the bankruptcy of OTB (Off Track Betting).
Government is so pathetic in New York, they’ve managed to pull off the impossible — run the gambling business into bankruptcy! How did this happen? There were far too many OTB employees (all cronies of government bureaucrats and politicians), collecting bloated salaries and obscene pensions at the expense of taxpayers.
The goose that laid the golden egg was finally killed by the greed and incompetence of big government. I figured this all out 20 years ago and escaped from New York.
Let New York serve as proof that the entire country will soon be moving toward the model of my adopted home state of Nevada. What is the Nevada model? It’s simple. It’s the model of the United States Constitution — government should do as little as possible, leave the rest to the people and the private sector, and then get the heck out of the way.
Nevada’s model is smaller government, lower spending, reduced services, fewer government employees, and lower taxes. Does it work? Ask the U.S. Census Bureau. Nevada is once again the fastest-growing state in America — for the fifth straight decade. It’s no coincidence or luck when you’re No. 1 for 50 years in a row.
Does Nevada have financial problems despite that philosophy of smaller government? You bet. Like the other 49 states, Nevada spent irresponsibly for the past decade. We spent money we didn’t have. That’s not a tax problem. That’s a spending addiction. It’s time for our states to enter rehab.
Brian Sandoval, the newly elected governor of Nevada, is a fiscal conservative who promises to close the budget gap without raising one cent in taxes. Like New York Gov. Cuomo, he’s even promising to allow about a billion dollars of temporary tax increases enacted a few years ago to expire. That’s called courage.
If our governor holds true to his promise, I predict Nevada will be No. 1 out of 50 states for many more decades to come.
Cities, counties, and states across America are facing financial disaster and bankruptcy due to unsustainable spending and debt. Higher taxes aren’t the answer; it is America’s highest tax states that are facing the worst ruin.
The lesson is clear — higher taxes lead to even higher spending, deficit, and debt.
Higher taxes are used to hire more government employees, at higher salaries, with bigger pensions. This progressive agenda leads to economic ruin all over the world.
Ask New York. Ask California. Or ask the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). They all suffer from the same maladies — big government, bloated spending, big pensions, unsustainable deficits, powerful unions, and too many government employees trying to leech off too few taxpayers. It’s a dying model.

Perhaps liberals, progressives, and all Obama followers need to watch the news once in a while. If they did, they’d see the greatest example of all. Even communist Cuba is cutting 500,000 government employees, promising to cut another 500,000 soon, and asking its citizens to stop expecting so much from government.
Thankfully, the progressive model of big government is dead.

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Wayne Allyn Root is a former libertarian vice presidential nominee and now serves as chairman of the Libertarian National Congressional Committee. He is the best-selling author of “The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gold & Tax Cuts.” His website is ROOTforAmerica.com.
© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

We are now in Act IV, the one where the liberal class postures like the cowardly policemen in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Liberals promise battle. They talk of glory and honor. They vow not to abandon their core liberal values. They rouse themselves, like the terrified policemen who have no intention of fighting the pirates, with the bugle call of “Tarantara!” This scene is the most painful to watch. It is a window into how hollow, vacuous and powerless liberals and liberal institutions including labor, the liberal church, the press, the arts, universities and the Democratic Party have become. They fight for nothing. They stand for nothing. And at a moment when we desperately need citizens and institutions willing to stand up against corporate forces for the core liberal values, values that make a democracy possible, we get the ridiculous chatter and noise of the liberal class.

The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative—as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.

The liberal class’ solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression. Conferences, whether organized by Left Forum, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun or figures such as Ted Glick—who is touting a plan to lure progressives, including members of the Democratic Party, into something he calls a “third force”—are where liberals go to feel good about themselves again. These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best—applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.

“What we need is an alliance which consciously incorporates elected Democrats as well as elected Greens and independents, as well as groups, or individual leaders and members of groups, like Progressive Democrats of America and the Green Party,” Glick proposes. “More than that, this alliance eventually needs to support and work to elect candidates running both as Democrats and progressive independents, and maybe even an occasional Republican.”

The Tikkun Conference held in Washington last June was another pathetic display of liberal apologists begging Obama to be Obama. The organizers called on those participating to “Support Obama to BE the Obama We Voted For—Not the Inside-the-Beltway Pragmatist/Realist whose compromises have led to a decrease in his popularity and opened the door for a revival of the just-recently-discredited Right wing.”

Good luck.

The organizers of the Left Forum conference scheduled for this March at Pace University in New York City also communicate in the amorphous, high-blown moral rhetoric that is unmoored from the actual and real. The upcoming Left Forum conference, which has the vacuous title “Towards a Politics of Solidarity,” promises to “focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working-class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.” The organizers posit that “the potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.” The conference “will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.”

The conference agenda, which sounds like a parody of a course catalogue description, includes the requisite academic jargon of “moral act of imagination” and “chains of solidarity.” This language gives to the enterprise a lofty but undefined purpose. And this is a specialty of the liberal class—to grandly say nothing. The last thing the liberal class intends to do is fight back. Left Forum brings in a few titans, including Noam Chomsky, who is always worth hearing, but it contributes as well to the lethargy and turpitude that have made the liberal class impotent.

The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience, which is why I will be at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., at noon March 19 to protest the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Veterans groups on March 19 will also carry out street protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. You can link to the protests at AnswerCoalition.org. Save your bus fare and your energy for events like this one.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.” He writes a column for Truthdig that appears here every Monday.

LIBERAL BETRAYALS—

   Comic Jon Stewart attacks WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

A cheap shot by a political lightweight and insufferably smug egomaniac

By David Walsh
7 December 2010 [print_link]

Comic Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, the satirical US news program and talk show, went out of his way November 30 to attack WikiLeaks’ co-founder Julian Assange and the exposure of American government conspiracies around the world.

In the eight-and-a-half-minute segment, Stewart downplayed the explosive WikiLeaks material, cynically made fun of Assange’s name―of all things―and generally made light of revelations that have produced a major crisis for US imperialist diplomacy.

Assange is presently the subject of an intense international campaign of persecution spearheaded by US authorities. He faces phony sexual assault charges in Sweden and calls from the American ultra-right for his assassination.

That Stewart chooses this moment to broadcast a demeaning and dismissive routine at Assange’s expense is an act, if nothing else, of extraordinary cowardice. By his comments, Stewart solidarized himself with the US and other powerful states and the global media in their campaign to demonize and, if possible, eliminate, one troublesome individual.

Stewart has had his good days in the past, attacking Bush administration officials and Wall Street’s media mouthpieces. He may still have some ahead of him, but his general trajectory is increasingly toward the establishment.

Stewart and his Comedy Central colleague, Stephen Colbert, maintain a following among young people in particular. In the giant vacuum that is American political life, their brand of disrespect and ridicule gains a relatively easy hearing. The departure of George W. Bush from the White House and the arrival of Barack Obama have helped bring out the relative poverty of their humor and overall outlook, as so much of their criticism of the Bush administration was of a superficial, “cultural” character.

Stewart’s large “Rally for Sanity” October 30 in Washington was dominated by political and social complacency and empty calls for moderation, very much in tune with the White House and the Democratic Party’s 2010 election campaign. Stewart, in his address to the rally, faulted ultra-right and liberal commentators alike for the present tense political atmosphere, suggesting that while their over-the-top rhetoric “did not cause our problems … its existence has made solving them that much harder… If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

The Daily Show host’s malicious comments about Assange ran along the same lines. He began November 30: “The release of many embarrassing and possibly damaging diplomatic cables has introduced the world to a new super-villain, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.” On the one hand, Stewart sought to make fun of those outraged at Assange, but only from the point of view of underscoring the supposedly unrevealing and unsurprising character of the WikiLeaks revelations. Moreover, the monologue on Assange was interspersed with crude comments, which had nothing to do with the subject at hand, satirically or otherwise, but had the aim of lowering the tone as much as possible.

The Daily Show segment on WikiLeaks made reference to some of the cables’ content, but generally to their most obvious and harmlessly embarrassing elements, i.e., the publication of US diplomats’ opinions about various world leaders.

Stewart went on: “Transparency is a good thing, government wrongdoing should be ferreted out. Although, just because something is secret doesn’t necessarily mean it’s nefarious.” In sum, “an interesting yet less explosive and less than searing indictment.”

After a few comments on video from Assange, about the latter’s personal satisfaction in “crushing bastards,” Stewart addressed the WikiLeaks founder directly: “I think you are underestimating how cynical Americans are about our government already. We’ve engineered coups in Chile, Iran, Guatemala etc. … We sell weapons to our enemy’s enemy who somehow always then becomes our enemy and forces us to defend ourselves from our own weapons. That happens a lot. …

Truly remarkable! The chronically self-satisfied Stewart―who earns how many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year for acting as one of American society’s official court jesters?―lecturing an individual who has put his neck on the line in the interest of exposing imperialism’s crimes to stop dramatizing himself!

The remainder of the segment was devoted to a would-be comic debate between Stewart and one of his mock correspondents, Aasif Mandvi, in which the latter took the position, presumably linked to Assange and WikiLeaks, that “everyone has the right to know everything about everyone” and cited positively the invasive airport scanning as an example of that.

Delivered the soft lob from Mandvi about the scanning, Stewart replied: “That’s not transparency. Transparency is about being open to the public on important issues and processes so that the public can make informed decisions.”

Mandvi later asserted pompously that the WikiLeaks’ revelation was “basically our generation’s Pentagon Papers.” Stewart responded, “The Pentagon Papers exposed blatant lies about how the government got us into the Vietnam War, how they continued to mislead us about the war’s progress, even the most cynical reading of these documents, I don’t think rises to that indictable level.”

Mandvi dismissed this airily with, “It’s not meant to, it’s about the beautiful anarchy of information. It shows that what the government says in private is not necessarily what it says in public.” This of course permitted Stewart to return to one of his favorite and most cynical themes: “But who doesn’t know that? That seems like a relatively banal point to be made.”

The exposed cables have shed light, in fact, on filthy US operations around the globe, from warmongering against China, coordinating lies with the dictator of Yemen, covering up Saudi support for terrorism, participating in war crimes in Sri Lanka, to weighing the usefulness of a coup in Pakistan, and much more.

In their scope and weight, the WikiLeaks are more damning than the Pentagon Papers. WikiLeaks has helped bring to public attention the way in which catastrophic events, such as wars and coups, are prepared and organized by the imperialist powers. This is what has outraged the various regimes and has set in motion the campaign to close down WikiLeaks and destroy Assange.

Through his unserious and dishonest attempt to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks, Stewart has only disgraced himself. Anyone who looks to the Daily Show as a politically oppositional beacon is looking in the wrong direction.