You are here: Home / Archives for Reagan

Ryan & Rand

July 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Dude, did you listen to a single word I said?

Returning to the theme of Paul Ryan’s infatuation with Ayn Rand and his supposed adherence to her ideology there are in actuality considerable gaps between them. Even as Ryan calls for drastic cuts to balance the budget and the privatization of Medicare he supports increased military spending. Rand opposed the Vietnam War vociferously and like Ron Paul considered aggressive war incompatible with capitalism. She never would have supported increased military spending and would no doubt have denounced Ryan for his position.

 

Rand supported Civil Rights and Women’s Rights and said her favorite president was Gerald Ford because of his policy of deregulation. And whilst she said that her basic philosophy could be found in “Atlas Shrugged,” she insisted that she never expected it to be adopted as a practical matter. The most important philosophers she argued were Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Is it possible that Ryan has read them? Not likely.

 

It was Aristotle who maintained that what he called distributive justice was essential to

Share the wealth and the burden or the shit will hit the fan.

the stability of the state. He defined it as the ”equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of society.” Without this he insisted there would be social unrest that would threaten the well-being of the well-off. Don’t expect to find anything like this in Paul Ryan’s thinking.

 

Rand was foremost a notorious atheist who ridiculed religion unlike the Ryanites who use religion as a cover for their ideology as though they had never read the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles which call for the sharing of the wealth. When Rand met William Buckley she told him that he “was too intelligent to believe in God.” Instead of parrying by saying that she was too intelligent not to he cut her off, became permanently hostile to her and drove her from the conservative ranks.

 

Ryan will never balance the budget by increasing military spending and keeping the tax cuts for the wealthy. His and the Republican position is essentially a hoax. It is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan campaigned on “cutting the Gordian Knot” by balancing the budget. He drastically increased military spending and produced a gigantic deficit whilst increasing the size of the government substantially. Under Bush Clinton’s surplus quickly vanished and here was a new gigantic deficit owing in good part to the war in Iraq and his tax cuts. Under Clinton and Gore the government was at its smallest since Eisenhower. Under Bush the government grew substantially with the Republicans going along with it. Where was Paul Ryan then? Ryan is peddling snake oil and is not to be trusted. Ayn Rand would have been flattered that he makes his staff read “Atlas Shrugged” but would otherwise have considered him a bad joke.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Meltdown!

March 16, 2011 By 3 Comments

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
– Richard Feynman (1918-1988) American physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)

“Truth is treason in the empire of lies”

- Ron Paul, United States Congressman, Texas.

Both of these observations are pertinent to the nuclear disaster in Japan.  In 1976, the University of Massachusetts Press published THE ACCIDENT HAZARDS OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS by Richard E. Webb.   It was a completely non-ideological work based on the author’s study of nuclear power technology.  A trained nuclear physicist, Webb was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at the time.

Unfortunately for Webb, the scientific community had adopted the gospel that nuclear power plants were the wave of the future and were completely safe.  But if they were so safe, why had Congress enacted the Price Anderson Act strictly limiting damages for  any nuclear power plant accident?  The answer was that it was needed to guarantee that the capital could be raised to meet America’s future electricity needs since the country’s economic growth depended upon it.  Webb was universally attacked, lost  his teaching job and was shunted into obscurity. The book is still available though.  You can buy it on Amazon.com. You can read the truth that the scientific community in and out of academia deemed treasonous in their empire of lies.

Now that the chickens are coming home to roost in Japan, it is  time to revisit Webb’s study. In 2008, with Wall Street unwilling to finance new nuclear plants, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner advanced legislation to provide $544 billion for new nuclear plant development.  Now Lieberman says that in light of the Japan disaster, America should reconsider its pro-nuke policy.

During the same time frame as Webb’s book, Avery Lovins published THE SOFT ENERGY PATH, arguing in favor of renewable, non-dangerous energy such as solar and wind.  Jimmy Carter, during the oil embargo, authorized the Department of Energy to launch a program promoting alternative sources of energy.  He spoke to the American people on television wearing a cardigan.  Ronald Reagan was quick to ridicule him, insisting that Americans were “not going to freeze in the dark.”  On becoming president, Reagan canceled Carter’s initiatives and directed the Department of Energy to develop breeder nuclear reactors based upon their ability to provide an endless source of energy by generating more fuel than they use.  Because of the cost and the dangers associated with the technology, Reagan’s plan went nowhere.  Instead, he announced that America would always come to the aid of the “House of Saud,” guaranteeing America’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil for the indefinite future.

Saudi troops have now entered neighboring oil-rich Bahrain to put down a Shiah-led uprising against a backward monarchy

Bahrain can't do that to protestors, only Iran can do that to protestors.

out of fear that they could be next.  Their actions are as dangerous as the breeder reactors.  Bahrain is predominantly Shiah and the absolute monarchy is Sunni. The Shiah resent the widespread discrimination against them, something that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia as well.  Iran, a Shiah nation, is not likely to stand by and accept the repression of its co-religionists.  Should it decide to take action against Saudi Arabia, the Middle East will go up in flames and because of the danger to oil supplies, the stock market will crash again.  It is already tanking so it is not hard to imagine what the impact of all-out war in the Middle East will be.  Forget any economic recovery.  Instead, there could be an economic collapse of monumental proportions, with growing demand that America intervene in the Middle East to protect its energy supplies.

With nukes now off the table and oil an unreliable energy source, coal and natural gas will soar in price, generating inflation while the economy tanks and gas hits five dollars a gallon.  The world that Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller created will exacerbate the problem.  Ford, who first mass-produced automobiles, said that the cities were “dead,” as  Americans, armed with their cars, flocked to the suburbs.  Rockefeller, who proclaimed individualism to be “gone, never to return,” provided the fuel bland conformist suburbia needed as its lifeblood.  The entire vanilla American way of life will no longer be able to sustain itself.  Private homes heated by oil and cars, the only means of everyday transportation, will become exorbitantly expensive to maintain.  There will have to be a mass transition to electric vehicles with power generated by coal and natural gas, something not likely to happen overnight, along with a total redevelopment of infrastructure to centralize populations and provide mass-transit.  “Hold on to your hats.  It’s  going to be a bumpy ride.”

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

O’Donnel’s Revolution

December 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The “I’m-not-a-witch” losing candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has landed a book deal with

Okay, so I ride a broomstick at night whilst wearing a silly hat. That makes me a witch?

St. Martin’s Press.  This anti-Establishment Tea Partier is represented by one of the top literary agencies, Trident Media.  So far, no one’s talking about the size of the advance.

In the book, O’Donnell will reveal her frustrations with American electoral politics and her experience defeating an Establishment Republican with Tea Party support.  O’Donnell made this statement: “The 2010 midterm elections were just the beginning—the first rumblings of a revolution that has not fully erupted.  I plan on making my book one of the revolution’s catalysts.”

Her book is hardly going to be THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO or Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE.  But this is what revolutions have come to in America.  We have had the “Reagan Revolution, “The Gingrich Revolution” and now this, the “Tea Party Revolution,” and its chief theorist will be an empty-headed nincompoop who can barely speak a sentence.  What are the chances that she will be the actual author?  Of course, it will be snapped up by the radical right across the nation and will make all the bestseller lists, including The New York Times.  All the struggling bohemian writers in Brooklyn will be gnashing their teeth at St. Martin’s total sellout, jumping the shark with this specious project.  But there is something more important going on here than meets the eye and it has to do with the meaning of revolution.

When the left speaks of revolution, the FBI goes after them and they are branded as “un-American.”  But when Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Palin, Beck and now O’Donnell speak of revolution, it is perfectly acceptable because it comes from the right.  Hitler, too, said he was a revolutionary but what is true of these so-called rightwing revolutionaries is that they are, in fact, counter-revolutionaries, all backed by forces of reaction. Under the banner of defeating socialism and communism, they are determined to stamp out the social progress achieved by progressives. They all tend to be racist to some degree and when you scrape the surface, big money is backing all of them.  The corporate and financial types are paranoid about socialism because they believe they are threatened by a violent revolution that will take away all they have.   When the market crashed in 2008, wealthy New Yorkers hired security guards because they feared poor blacks and Hispanics would descend upon them from Harlem and the Bronx.

The ones with the money are far from revolutionaries.  They consider themselves to be conservatives, part of a respectable ideological tradition going back to William Pitt, but they are not.  They are much more like the conservatives in Germany who were terrified of a Communist Revolution and saw in Hitler and the Nazis potential allies in defeating it. They assumed that they could co-opt them and rule behind the scenes with Hitler as a sort of front man with no real desire to govern but wanting only to make speeches and bask in the limelight.

That's Mister Fuhrer to you.

What happened was the reverse.  Hitler devoured the conservatives, who ended up dependent on him.  Pappen, the conservative Deputy Chancellor, had no power.  He actually opposed Kristalnacht, to no avail. And old Hindenburg, the national hero who had defeated Hitler when he was elected president of Germany, succumbed as well.

The Republican Party is now going the way of the German conservatives.  Terrified of Obama because they are convinced he is a Socialist, they allied themselves with the Tea Party after Tea Party-backed candidates succeeded in routing numerous members of the GOP old guard in primaries.  And while they are trying to block Palin with a traditional Republican, Mitt Romney, in the end they will accept Palin because they are so terrified of what they are convinced is a socialist conspiracy to take over the country.  At a recent Tea Party-sponsored meeting of candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee, the Tea Party activists dominated, with all of the candidates pandering to the radical right.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, once Richard Nixon’s protégé, finds himself the next target of the Tea Party. As one of Lugar’s Tea Party opponents in Indiana put it, he has become “moderate.”  Getting rid of Lugar is, as a Tea Party activist at the beauty contest held for candidates seeking the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee put it, a “priority.”  They would not support any candidate for chairman of the party who did not share this objective.  Jack Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri who is from an old-line aristocratic family, lamented that the Republican Party has become so extreme that it is now “beyond redemption.”  But, of course, he is one of the  “elites” that Sarah Palin has vowed to purge from the Party.  And once she has, the counterrevolution will be in full force, calling itself a version of the original American Revolution, as the Tea Partiers proclaim.  Jefferson would not think so.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,