His Name Was Willard Romney, Incorporated (Part 2)

Vulture capitalist turned presidential candidate Willard Romney, Inc. speaks his true opinion of the American electorate in an unguarded moment. In the language of Paul Ryan's guru Ayn Rand, that means nearly half the voters are moochers who exist only to loot the Producers i.e. the plutocratic class of Romney and Ryan. In the mountain tunnel scene of Atlas Shrugged (called "The Moratorium on Brains"), Rand blew a trainful of such people up. But what Romney and Ryan don't know is that corporatists like them are the villains of Atlas Shrugged — in fact, arguably worse: at least Orren Boyle was an industrialist, though an incompetent one whose company continued to exist because of government support. It's Boyle's kind that are behind protectionist laws. Romney himself is in fact worse: he got his fortune from destroying companies and exporting jobs to China. Apparently the vulture capitalist was too horrific a concept for Rand. But now we're stuck with an aristocracy of them. And Willard Romney, Inc. is their standard bearer, their point man in their Social Darwinist crusade against democracy and the common man.

The Republican Party Is Over

I've said previously that the Republicans have lost this election. The Mitt Romney campaign, it is said, are secretly conceding. But I wasn't confident enough to go one step further. But Laura Ingraham has. Even Rush Limbaugh has. The Republican Party is over. Of course, the conservative pundits add one caveat: "if Obama wins this election" (which they think is impossible unless Americans' faith is lacking). I'm saying Obama has already won it. Fact: The Democrats got a "bounce" in the polls from their convention. The Republicans got nothing. Not that polls are scientific or anything, but this is a bad sign. Fact: The Republican presidential ticket was upstaged at their own convention by an old man raving dementedly at an empty chair. (The chair became an instant star. Watch out, inanimate carbon rod!) Fact: This election the Republicans face not one but two spoiler parties (the Libertarian Party, which has picked up the Ron Paul libertarian vote; and the Constitution Party, which aims to be the party of the Christian Right); the Democrats face none, not even the Greens that helped cost them the 2000 election. Obama now has Clinton's spoiler advantage. Fact: There are five upcoming debates, two between the presidential candidates and two vice-presidential. So far, Willard Romney Inc. and Paul Ryan have not shown that they are ready to take on Obama and Biden. But these are reasons why the current Republican presidential ticket will lose the 2012 election. But here's some signs that the GOP may not survive this election at all:

1. Demographics. The older the generation, the whiter and more conservative, and the more likely voters will vote Republican. Also, in the wake of the Crash of 2008, the nation is becoming more urban, and cities are far more diverse and liberal than the suburbs and exurbs that are the traditional base of conservative power.
2. The libertarian wing was in effect purged. It is no longer part of the Republican coalition at all. It has its own party: the Libertarian Party. After 2012, not even conservative libertarians will vote Republican ever again.
3. Another major wing of the GOP, the Christian Right, has a third party of its own competing for Republican votes: the Constitution Party. In this election the CP is in perfect position to suck up votes from white Evangelical fundamentalists that would otherwise go Republican if only the GOP candidate were not Mammon-worshipping Mormon plutocrat Willard Romney Inc. More on the CP below.
4. At the Republican National Convention, the party establishment pushed through a rule change that would in effect eliminate any more populist "insurrections" like those behind Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul. The Republican National Committee, in effect, established a dictatorship within the party, like that of the Communist Party to which so many neocons in the party establishment used to belong. The Sovietization of the GOP is now complete.
5. The plutocrats who currently control the GOP are not loyal to any political party; rather, they buy parties. The coming Republican Massacre will convince them that the GOP is now a failed investment, so they'll abandon their losses and shift their attention to the Democrats.

I've previously predicted that the Republicans would shrink into a sectional religious party. But the Constitution Party is already that; a religious GOP is redundant. So I am now confident enough to take that one step further: It's not just the end of an era of Republican dominance. It's the end of the Republican Party, period. It's about to join its predecessors, the Federalists and Whigs, to oblivion. And after that? Consider that the Constitution Party is the existing sectional religious of the South, and the main base of Libertarian popularity is the West. That would make the Democrats the only remaining national party in 2016. You know the corporatists who now own the GOP will attempt a hostile takeover of the Democrats, complete with a purge of the liberal base and

The Republicans Have Already Lost; or, Barry Goldwater All Over Again

Willard Romney, Incorporated was already losing in the political polls. Then on Saturday the 11th, he made what he thought was the winningest pick for vice president: Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Romney-Ryan has already lost. Here's why. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona ran his Republican presidential campaign on a more or less ideologically pure platform and got his butt handed to him by President Lyndon Johnson, who proceeded to sign the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Paul Ryan is the architect of this year's GOP platform. His plan ends Medicare, privatizes Social Security, raises taxes on the middle class and the poor, and all but subsidizes the rich. He justifies this with Ayn Rand's ethics, which states that the big industrialists are the true producers and everybody else is a mooching looter and moral cannibal living off their totally deserved wealth. The not-so-hidden assumptions are "vulgar Calvinism", the belief that wealth is the mark of virtue or is itself virtue, and Social Darwinism, the cult of "the survival of the fittest" — combined in the assumption that the rich are the fittest and the poor are the unfit that must be destroyed. Seems the Corporates have not evolved one bit since they tried to destroy President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Hell, some of them even supported Hitler in his Kampf or jihad against America. America is evolving and changing around them, yet they haven't changed one bit. Wealth and power can be very regressive forces indeed. Ryan's plan to destroy Medicare and sell off Social Security to his predatory Corporate friends will lose him the senior vote that the GOP previously relied on as the core of their base. It's even threatening the GOP down-ticket: Ryan is now every GOP politician's running mate, since he wrote the party platform he's now running on as VP nominee. There are two potential Ralph Nader/Ross Perot-type spoilers. First, there's the Libertarian Party, whose nominee Gary Johnson is running on essentially the Ron Paul platform. He will siphon away at least a significant proportion of Paul supporters from Romney-Ryan. The other is the second biggest third party, Dominionist party variously called Constitution, Independence, and American Taxpayers. If they can nominate a top ticket with a high enough profile, they could take away a good chunk of the Religious Right. The platform Romney and Ryan are running on is essentially Corporatism, an ideology with little mass appeal precisely because it scorns the masses. Its current basis is Ayn Rand's ideology of Objectivism, which is basically Stalinism turned upside down: she replaced Marxism's revolutionary proletariat with a revolutionary bourgeoisie, and replaced Christian and Marxist altruism (the ethics of self-sacrifice) with an equally extreme egoism. Now combine this disadvantage with the threat of two competing right-wing third parties. The result? A second term for President Barack Obama, the guy the Right hates because the Great White Father isn't supposed to be black. Note that I never mentioned the Democratic Party once in the above paragraphs. Democratic Presidents, yes, but not the party. That's because, as I've been saying since last year, this election is the Republicans' to lose. Now I'm convince that they've already lost it.

His Name Was Willard Romney, Incorporated

When F. Scott Fitzgerald began one of his novels with the statement “The rich are different from you and I,” he wasn’t talking about mere cash flow, but worldview. Willard Mitt Romney, the Overclass’ designated robocandidate, exemplifies that worldview so central-casting perfectly that it’s not even funny. Now that he’s won the Republican Party nomination for President, everyone is about to find out how.

First, a relevant digression. In his cyberpunk short story “Sunken Gardens,” Bruce Sterling introduces the story’s dominant character (not the main character, a near-nonentity) with this sentence: “Her name was Arkadya Sorienti, Incorporated.” Later he repeatedly refers to her as “The Sorienti.” And of course I “homaged” that notation to refer to my High Corporate villains in Chaos Angel Spanner.

Willard Mitt Romney is the very archetype of the High Corporate aristocrat. He’s slick, soulless, and robotic to the point of activating the “uncanny valley” response in actual humans. He drips with contempt for the “inferior” orders. He’s a “vulture capitalist” who specializes in destroying American businesses and jobs. He’s on record as saying that inheriting great wealth is equivalent to inheriting great looks or talent, in denial of all the evidence which shows that inheriting great wealth sucks away all talent and personality. He shares his caste’s delusion that being rich means being genetically superior by definition. His goal is that of his caste: to abolish democracy worldwide and establish the global dictatorship of American Corporatism.

A candidate so stuck up, so cluelessly arrogant, would have to be a bottomless fount of campaign-destroying gaffes of the caliber of Carly Fiorina’s demon sheep. So Romney. There’s the dog-atop-the-car incident that has pet lovers hissing and growling. There’s the time he publicly confessed he enjoys firing people — and it’s not just firing yard work contractors; it’s firing people, period, that turns him on, or he wouldn’t have made it his life’s work. There’s how he gets testy with angry poor people and talks down to them. There’s how he looks so artificial that people have taken to calling him a robot (e.g. RomBot) and a zombie (Zomney). And the gaffes will not stop. They cannot stop because Romney completely lacks the ability to connect with people below his own aristocratic caste.

Last year, surveying the much broader field of Republican candidates in what had already turned into a tawdry reality show by the time The Donald briefly entered the race on a “birther” platform, I predicted (privately and on Twitter) that even though there’s no way Obama, unmasked as a Nixonite conservative, could win the 2012 presidential election, the Republicans would find a way to lose it. As it turned out, they found several: Trump, the pizza man and his Sim City tax plan, the crazy lady, the debate reality show, Newt’s ego, Santorum’s sanctimony, the replacement of democracy with corporate fascism, tax cuts for the rich and tax war against the poor, and a relentless war not just on workers but women. The Gang Of Plunderers are certain that they are invincible because God and infinite wealth are on their side. The triumphalism of their 2010 victory has made them arrogant enough to make Ayn Rand look humble. Spitting on your constituents on behalf of your corporate owners is not a recipe for electoral victory.

The primary-ending duel between Romney and Rick “the Preacher” Santorum made me realize another thing. Santorum, of course, lost. There are a lot of poor people in the Christian Right, and they voted for Santorum. If I were to bet money, I’d bet big money that the Christian Right will defect from the Rich Man’s Party and vote for the candidate of the party that claims them as its own, called by various names (here in Washington state, the Constitution Party; Independence Party elsewhere). It should be clear by now to the theocratic reactionaries that the GOP worship another god as the Supreme Being, not Jehovah but Mammon, god of money. Between liberal anticorporatism, religious conservative revulsion (and not just because he’s Mormon), and, well, just being a robot or reptoid masquerading as human, Romney looks to be even more the sure loser than fellow flipflopper John Kerry was in 2004. The Republicans are well on their way to losing.

His name is Willard Romney, Incorporated. Pass it on.

Barack Obama Jumps the Shark

The article: Obama Channels Reagan, and Risks Becoming Carter

Remember when I said, before the election catastrophe, that Rand Paul was over? Well, allow me to eat my words: he's not. In fact, he won. There can be only one reason why Rand Paul is not over:

Barack Obama is.

This time, he's gone too far. He's extended Bush's disastrous tax cuts for the rich! And without spending cuts to compensate. You know, Big Government Conservatism. Remember voodoo economics, the religion of Wall Street? You know, the magical thinking that claims tax cuts for the rich without spending cuts will cut deficits? He's now its most ardent acolyte. He's now defending his support of the Republican agenda against the liberal base that elected him. The people who voted for hope and change in 2008 are now every bit as unrepresented as the British colonials who started the American Revolution.

Even earlier, not long after he rode the wave of hope and change into office, he betrayed the millions of actual liberals who voted him into the White House by going to West Poing to announce a George W. Bush surge in the Afghan war. This war, like any other colonial war against the Middle East, has never been for the purpose of preserving freedom. Its only purpose is profit for the corporate welfare kings, particularly the oil barons and war profiteers. That's when he strangled all his beautiful promises in the crib, promises he never had any intention of ever keeping.

Now the man the TEA Party thinks is a Kenyan-born agent of Osama bin Laden has completed his transformation into a neocon. Yes, he is determined to destroy America. But with enemies like Obama, do Al-Qaeda even need friends? His plan for the destruction of America was written by America's corporate owners on Wall Street and their agents in the Republican Party. This is the beginning of the end of Obama's one and only term as president, for he has now definitively jumped the shark. Only the neocons are left in government now. There is only one party left, the party of corporatism and empire. The US government does not belong to the people, and never has; it is democratic only in theory, but oligarchic in design. Today, America is not its people but its corporations.

Obama's failure is the failure of the Democratic Party. The Republicans may be at each other's throats to the point that it threatens to split in two; but it's the Democratic party that's collapsing. The Democrats are an echo of the Republicans. An echo, not a choice. If the GOP is the Evil Party in the 1 1/2-party system that H.L. Mencken described almost a century ago, then the Dems can only be the Stupid Party.

No wonder they got clobbered by the TEA Party reactionaries in the '10 election! But said rebels are also signalling their eagerness to sell out to our corporate slavemasters. They shouldn't expect to be immune from the populist backlash, either, when the reckoning comes in two years.

I tell you, it's going to get ugly come 2012. Watch the Democratic primary. And don't bet on the incumbent winning it.

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

American Chernobyl: The BP Disaster

You've heard all about the BP oil spill, on TV and online, in the business and environmental and political news. Well, guess what? The Republican Party and the TEA Party are loudly defending the sovereign right of BP's corporate raider owners to destroy whatever the hell they damn well feel like, in the name of the "free market". The problem with BP is that the "free market" is hardly free at all. The problem is corporatism.

Corporatism, a form of synarchism, is socialism for giant corporations and the financial elite. Its core policy consists of privatizing profit while socializing risk and harm. To that purpose, the government enacts protectionist laws to restrict competition. Private business is completely embedded in government and should be considered a branch of government.

Yes, free markets exist, even in America. But the oil industry is not one of them. It is controlled by a corporatist monopoly cartel, some of whose members (most notably ARAMCO) are owned by fundamentalist Islamic dictatorships and absolute monarchies.

Corporatism requires state socialism in order to prevent competition. But competition is the lifeblood of any true free market. No free competition means no free market. The oil cartel bought the US presidency for Enron executive George W. Bush with corporatist state socialism as its mandate to him. He corporatized the US government faithfully, going so far as to use the US armed forces as the cartel's mercenaries to pirate the oil from Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon (and this will be faithfully carried out by future corporate lawyer Barack Obama) Iran.

Chernobyl was the inevitable result of Russian state socialism under the Soviet Union. I've heard tweets that the BP disaster is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. It is not. It is American corporatism's Chernobyl. It is destroying the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea the same way that nuclear meltdown destroyed a corner of Ukraine. It's not just BP that's to blame. The entire oil cartel, the US government, the irresponsible financial elite, and the entire system of corporatism are to blame. The bad karma is theirs, and that of their "populist" apologists for corporate dictatorship.

Chernobyl was the omen of Communism's collapse. The BP oil disaster, the American Chernobyl, is the same thing. Soon American Corporatism will follow Russian Communism into the trash compactor of history.

Rand Paul Is Over: or, Why Conservative Libertarianism Is a Contradiction in Terms

The article: "Rachel Maddow Demolishes Rand Paul" by Joan Walsh, Salon

Yesterday, "fighting liberal" MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow interviewed Kentucky senatorial candidate and "TEA Party" favorite Rand Paul on her show after he crushed his establishment opponent, secretary of state Trey Grayson, in the Republican primary election. Joan Walsh insists Maddow won big. Ray Beckerman is not so sure. Me, I had to see for myself. So I read Walsh's article and watched the interview. When it was over, I realized that Walsh was spot on. Toward the end of the interview, I got the feeling that I was witnessing a fatal car wreck as it was happening and watching the driver die right in front of me: what I witnessed was the complete self-destruction of the New Right's rising superstar in the span of half a minute. In effect, even despite himself, Paul defended the nasty racial protectionism called Jim Crow, convicting himself of not just racism but statism. He outed himself as a conservative. He didn't sound libertarian to me: he extolled the economic freedom of corporations, pointedly including racist owners of lunch counters, while spitting on individual freedom in the form of consumer choice, which Jim Crow was designed to restrict. My verdict: Maddow crushed him, ending his political career in front of the whole world. Rand Paul is over.

It's Official: No, Obama Can't, And He Never Wanted To Anyway

The articles:

1. Tom Sullivan: President Obama Loses His Base: He Just Ran Out of Slack
2. Glenn Greenwald: White House as helpless victim on healthcare and The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
3. Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout
4. David Sirota: The "Candidate vs. President" Canard

And now it's official at last:

1. Barack Obama is not a progressive.
2. Barack Obama is a bought and paid-for conservative Clintonite corporate shill who is selling out American democracy to corporatist dictatorship.
3. Barack Obama has officially jumped the shark.

Progressives, you've been had. Big time. That "change agent" you (and, shamefully, I too) elected? Not to be seen. He suckered the American people for everything. The ex-community organizer just proved himself to be one of the worst of the neoconservative Blue Dogs. For all we know, he planned the total abortion ban in the corporate welfare health care "reform" (sic!) bill. Turns out the libertarians were right after all.

No He Can't, Part 2: Obama Says War Is Peace, Jumps The Shark

The article: Nobel-winning Obama defends war in call for peace - Yahoo! News

So the latest chickenhawk warlord who rules the world, who might as well be called George Bush III because he loves loves LOVES war so much, the neocon in liberal's clothing called Barack Hussein Obama, accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in order to defend the negation of peace. He pays lip service to the peacemakers, then defends his true calling, All-Conquering Khan of the World, his true title. Apparently God's got him on Shrub Bush's hotline! "Some will kill; some will be killed." But what's important is that the killing must must MUST continue, at all costs! For the infinite glory and profit of America's corporate welfare kings!

Barack Hussein Obama, the smooth-talking Chicago conman who convinced us that he's a liberal but is really the second coming of Emperor Shrub, has now definitively jumped the shark. If you remember the 2008 US presidential election, Obama was elected by an antiwar majority. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going badly and bankrupting the country. But not only did the new president continue Bush's bailout of his big banker friends, he escalated both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is waiting like Bush for the perfect excuse to invade Iran in order to save damsel in distress Israel. He ended up being more of the same, only with the silver tongue of the Devil and a convincing liberal façade. The neocon warhawks are having multiple orgasms over their former seeming enemy's total conversion to the cause of empire.

Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.