Already we know that Exxon is generating profits at a rate of more than $1200 per second. That is alarming enough in itself, but it tends to get the public to overlook that Exxon is just one of four major oil/energy companies that are regressively redistributing large quantities of cash from the millions of not so well off citizens to the offshore/ out of taxable range coffers of secret accounts around the planet. We also know that most of the Halliburton and friends lobby are busy paying off those who have blessed them with billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to rebuild various parts of the US stung by natural inclement weather crises. What more don't we know.
Well this tidbit came out today. Tomorrow Bush will give a speech on the bird flew, no, wait the avian flu; yeah that's it. He will of course tell the people that the rest of the world is keeping the US from hoarding tamiflu jabs and that we are in another imminent crisis requiring the use of the military to protect our nation from chaos. What he won't be telling the people is that his own Secretary of Defense is sitting on millions upon millions of dollars of stock in the US patent holder of tamilflu and that his connection has pushed the mass of our nation's stockpile into the hands of the military at greater than retail prices. Nope you won't hear that in the speech. You also won't hear how the new nominee to SCOTUS doesn't think that owning hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock assets in a company matters when deciding cases involving the corporate behaviors since that company is worth millions. Nor will you hear Bush discuss the complete breakdown in the accounting, auditing, and use of US taxpayer funds that were to be used to rebuild Iraq.
This is all business as usual, and there are many who support it for wonderful ideological reasons. Some of course are corporate fascists like those connected to government; some are libertarian advocates running around the country spouting their propaganda to Federalist Society events at colleges, hoping to raise the banner for ending government oversight on all manner of economic decision making--but of course maintaining and strengthening the military to protect these neo-feudal lords of capital. One such freak is Timothy Sandefur. Here is a sampling of his line of thinking:
"Californians are so extremely wealthy that they are willing and able to pay to live in hyperregulated environments like San Francisco and Santa Monica—where prices on everything from homes to consumer goods are needlessly driven up to serve the agendas of the demagogues whom it delighteth the economically illiterate to honor. But what could we have, and what could we be, if it weren’t for the stifling interference of the government?""
"Progressivism as an innovation intended to curtail racial violence. Among other Progressive ideas were forced sterilization and other eugenics programs, peacetime military conscription, the prohibition of alcohol, and forced government schooling, complete with a Pledge of Allegiance written by a socialist. Progressivism (which I take to be in many ways the ancestor of today’s liberalism, and certainly a word of which contemporary liberals seem fond) represented a massive attempt to make men good by force. It was profoundly evil, and profoundly anti-conservative.
"More recently, those regarded as “liberals” have promoted a program of “multiculturalism” and cultural and moral relativism which teaches America’s youth that America and its founding principles are essentially evil, and that capitalism and individualism are the causes of environmental destruction, social oppression, and other social ills. I, for one, regard this as deeply wrong. Movements to purge American school textbooks of fundamental elements of American history, and to label important and great historical figures as evil, and to make martyrs out of people with questionable causes, have all been defended by “liberals.” Those described as “liberals” have included such propagandists as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore—apologists for Islamic terrorism and foreign regimes of enslavement and misery, and defenders of people like Saddam Hussein."
"But down to brass tacks, as Will Baude points out, “conservatives” is usually the term applied to people who opposed the relentless expansion of communism in the twentieth century—communism being the single most evil thing ever created by man.... That is to say, Leiter continues to this day to defend a political ideology that enslaved and continues to enslave more than a fifth of the world’s population; depriving them of the most basic human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, economic liberty, and many others. Leiter would regard those who resisted communism as evil, which is to say, he is among those whom Robert Conquest called “fucking fools.”
"Will Wilkinson points out the example of Social Security, a horrendous fraud on the American public, which today redistributes wealth from poor black men to rich white women at an astonishing rate. “Conservatives,” under the generally accepted definition generally think Social Security was a bad idea and needs to be overhauled or eliminated."
“Conservatives” generally opposed (at one time) the massive expansion of the regulatory welfare state, particularly the “Great Society” programs of Lyndon Baines Johnson: an expansion which has created a semi-permanent underclass, wreaked havoc on families, nurtured dependency, throttled self-reliance, and indebted the nation to an astonishing degree. Conservatives were behind the welfare reform programs of Governor Ronald Reagan and President Bill Clinton, programs which worked very well. "
and if his own temerity is not fully revealed in its magnificent self-aggrandisement try his bit on jass:
"... It’s been so over-intellectualized that much of the fun is taken out of it for most people. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t ask questions about art or seek a deeper understanding of music, including jazz. The problem isn’t ideas, the problem is intellectuals. They’ve screwed up a lot in this world, and jazz along with it.....I was deeply unimpressed by the Shorter album everyone was raving about recently, Alegria. It had some nice moments, but they were often crippled by bizarre, unpleasant moments that were just musically meaningless to me—"
Over the next couple of days i will critique each of the quoted points, but suffice it for now i make this one observation: "Those who profess to be objectivist libertarians are arguing for the establishment of corporate feudal fiefdoms protected by raising taxes to provide security forces for property holding capitalists, subjegating all others with the overwhelming burden of "eating their own children to survive."
