Court And Spark

When I was 16 I hitchhiked from Brooklyn to Los Angeles so I could stow away on a ship to Tonga. In Brooklyn there had never been anything like the billboard campaigns along Route 66 in state after state in the middle of the country to impeach Earl Warren. Warren was a moderate Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by President Eisenhower, and Fred Koch, the money behind the virulently anti-American John Birch Society and the father of today's vile Koch brothers, made it his life's work to impeach Earl Warren (as well as Eisenhower and Kennedy). Fred Koch is the evidence that society should confiscate all the wealth of sociopathic individuals who use that wealth to undermine society itself. Lee Fang devotes a whole chapter of his new book, The Machine, to the evil Koch family.

The true story of the Koch family’s dedication to rightwing politics begins back one generation with the father. Fred C. Koch, a hardscrabble Texan of Dutch ancestry, founded the Koch Industries empire and pioneered a strategy for advancing conservatism that was pivotal in shaping the modern American right. He unapologetically attacked his enemies, branding them communists, or worse. He paid for groups to help whip up a grassroots army filled with populist rage against the united Nations, Justice Earl Warren, and President Kennedy. He helped begin the process of evicting moderates from the Republican Party. And he instilled in his sons a philosophy that a proper “American businessman” should “fight like a tiger” when someone tries to “take a few thousand dollars away from him.”

Fred, a racist who detested the civil rights movement, probably could have never imagined a black president of the United States. But Fred laid the groundwork for his sons to try to tear the first one down.

...Because Eisenhower allowed the Panamanian flag to fly over the Panama Canal, Fred surmised that the president was “beginning to surrender” to the “Communist conspiracy.” Fred wrote that “a former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs told me that certain members of the State Department helped put Castro in power and guide his every move.” Fred believed Democrats, as well as moderate Republicans, were actively enabling Castro, who he called the “Mao Tze-tung of the Western Hemisphere.”

In December of 1958, in the living room of a brick Tudor house in a quiet Indianapolis neighborhood, Fred was summoned for a meeting with eleven other staunch anticommunists who shared his fervent belief that Christian society and free markets were at grave risk of slipping away. Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer who had been financing and authoring a series of pamphlets articulating his anticommunist ideas for half a decade, presided over the special gathering. Welch bellowed that there had been an “800% expansion of Communist membership in [the] last 20 years” and that the recent surge in inflation and “collectivism” was part of a red plot to destroy American civilization. After two full days of nearly uninterrupted lecture, Welch presented his solution: a new organization to fight the left in every corner of America. Named after a Baptist missionary serving as an American soldier, who was reportedly killed by the Chinese in 1946, the John Birch Society was born. Welch wanted to make Birch a martyr and proclaimed him the first American death in the war against communism. The men at the meeting, many of them leaders of the powerful National Association of Manufacturers, agreed they would level the playing field with the communists and commit to “fight dirty.”

Welch parlayed his expertise in marketing candy into a multifaceted strategy for advancing his paranoid anticommunist beliefs. He recorded simple how-to videos, developed a door-to-door strategy for his organizers, and stressed the importance of advertising to his allies. Fred’s wife Mary later remarked that she had always been impressed with Welch and his approach to politics. Welch was a “very intelligent, sharp man, quite an intellectual,” she told the Wichita Eagle.

The Birchers, with plenty of seed money from Fred and his cohorts, spread quickly throughout the nation, hiring field operatives, hosting training sessions, and publishing hundreds of thousands of Welch’s Blue Book of anticommunist theory and monthly newsletters proclaiming new examples of communist infiltration. The Belmont, Massachusetts, headquarters of the Birchers initially hired twenty-eight employees, in addition to many volunteers who labored to fire off $4,000 worth of mail every week. As a founding member of the national John Birch Society Council, Fred served as a liaison to paid coordinators, who in turn worked with volunteer chapter leaders and ordinary members. Under the seemingly benign motto of “Less government, more responsibility,” the Birchers recruited upward of 50,000 people in a massive rollout campaign during the spring of 1961. In the wake of the Kennedy victory and a relatively liberal Republican Party, the Birchers filled a vacuum of conservative leadership.

Through monthly bulletins and taped lectures from Welch, individual members were asked to advance the cause in their local communities. Goals would include tasks such as attending meetings of “Communist fronts” like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers or to organize “spontaneous” petition gatherings to impeach Earl Warren. Despite their belief that every liberal group in America was truly a front group for communists, the Birchers themselves were obsessed with using dummy organizations to better achieve their agenda. Welch recommended that members assemble various fronts like: TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil), which connected civil rights groups and African American organizations with communists; TRAIN (To Restore American Independence), a group to mock the united Nations and pacifists; SYLP (Support Your Local Police), a particularly effective recruiting tool after the Watts riots; and MOTOREDE (The Movement to Restore Decency), which lobbied against sex education, birth control, and abortion.

A Bircher-led red scare rekindled McCarthyism in towns across the country. In Amarillo, Texas, the local Bircher leaders, including the mayor and a retired brigadier general, led a campaign to purge a clergyman accused of being a communist sympathizer. They also rid the libraries of “communist” books, which included Pulitzer Prize–winning literature, and punished teachers who had been accused of disloyalty. According to historian Rick Perlstein, Centralia, Missouri, became a “virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practically a condition for advancement.” In Fred’s hometown Wichita chapter, which included its own paid Birch Society organizer, Time observed that “student members of the society are trained to tell their cell leader of any ‘Communist’ influence noted in classroom lectures; by phone, parents belabor the offending teacher and his principal for apologies and admissions of guilt.”

The rapid rise of the Bircher movement sharply divided the GOP. In early 1961, the national press reported on Welch’s view that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of “treason,” and that his brother Milton Eisenhower was probably his “boss within the Communist party.” This prompted a harsh rebuke from a group of Republican elders. “It is unbelievable that any sane person would make such accusations,” said North Dakota Republican Milton Young during a speech on the Senate floor. Liberal Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel complained he was being targeted by Birchers in his reelection bid.

However, a faction of Southern lawmakers and Republican politicians found strength in the Bircher brand of conservative populism. Dixiecrat Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina extolled the Birchers as a “nation-wide organization of patriotic Americans.” Congressmen John Rousselot and Edgar Hiestand, both California Republicans, were card-carrying Birch Society members. Life reported that Republican defenders of the group believed that the Birchers would serve as a vanguard for the “conservative renaissance in America whose main respectable apostle is Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.”

When I was a schoolboy, the giants on the Supreme Court appointed by FDR were beginning to retire-- Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas. Truman's, Eisenhower's and Kennedy's appointments weren't as profound, just kind of mainstream. LBJ's last appointment was Thurgood Marshall, a brilliant jurist who was also the first African-American to serve on the Court. Even 75% of Nixon's dreadful conservative appointments were kind of mainstream-- Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell-- and it wasn't until his final appointment, the hideous William Rehnquist, that the GOP decided to turn the Supreme Court into an ideological and highly partisan arm of the Republican Party. Rehnquist came to prominence as an Arizona attorney who would work on Election Day trying to prevent Blacks and Hispanics from voting. Reagan made him Chief Justice when Burger retired. The Court started transitioning from a conservative bastion to a reactionary one. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito are dangerous far right ideologues and corporate whores who work every day of their lives against the interests of ordinary American families. Hopefully when Scalia and Kennedy, each 77 years old and fighting off senility, retire President Hillary Clinton will replace them with more mainstream justices. But, for now, the GOP and corporate America control the Supreme Court, just the way Fred Koch had planned long ago. E.J. Dionne:

We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.

Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.

...The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.

The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.

Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.

Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era-- and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption-- by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.

Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.

The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”

In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.

Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.

It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.

Teabaggers Witlessly Fulfilling An Old John Birch Society Plot To Destabilize The U.S. Government?

I don't know why I put a question mark at the end of that sentence in the subject line. The other day I was joking around on Twitter, suggesting that some teabaggers might find it ironic if the Republican Party's latest attempt at rebranding included them calling themselves "Tories," "Red Coats" or the King's Men." I don't know how many teabaggers have a sense of irony-- certainly none of the ones I've met.

The Tea Party's Austerity Agenda, which is wrecking every single economy in Europe that tries it, just pushed the U.K. into a triple-dip recession. The same week that Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he interprets that as a need to cut even deeper and harder and push Austerity into overdrive, his Conservative Party came in third in a by-election in Eastleigh, a constituency they acknowledge they must win if they are to get a majority in 2105. Right now they are losing to Labour by double digits. If Labour were any good-- they aren't-- the chasm would be much wider. And it isn't any better in any countries that have bought into the Austerity charade.

[E]veryone predicted that this austerity would be devastating for growth, and now we see that playing out in 2013 in a wicked way.

...A very severe leg down is taking hold, and there's nothing anybody is doing about it.

The ECB might at some point cut rates again, which should benefit marginally. But the lack of domestic demand remains brutal.

And now politics is getting worse, as the electoral crisis in Italy shows.

The question is: Will anyone address it?

Right now most of the rhetoric is about the importance of sticking with various austerity commitments. If nobody has the guts to change direction, there will be more Italies in the future.

Here in the U.S. the abysmal failures of Austerity have done nothing to dampen Tea Party passions for it. The billionaire Koch brother predators-- who invented and fund the Tea Party-- are chips off the John Birch Society father's block. They want to see the America we love dismantled. That detestable family always has. And now they have the useful fools in the Tea Party, the religionist charlatans at the anti-Jesus "churches," their allies at Hate Talk Radio and Fox, and the Republican Party amplifying their message. The Ryan Budget is their agenda. Thursday Robert Reich painted it as a plot or a conspiracy against America.

Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched?  Perhaps. But take a look at what’s been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you’d be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the “sequestration” cuts beginning today (Friday). “This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington,” says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government-- “drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist-- slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States-- notwithstanding the Constitution’s instruction that the public debt of the United States “not be questioned.”

To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary “sequestered” spending cuts if they couldn’t come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.



Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January’s fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year-- dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers  refuse to extend the government’s spending authority, which expires March 27.

A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government-- blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government’s size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.

They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they’ve sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.

  What is the President’s response? He still wants a so-called “grand bargain” of “balanced” spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance-- $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans’ $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.

And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP-- where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.

I suggest the President forget about a “grand bargain.” In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality-- as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.

Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are-- a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.

Hopefully, the public will make these politicians who take their walking orders from the Tea Party in 2014. As of now, it looks like they well may. The GOP Message is very confused. They want to celebrate the Sequester as a huge victory-- and, at the same time, blame the Democrats for all the economic problems it will cause. They love inflicting the pain... but they don't want to be seen-- outside of their own circles-- in overt fits of ecstasy over it. Except Koch's own personal member of Congress, Mike Pompeo, who openly admitted that his side sees the Sequester as a "home run."

John Lewis Shames Paul Braun, The Congressional Representative Of The John Birch Society To Withdraw A Voter Suppression Amendment

The Republican Party is in the throes of a full scale counterrevolution. They're at war with the revolution conservatives lost in 1781. They're at war with the Constitution that they despised so much, especially the intimation that all men are created equal. Conservatives fought on the side of the British during the Revolution. Those who didn't flee to Canada and the Old Country after they lost-- as well as other conservatives who had remained "neutral" during the war for independence-- insisted that the Constitution preserve the privileges of wealthy white males. The ideals of a new world that had inspired so many of the patriots was trampled on by conservatives-- many from backward Southern states that were as backward then as they are today-- who held the very idea of a united nation hostage to their right-wing ideology. They threatened to tear the new country apart, not just over slavery, but over the franchise as well. No women, no young people, no poor people would be allowed to vote-- or they would walk. Only older white male property owners. The history of conservatism in this country is the history of opposing every extension of the franchise that has come down the pike.

Ironically, now that they own their own political party, well-funded by a greed-obsessed and dangerously powerful plutocracy, many of the very people who they would bar from the franchise are their keenest followers. Low-info voters, especially, though not exclusively, in the Old Confederacy can buy into a zeitgeist manufactured by right-wing wealth. They have Fox and Hate Talk Radio validating their basest instincts and stoking and manipulating manufactured fears and prejudices. Objective reality and science are now just a he-said/she-said proposition as the vilest aspects of the Republican lizard brain seem perfectly respectable to large segments of the population.

The states that the GOP controls-- and not just southern throwbacks like Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida-- but normal places that have fallen into their clutches as well-- Wisconsin being the most obvious example-- have been passing laws to suppress voter participation. They are no longer content in opposing extending the franchise, now they have deranged billionaires like the Koch brothers will to fund efforts to prevent people from voting. And how hard was it to dig up some far right congressmen to bring these efforts to the federal level. Yesterday John Birch Society Rep., Paul Broun (R-GA), tried defunding Department of Justice programs that safeguard voter participation-- particularly in the racist South. In the video above he is confronted directly by another Georgia congressman, John Lewis from Atlanta. It's a short and very powerful clip-- powerful enough to have forced Broun (and actual neo-fascist in our Congress-- to smile for the cameras and back down, withdrawing his virulently anti-democratic measure.

Friday Fun-- You Think We Have Dangerous Extremists In Congress Today? Meet John G. Schmitz (R-CA)

John G. Schmitz, formerly a Nazi congressman from Orange County

"I didn't care that Nixon went to China, I was only upset that he came back."
                     -Congressman John G. Schmitz (R-CA)

The above quote, given as an answer by Congress' then most extreme right member, to a question about President Nixon's 1972 trip to China, is the only time I recall ever agreeing with Schmitz about anything. You may not remember him but he was kind of the Paul Broun of his day-- only with some clout-- a fanatical leader of the John Birch Society and a deranged tool of the anti-communist plutocrats who felt they owned America. [In fact, I've embedded a video of the worst of that breed, Texas Republican oil man-- possibly the man who bankrolled the assassination of JFK-- H.L. Hunt, which typifies the spirit of the day in domestic right-wing circles and shows how just a little ahead of their time these dangerous sociopaths were-- the teabaggers of the mid-20th Century.]

We'll come back to the colorful Congressman Schmitz, who raised his family in a home owned by his idol, Joe McCarthy, in a moment. First let me ask you if you recall a school teacher in Washington state, a Mary Kay Letourneau, who was convicted of child rape for having a sexual relationship with one of her 12 year old students? It was a pretty notorious case. After serving 6 years in prison she married the kid-- by whom she had two babies in prison-- and took his name, Mary Kay Fualaau. Although she was born, in 1962, Mary Katherine Schmitz. Yeah, she was one of a large brood of children fathered by Congressman Schmitz in at least two simultaneous marriages, one with-- what else-- a teenage student of his while he taught at Santa Ana College. (Weird, yes, but he wasn't a Mormon; he was-- I kid you not-- a self-described "strict" Catholic.) Mary Katherine was a "strict" Catholic too but because she came from-- and ascribed to-- far right Republican values, she had no trouble reconciling that with her life as a "party animal," all through high school and college. She got knocked up in college and her parents forced her to marry the poor guy, who she says she never loved, Steve Letourneau. They had 4 children and he beat her frequently and eventually turned her over to the police for raping her then-13 year old student. Both she and Steve had extramarital affairs all during their "strict" Catholic marriage. Currently she and Fualaau host "Hot for Teacher Night" promotions at a Seattle night club-- Fualaau serving as the disc jockey and Letourneau as hostess.

Not to be overly judgmental, but her siblings-- the ones who can be tracked down-- turned out even worse. Two of them, John, Jr, and Joseph-- named for guess who-- have been Republican Party apparachiks for many years, although Joseph, who served in the German Navy (for old times sake, I guess) also worked for the far right mercenary firm Blackwater as a top executive, probably indicating that he's a war criminal. He also worked as a special assistant for Attorney General Edwin Meese III and as Inspector General for the Pentagon (until forced to resign for a pattern of extreme corruption that was exposed by Chuck Grassley) and for one of Washington's most notoriously shady lobbying operations, Patton Boggs. John, Jr worked as a deputy counsel for George H.W. Bush.

OK, another family values fanatic with the most fucked up family ever? First of all, you haven't heard the half-- and second of all... you haven't heard a half of the half. Remember I mentioned that Congressman Schmitz fathered two children with one of his college students, Carla Stuckle. (His legal wife, a right-wing TV commentator, Mary Schmitz, was widely known as the West Coast Phyllis Schlafly.") When the other woman died, Schmitz gave the kids to another German fascist-- crackpot astrologer Jeanne Dixon (born, like him, into a fascist home in Wisconsin)-- who had made a name for herself "predicting" JFK would be assassinated, although she traveled in the fascist circles of the people who were always talking about having him killed. She's also famous for being an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan and for writing a completely insane book on dog horoscopes. She died soon after taking the kids and both of them wound up in an orphanage, since their father (Congressman Schmitz) and his other family refused to have anything to do with them or give them a dime.

So, how crazy was Schmitz? How about this? A complete kiss-ass to wealthy Orange County wingnuts, he was a longtime national leader of the John Birch Society. His extremism was so off the cliff that they kicked him out of the organization! He ran against Nixon on the ticket of a domestic Nazi party, the American Independent Party, and got over a million votes, mostly in the same kinds of low information centers where Republicans still dominate, Idaho, rural Louisiana, Alaska, Utah...

A virulent racist his entire life, Schmitz was a Martin Luther King hater and once said, "I would have voted for a three-tier system-- have one school that the blacks could go to, one school that all the whites could go to, and those who want to mix go to a third school." He was also a bizarre anti-Semite at a time when Republicans were still very associated with Nazis. When Schmitz announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he had Yassir Arafat at his side, a way to rally deranged right-wingers at the time.

Before becoming a congressman-- and again after he was defeated in a Republican primary by another psychotic wingnut, Andrew Hinshaw, who eventually went to prison for accepting bribes-- Schmitz was a California state senator. He made a name for himself opposing sex education, ironic when you consider he was basically raping his happily uneducated teenage students. He saw Communists under every bed and accused anyone and everyone he ever disagreed with of being a Communist, including Nixon, who lived in his district. Nixon recruited and helped finance Hinshaw's successful run against him.

Back in the state Senate he became the poster-boy for the anti-Choice movement, which he managed to turn into an anti-Semitic and anti-gay crusade as well. His last campaign was an attempt to gain back his congressional seat in 1984. He ran against B-1 Bob Dornan, the only race Dornan ever ran where he was the more mainstream candidate. Schmitz came in third and got 11% of the primary vote. He fnally died in January, 2001, then a peddler of knickknacks to tourists in Washington, DC.

How, to put this all in context and to see how Schmitz's were the strands that have tied the modern Republican Party together, please watch this video by one of the financiers of the GOP and the rest of the American far right:

How American Is Fascism? Among U.S. Ruling Elites-- Absolutely Prevalent

Kissing and making up with dedicated hereditary traitors never works. For them, historically, it's just an opportunity to try again. Many historians-- including African-Americans ones-- realize that the Southern aristocracy got off way too lightly after the Civil War. Their spawn is back... in a big way, successfully preaching the same racism and anti-democratic obscurantism that tore the country apart in the 1850s and 1860s.

Far more contemporaneous is how the "leading families" of American Business were all able to skip away from their aggressive support of fascism during the 1930s and '40s. I've been following the story in The Nazi Hydra in America of how the American ruling elites, in awe and in love with fascism, tried to sell out the country to Hitler. None were punished-- and their sons prospered and went on fulfilled Huey Long's prediction: "Of course we will have fascism in America, but we will call it democracy." The Bush's, the son and grandson of a big-time fascist and Nazi collaborator are just the most obvious examples. Far more insidious are the ones hiding in the shadows, the millionaires and billionaires who worked to defeat America and whose spawn is still seeking to undermine democracy today.

Yesterday Think Progress' Lee Fang posted about how the Koch family was celebrated this week for the major contribution of founding father, Fred-- the financial godfather of the right-wing hate group, the John Birch Society, whose tenets are infused in everything his two degenerate sons are doing to American politics today. "As a founding board member, Fred helped engineer a hysterical wave of attacks on labor, intellectuals, public education, liberal clergy members, and other pillars of society he viewed as a threat. Birchers decried everyone from former President Eisenhower to water utility administrators as pawns in a global communist conspiracy. In the last two years, as the Koch name has become synonymous with right-wing plutocracy in the United States, the Koch family has played down its relation to the Birchers. However, the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:"

Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television-- all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. [...] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.

Fang reminds us that the Bircher paean to ole Fred glosses over his record of bigotry. "In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a 'mongrelization' of the races. Although the present-day Koch brothers try to eschew explicit racism, their top Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity, is currently pursuing similar racial segregation goals. In North Carolina, the Americans for Prosperity chapter led a campaign to end a highly successful public school integration system."

Because of their ostentatious financing of the Tea Party "movement," the Kochs are in the spotlight today but they are far from the only offspring of American fascists. In fact, as contemptible and reprehensible as their father was, he wasn't technically a traitor (as far as I know.) The same can't be said about J.P. Morgan, the Dulles Brothers, Prescott Bush, the du Pont family, the Rockefellers, the Hunts, the Mellons... obviously the Fords. Remember, Wall Street and corporate America built Hitler's war machine-- and not just because they wanted to make a quick buck... they believed in the fascist doctrines he was espousing. The "biggest names" in America actively sabotaged the war effort while American boys were dying on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. Yeadon makes it clear in Nazi Hydra that "just as the backers of Hitler's were rich industrialists, so were the backers of fascism in the United States" and that, in fact, many of them were the same backers... as the following quote from the New York Times from the Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd shows:

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. On (the ship) a fellow passenger, who is a prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.

Certain American industrialist had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.

Propagandists for the fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

As Yeadon makes clear with his careful research, "Americans have never been told the truth about the extent of corporate America's involvement with the Nazis. The media has spoon-fed Americans into believing that only a handful of companies were involved. In reality, more than 300 American corporations were illegally arming Nazi Germany during the war... They could have severed all links with Nazi Germany, but instead chose to continue to support a regime at war with their own country. In doing so, those corporations became willing accomplices to the Holocaust, traitors to their country and guilty of war crimes. The traitors responsible for such actions and crimes should have received justice at the end of a hangman's noose. Sadly, not one American corporation was charged with aiding the Nazis." They all got away scott free-- to fight another day. And we're talking about household names like General Motors, IBM, duPont, Standard Oil, International Harvester, Ford, General Electric, United Fruit, Alcoa... The heart of fascist ideology of the 1930s in Germany, Italy, Spain and here in the U.S.-- and of the far right today-- was corporate rule.

It is the basis for the visceral level of hate for unions, fueled by the corporate elite and their propaganda organizations. There is no better example to illustrate the power of the pro-fascists in the United States, than to compare the plight of the American worker with his counterpart in the rest of the industrial nations. In every category, the American worker comes up short when compared to the workers in other industrial nations. As an example the American worker earns 44% less than his German counterpart and 15% (1994 figures) less than his Japanese counterpart. ... While the average American worker is lucky to receive a two-week vacation his European counterpart enjoys a five-week vacation-- or more-- and a list of benefits that the American worker can only dream about.

Nor is the plight of the worker seeking to unionize much different today than it was in the 1930-40s. There are a myriad of companies today in the United States that provide security for corporate America. In reality, these companies are nothing more than hired thugs and union busters. While the muggings and factory death squads are not as great a threat today, the American worker is still being spied on. However, corporate America has no qualms about murdering union organizers in other countries. A recent report revealed that Coke Cola had hired right wing death squads to murder union organizers in Columbia. The United Steel workers union has filed suit in Miami alleging that Coca-Cola and Panamerican Beverages, its principal bottler in Latin America, waged what union leaders describe as a campaign of terror, using paramilitaries to kill, torture and kidnap union leaders in Columbia.

Marching for the billionaires who paid for their buses:

Do You Believe In Monsters? Allow Will Bunch To Re-Introduce You To Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA)

Yesterday Will Bunch's new book, The Backlash: Right-wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, was published. We'll call it "The Backlash" from now on and, as you can see, we put it right between Over the Cliff by John Amato and Dave Neiwert and American Taliban by Markos Moulitsas, this summer's 3 must-read political books. You might know Will as a HuffPo blogger or for his work at Media Matters, Attytood or at the Philadelphia Daily News or because of his provocative first book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. Will immediately caught my attention by publishing an excerpt at Salon yesterday, The Right-wing Congressman Made For The Obama Age. "Paul Broun," he started, "is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing backlash that has greeted Barack Obama's presidency." In early August Russell Edwards, the Democrat running for the seat Broun is occupying, did a guest post here at DWT explaining why Broun is "one of the most dangerous politicians in the nation."

Will has given me permission to use some excerpt from his new book but before you start reading it, take a look at this speech Paul Broun gave at a John Birch Society gala. This is the Republican Party of Paul Broun and his cronies in Congress:

Two months after the John Birch speech, Broun joined his Georgia congressional colleague Gingrey in attending a closed-door conference supported by some of the more extreme elements of this so-called “grassroots movement.” The National Liberty Unity Summit in Washington was co-sponsored by several groups that have been cited as right-wing extremist groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That would include the Oath Keepers, who were quite active in organizing and promoting the December 2009 event, which sought to organize the disparate “Patriot” groups that were either created or were gaining strength in the first year of Obama’s presidency.

A photo from the event shows a smiling Broun posing with a key organizer, Georgia conservative activist Nighta Davis and with Maryland pastor David Whitney, a leading activist in the Constitution Party and a senior instructor for the Institute on the Constitution. The Constitution Party-- which the Southern Poverty Law Center has branded “the most extreme right-wing political party in the United States,” citing its 2004 platform that called for undoing every amendment since 1913 (that includes woman voting and the income tax) and extreme views on immigration and abortion-- was also a major co-sponsor of the conference attended by Broun. One of the featured speakers was the leader of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group founded by Glenn Beck’s favorite extremist author Cleon Skousen in 1971 as-- in the words of Salon’s Alexander Zaitchik-- “a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.” 

Others on the agenda included Walter Reddy of the Committees of Safety-- who produced a 1996 documentary calling the Oklahoma City bombing “an inside job”-- as well as Houston Tea Party activist Dale Robertson, later dogged by controversy when a picture surfaced of him bringing a sign comparing Congress to the (misspelled) N-word to a 2009 rally, and the Oath Keepers’ David Gillie.
 
These were the extreme fringes that echoed off the hillsides of Knob Creek and had animated the Oath Keepers and their paranoid fantasies about urban concentration camps and practice drills for the “Obama gun confiscation” and that rallied to the support of “Sheriff Joe” with their crude signs. Now these far-right groups that had always been way out there on the edge weren’t just growing in size since Obama’s inauguration but here were two members of the United States Congress bestowing a brand of legitimacy that was almost priceless. In return, Broun appeared as a leader, albeit not as the representative of the 10th Congressional District in Northeast Georgia but of an amorphous place that you could call Oath Keeper Nation. The risk going forward was that Tea Party anger within the gerrymandered far-right districts of Red America might lead in 2010 and beyond to a much larger political wing of Paul Brouns, and America’s paranoia-fueled political gridlock will only get worse.  

Organizers of the right-wing summit understood and appreciated the gift that Broun bestowed upon them. “He is a statesman,” Nighta Davis, who planned the event and lives within his 10th Congressional District in Georgia. He recalls Broun spending time with the summit’s 2nd Amendment Committee, which included the abovementioned Walter Reddy as well as Larry Pratt, the executive director of the Gun Owners of America, a group frequently described as “the NRA on steroids”; Pratt himself has been called “a gun rights absolutist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which also criticized him for playing footsie, in essence, with militia groups during the 1990s. It’s not known what Broun and Pratt discussed but five months later Broun will be the only one of the 435 members of the House to address a much debated 2nd Amendment March on Washington that was spearheaded by Pratt.      

“We had a nice talk, about how the 2nd Amendment is not really functioning the way the Founders intended it to,” recalls the militia enthusiast Reddy of his meeting with Broun, when contacted by phone. Apparently, Reddy didn’t get a chance to tell the congressman about his documentary purporting to expose the U.S. government’s involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, but he did lobby for his current pet cause of establishing true state militias that would be independent from the National Guard or any federal authority.

If you don't think Paul Broun is a real danger to this country and to our way of life, you probably slept through history class. Russell Edwards has a game plan to send him into early retirement-- something every one of us should consider contributing to.

Arguably, no member of Congress has ridden anger and paranoia against Barack Obama from the back bench of the Capitol to the front of the headlines louder than Paul Broun Jr. Practically no one outside the winding tin-roof-rusted highways east of Athens had even heard of Broun, until the days that immediately followed the election of that first African-American commander-in-chief. In early November 2008, Broun -- who’d only been in office for about 18 months -- told a reporter for the Associated Press that he was worried that President-elect Obama had the potential to put America on the path to a dictatorship in the style of Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base ..." Those are nine words that a congressman should never say to a journalist, but now Broun was rolling. He insisted he was alarmed by a suggestion that then-candidate Obama had uttered that summer for a national service corps, and that he was worried that such a corps could be used to take away guns from citizens. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany," he said. "I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road." The comments created a minor, brief firestorm with all the usual hallmarks -- liberal blog outrage, and Broun’s statement that he apologized "to anyone who has taken offense at that," quickly followed by his insistence that his apology wasn’t really an apology. In fact, Broun had achieved maybe the greatest accomplishment of his congressional career, which was shifting the so-called Overton window-- a political theory on how extreme statements can shift the boundaries of what become acceptable speech (adopted by Glenn Beck as the title of his 2010 novel)-- on what could be openly said about the new president.

Meanwhile, some people around the country-- joined by some voters in Broun’s own 10th District-- were starting to ask, just who is this guy, anyway? There was a time when Paul Broun Jr. asked the same question of himself. It happened in 1986, when the 40-year-old baby boomer was into booze and into his fourth marriage already-- and having problems with both. Broun was at an NFL football game and drinking heavily when he noticed the fan who was a quasi-celebrity back during the Reagan years, the guy with the crazy rainbow-haired wig who stood in the end zone seats with the sign, "John 3:16." Broun said in a speech on the floor of Congress after his election to Congress two decades later that he was captivated by this "gentleman with this big type hair wig on." A few weeks later, after another fight with his new wife, he took out a Bible, read the verse, and decided to dedicate his life to Christ. (Ironically, it was the exact same year and at the same age that George W. Bush quit drinking as well.) Broun now considers his odyssey to the corridors of power the result of Jesus’ calling. He fails to add the kicker to the story, that the wig-wearing fan, a fellow named Rollen Stewart, is currently serving three life sentences for kidnapping.

...A family doctor who treated Jimmy Carter’s relatives in South Georgia for a number of years, Broun declared bankruptcy in the early 1980s. A federal judge ruled-- according to news accounts in Athens-- that Broun "falsified financial documents in an effort to obtain a loan and misrepresented his assets and debts during bankruptcy proceedings" and ordered him to pay nearly $70,000 to an Americus bank. According to a bankruptcy complaint, the young family doctor "has a reputation of having an extravagant lifestyle evidenced by the acquisition of a number of expensive rare hunting books, expensive rare ceramic items related to hunting, safari to Africa, expensive gun collection and the acquisition of the very best in everything purchased." He had to pay more than $61,000 in back taxes to the IRS, and one of his ex-wives even took him to court for alimony and child support. There was a time when that kind of résumé would have sunk a would-be politician, but the 21st century has proven to be remarkably kind to past sinners who adopt the language of 12-step recovery-- just ask Glenn Beck how that works-- and even awards bonus points when Christianity is involved.

Broun joined the Baptist Church, sobered up, but failed dismally in his early efforts in GOP politics, losing two congressional primaries and receiving a dismal 3 percent in a 1996 bid for the U.S. Senate. Still, Broun entered a 10-candidate special election when that district’s longtime Republican congressman, Charlie Norwood, died of cancer in 2007. He gained the runoff with a surprising second-place finish, but was universally predicted to face crushing defeat by the Republicans’ handpicked candidate, a state senator named Jim Whitehead. In fact, Whitehead-- from Augusta at the other end of the district-- was so cocky that he didn’t campaign in Athens for the runoff, even after it was dredged up that he’d once joked he’d like to see all of the University of Georgia bombed, except for the football team. Broun won a stunning narrow upset thanks to 90 percent of the vote from Athens. The most liberal city in Georgia had just unwittingly elected the most conservative congressman in America. Conservative-watching journalist David Weigel, then with Reason magazine, called Broun "the accidental congressman."

Voters soon found out just how conservative Broun really was. He was one of only four member in Congress to vote against a $20 million program to help kids in drug-infested neighborhoods and even joined just two other colleagues on opposing money for a registry for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS. Asked about that by Weigel, Broun whipped out his pocket Constitution and insisted there was nowhere that it was written that the federal government could do these things. "I’d say most of the things this Congress does, we don’t actually have the authority to do," the freshman insisted.

There was one thing, however, that the born-again congressman did think the government had the authority to do-- ban the sale of Playboy and other racy magazines on U.S. military bases. Broun’s Military Honor and Decency Act-- which an aide boosted by touting the congressman’s medical qualifications as an "addictionologist"-- was the only piece of legislation that he authored in that first term. What’s more, it turned out that Broun’s aversion to government spending applied to legislation but not to taxpayer dollars that could help him out politically. In 2008, during his tough reelection battle, Broun spent so much on taxpayer-funded mail to his constituents that his office nearly ran out of money to pay staff and maintain district offices.

Last night I got in touch with Russell Edwards. He had read the excerpt as well. He told me "Will's report uncovered important details, but the story goes on. Last Spring, Broun, Jr. received a one-man bailout after running GA's McIntosh Commercial Bank into the ground. The FDIC was forced to intervene to protect depositors, finding McIntosh to be the weakest bank in GA, with an estimated $246 million dollars in bad loans on the books." One more time: Russell Edwards; better safe than sorry. The damage Broun can do goes way beyond the borders of his Georgia congressional district.