How the GOP Became Victims of the GOP!

by Jay Diamond, Guest Author

Whatever happens in this election, it is finally the end of the psychotic and vicious American rightist movement as a political force.

This is the real reason the sulfurous "movement conservatives" have been going nuts.

Think about it....they would easily have controlled the senate after 2010 if their criminally insane movement....The low-brow, brownshirt talk radio party....had not insisted on lunatics like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell as their senate candidates in lieu of a little less fanatically rightist snakes.

And they would have padded that senate majority much further this year had not once again low-brow, brownshirt talk radio insisted on displacing one of the most respected men in the senate, Richard Lugar, with an out and out psycho Christianist Kook like Richard Mourdock, and a similarly preserved in amber asshole such as Todd Akin!

There are 3 or 4 other Dominionist brownshirt psychotics also especially selected by the low brow, brownshirt talk radio rulers of the GOP, thereby insuring a robust democratic senate majority for years to come, as the total talk radio control of all GOP primaries will guarantee.

The also know that if Obama wins in a week or so, that Hilary is a lock on the presidency for 2016 AND 2020 which means the Democratic Party will control the Oval Office till at least 2024!

Believe me, our brownshirt enemies are well aware of the truth of what I have written above.

And EVEN if Obama is defeated and provided that Rmoney’s John Bolton and Dan Senor do not kill us all before 2016, they also know that should Rmoney cause a complete collapse of the USA, including 40% effective unemployment as he gleefully repeals even the anemic post financial collapse re-regulation of Wall Street, that the American right wing movement will be dead as nails for at least the next 60 years! Like the Great Depression of 1930’s, the memory of what the economic royalists will have wrought will last for 3 generations of Americans. As in 1990, the very last people alive in the 1990’s who were adults in 1929, will finally be gone, leaving the right-wing propaganda machine once again able to bulldoze American Morons into killing themselves yet again.

They know this!

But they dare not, and can not even fathom how they might remove low brow rightwing Dominionist brownshirt talk radio as the owner of all GOP primaries!

They are a terminally ill and wretchedly pathological movement on the edge of extinction, which will make them temporarily more dangerous than ever.

But they will all go away, unless they dread the prospect of their imminent political destruction so much that they would rather we all die in a nuclear armageddon than relinquish control for all time.

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Mitt Romney's Not So Subtle Attack on the Rights of All Americans to Vote

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Today --the rights of all people of any color to vote are still under threat by ILK like Mitt Romney who has taken up the GOP 'code word' for BIGOTRY ---VOTER FRAUD. There are very few if ANY instances of voter fraud but the CROOKED EFFORTS of the GOP to keep anyone not of the 'white' race, indeed, anyone not a GOPPER from voting. I call GOP efforts to stop ballot recounts in Florida 'voter fraud'.

I call the disingenusous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, halting the recounts, by the name 'voter fraud'. Though it was phony votes that were the fraud --NOT real voters of any sort or ethnic origin whose votes were targeted by the GOP and the 'high' court. I would not be surprised to learn that the meme 'voter fraud' was cooked up by an Orwellian political consulting firm and its paid 'focus group' who 'tested' it.

Some real history about how it was a Demoratic President who worked to ensure the rights of ALL voters to vote. It was --not surprisingly --a staunch Republican senator from South Carolina, a confirmed segregationist who filibustered and blocked passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that had been written by then Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson. There were some alterations to the bill. That was to be expected. Nevertheless, the bill passed and would be signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower. It made the history that Mitt Romney hopes to re-write or erase.

The bill established the Civil Rights Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Both agencies would ensure that the voting rights and civil rights of African Americans and all Americans wiould be enforced.

Having already made history, in April of 1960, LBJ was 'playing catch up' to an aggressive Kennedy machine. Later, journalist Howard B. Woods, editor of a black newspaper called the St. Louis Argus would recall those times in Passage of Power, a biographical series on the life and times of Johnson:

The Senator, tie-less and in shirtsleeves, was eating cookies and drinking a tall, and stiff, Scotch, but when Woods ask him about the civil rights bill "which seems to please no one," saying, "Senator, the bill, as it was finally passed, was admittedly watered down," Johnson forgot about the cookies and the Scotch, and leaned forward across the table, looking Woods "straight in the eye" in a way the editor found quite memorable.

"When we say every man has a right to vote, that is not watered down," Lyndon Johnson said." The important thing in this country is whether or not a man can participate in the management of his government. When this is possible, he can decide that I'm no good." George Reedy slipped into the seat next to Woods, but Johnson didn't need Reedy now. "Civil rights are a matter of human dignity," he said.

"It's outrageous that all people do not have the dignity to which they are entitled. But we can't legislate human dignity -- we can legislative to give a man a vote and a voice in in his own government. Then with his vote and his voice he is equipped with a very potent weapon to guarantee his own dignity." [Emphasis added.]

-Howard B. Woods, Passage of Power

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'They Live' Directed by John Carpenter

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The release date of John Carpenter's film "They Live" is 1988 but seems more recent, more like a commentary on today's news than it is a commentary of 1980s paranoia. To be sure, there were many who warned of the dehumanizing effects of mass culture, political propaganda, political agendas --right or left!

The temptation to see allegory is not merely justified; it is, surely, the filmmakers intent. Like the much earlier "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" this message is political, a cautionary tale. While 'The Day the Earth Stood Still" deals with potential invasion, it is the alien's intent to warn us of ourselves. Klaato comes to earth with a warning, a warning about how we may destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. But, he might just as well have had in mind our enslavement from without and, most ominously, from within. It the latter case, 'we' would have no one but ourselves to blame. Or as Shakespeare put it in 'Julius Caesar':

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
--Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers' seems obvious in retrospect: the 'seed pods' were the American right wing, Republicans, narrow-minded bigots, authoritarians. They would enslave us from within. John Carpenter's 'They Live' is both allegory and warning. Carpenter has created 'aliens' who have disguised their origins and their 'evil' intentions. They cannot be detected without the use of special eye glasses. The viewer accepts this as a convenient plot device. Wisely, Carpenter does not slow down the action for lectures about how this kind of thing may be feasible. Nor does he reveal an agenda but through a well-crafted story --not lectures or soliloquies. It's a device which successfully moves both plot and action to a riveting and inevitable conclusion/climax.

'They Live' is not merely Sci-Fi. It's a horror film in which a dreadful future is the monster. And, like Frankenstein, the 'monster' is one of our own creation, in this case, the complicity of 'earthlings' with evil aliens. Unlike many Sci-Fi movies and literature, the aliens of 'They Live' do not appear to have anything profound or awe-inspiring in mind. Like many earthlings the ugly aliens, resembling death heads when seen with special shades, have, it seems, only the U.S. right/GOP agenda in mind, that is, rigging Wall Street, acquiring great wealth and power, usurping the media for purpose of mass mind control. So far --they differ little from the Republican party.
Here's another review which, likewise, spotted the political implications:

John Carpenter wrote and directed this science fiction thriller about a group of aliens who try to take over the world by disguising themselves as Young Republicans. Wrestler Roddy Piper stars as John Nada, a drifted who makes his way into an immense encampment for the homeless. There he stumbles upon a conspiracy concerning aliens who have hypnotized the populace through subliminal messages transmitted through television, magazines, posters, and movies. When Nada looks through special Ray-Bans developed by the resistance leaders, the aliens lose their clean-cut "Dan Quayle" looks and resemble crusty-looking reptiles. Nada joins the underground, teaming up with rebel-leader Frank (Keith David) to eradicate the lizard-like aliens from the body politic. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

--They Live, Rotten Tomatoes

John Carpenter directed but, interestingly, wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym: Frank Armitage, the name of one of the characters in the movie. I have no idea why Carpenter chose to do this. In any case, the film (full movie below) is scary, challenging, and, if action is your cuppa tea, there is a memorable fight scene to end all fight scenes. Having failed to kill one another, the two characters are destined to be friends but we don't know that at the time. There is the possibility that one will kill the other. The audience is sure to find in each character traits with which he or she can identify.

Called part sci-fi, part horror, part dark comedy, it is, in fact, a cautionary tale. That it works on every level accounts for its enduring popularity.

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If 'Corporations' are 'people', then Labor Should Become a 'Person'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

If corporations are people so too are UNIONS! But --should UNIONS assert 'personhood', corporations (which don't like unions in ANY case) would scream bloody murder being comprised as they are of liars, psychopaths and hypocrites who cannot be held to their own 'standards'!

I have urged unions to INCORPORATE! What's to prevent them from fighting fire with fire? Nothing!!! And in this case SCOTUS would have no choice to but to support them having already said that any corporation that they may form is 'A' person.

I suggest that ALL OF THE UNIONS form a SUPER SUPER CORPORATION!

It should strike terror into the hearts of the crooks, liars, hypocrites and robber barons which now makes up the so-called 'corporate community' so dear to the hearts of crooked justices like Clarence Thomas.
THE NATION'S LARGEST UNIONS could --in fact --INCORPORATE and, in one stroke, strike fear and trembling into the hearts of so-called 'corporate AmeriKa':
As of 2003 these were all of the unions in the US with over 100,000 members in order from the largest:

• NEA - National Education Association - 2,679,396
• SEIU - Service Employees International Union - 1,464,007
• UFCW - United Food & Commercial Workers - 1,380,507
• IBT - International Brotherhood of Teamsters 1,350,000
• AFSCME - American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees - 1,350,000
• LIUNA - Laborers' International Union of North America 840,180
• AFT - American Federation of Teachers 770,090
• IBEW - International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 700,548
• IAM - International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers 673,095
• UAW - United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America 638,722
• CWA - Communications Workers of America 557,136
• USWA - United Steelworkers of America 532,234
• UBC - United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America 531,839
• IUOE - International Union of Operating Engineers 390,388
• NPMHU - National Postal Mailhandlers Union 388,480
• UA - United Association of the Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada 325,914
• NALC - National Association of Letter Carriers 294,315
• APWU - American Postal Workers Union 292,901
• PACE - Papter, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Engineering Workers International Union 274,464
• IAFF - International Association of Fire Fighers 261,551
• HERE - Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union 249,151
• UNITE - Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees 209,876
• AFGE - American Federation of Government Employees 200,600
• AGVA - American Guild of Variety Artists 182,597
• UAN - United American Nurses 152,000
• OPEIU - Office and Professional Employees International Union 150,882
• SMW - Sheet Metal Workers International Association 148,378
• BSORIW - International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers 130,928
• IUPAT - International Union of Painters and Allied Trades 115,511
• BCTGM - Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union 114,618
• TWU - Transportation Workers Union of America 110,000
• AACSE - American Association of Classified School Employees 109,188
• IATSE - International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States and Canada 104,102
• AFM - American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada 102,000
• NRLCA - National Rural Letter Carriers' Association 101,810
• BAC - International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers 101,499
• TCU - Transportation Communications International Union 101,228
• UMWA - United Mineworkers of America 100,570

Add up the membership of all these unions! How much money could be raised with the sale of stock?

I would urge this SUPER UNION, INC to sell stock! Few corporations could be so large so quickly. Should this stock sell publicly, this SUPER-UNION, INC could be a major player literally overnight. With that kind of clout, UNIONS could have their own lobbyists on K-Street!

Congress would --to say the least --pay attention and, one hopes, get a clue! Such a powerful 'corporation' could, at the same time, hire an army of lobbyists to lobby for the REPEAL of 'Citizens-United' which congress could easily do by merely, re-defining the word 'corporation'.

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Corporations are NOT people! They are 'Conspiricies of Rich Men'

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Real persons are conceived biologically in a womb! There is a word for that process but this short note is not about sex. Corporations, by contrast, are pieces of paper filed with a Sec of State somewhere (probably Delaware). Ergo: a 'corporation' is not and never will be a person.

A 'corporation' has more in common with and is more accurately described/compared to a piece of paper than to real, living biological persons to whom John Locke and, later, the American founders, ascribed 'rights'. NO rights accrue to mere legal abstractions but the 'privileges' that are defined and described specifically in a corporate charter that is prepared in advance by REAL people. Corporations can be constrained, restrained and/or limited by law and several hundred years of precedent.

NO intelligent person believes a 'corporation' is a 'person'. Sir/St Thomas More --arguably the most brilliant confidant of King Henry VIII --most certainly did not believe 'corporations' were 'persons'. More believed, rather, that they were 'conspiracies' and 'conspiracies of crooked rich men' to boot:

"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir/St Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia"

I suspect that the idea of 'corporate personhood' may have its origins in a misunderstanding, a mis-read of Hobbes'. But the Hobbes Leviathan refers to the 'state' --not to businesses that may be chartered in any way whatsoever by a state. In any case, not even the 'state' Leviathan is considered by Hobbes to have been a single person but, rather, the abstract sovereignty invested in the state by the people as a collective --NOT as a single entity as is the case with personhood. Nor have I found anything in Hobbes that asserts that the 'state' has the power to make 'people' of abstractions whose only raison d'etre is the making of money.

A herd is not a cow! A covey is not a quail. A stamp collection is not a stamp nor is a flock a single sheep. An ant is not a colony, but more to the point, a colony is NOT an ant.

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Mitt is Either Wrong or Lying; Corporations are NOT People

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Mitt Romney seemed very precise: "Of course, corporations are people, my friend!" His argument is as follows: corporations were made up of people; ergo: they ARE persons themselves.

That's fallacious of course! It's also a very bad re-write of Thomas Hobbes who described a Leviathan --a 'state' comprised of the people in it. But not even Hobbes would have dared to say that the 'state' IS a person! Being 'comprised' of people is not the same thing as being a 'being' a person.

As a person, I am made up of millions of cells, each of which replicate my DNA to some degree. But to say that EACH cell IS "ME" is absurd. What if I should prick my finger and I lose some blood? Have several hundred thousand 'people' died? Of course not!

Romney seemed to be arguing that because money that "...gets into people's pockets" does so by way of companies, companies are therefore 'people'! Again --his argument is not only fallacious but non-sensical! That workers are paid by corporations does not make people of corporations.

What about those 'people' not employed by the corporations about which Romeny spoke? Are we to believe that they are NOT people? In Romney's view, one must work or be indentured to a 'corporation' in order to be a person! That's absurd on its face. Clearly:

• Romney has never truly understood the issue and may be incapable of understanding it
• He is ignorant of the implications
• He needs to take remedial courses in elementary logic and biology
• Corporations are NOT and will never be 'people'

Let's consider Mitt's analogy in this way: if it were true that every cell in my body is a 'person', anyone cutting off my finger is, at least, guilty of assault and battery and possibly the cold-blooded murder of millions of little, micropscopic 'ME's". 

Being a 'person' occurs by virtue of being born of two members of the species: homo sapien! That is not the case with a corporation, any corporation, a corporation of any type! A corporation is, by definition, a charter, filed with a Secretary of State (most often Delaware); the charter outlines the corporate structure, lists the major officers and describes the 'type' of 'incorporation in legal terms. It is a NOT a person but simply a contract listing the major stockholders, summarizing the management and delegating various responsibilities. Certain accounting conventions follow but, certainly, no procedure has the God-like power to create 'persons' with a ledger book! No such combination of debits and credits has ever breathed life into inanimate objects and, by doing so, make 'people' of them!

When a corporation is given birth to by a woman as a result of her doing what human beings (persons) have done for thousands of years, then I might concur that corporations are persons. That will happn when pigs fly. And pigs WILL fly when I vote for a moron like Mitt Romney.

In the meantime, I suggest Mitt...

• go back to school
• take a biology course
• take two semesters of philosophy
• take two semesters of symbolic logic and one INTRO to the "Philosophy of Logical Analysis".

And ---corporations are NOT and never will be "people'!

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Romney is Wrong! Corporations are NOT People

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Mitt Romney has claimed that corporations are people, real people! He even got upset with his audience for daring to challenge his absurd assertions. Now --when corporations are held responsible for their crimes in the same way that individuals, that real people, are held responsible for their crimes, then and only then can I even begin to take seriously the utter BS re: 'corporate personhood' that has been put forward by the GOP, by the extremists on the right wing SCOTUS or by the legion of powerful, wealthy lobbies on K-Street!

The fact is corporations are mere 'legal abstractions'; they are NOT people. The definition of 'people' may be found in biology textbooks; I deny that old men or liars in robes can redefine with a mere decree some several million years of evolution over which they have had no control or input. Robed judges are not 'God' nor can they --with a decree --change the laws of evolution and/or physics.

I deny that SCOTUS may decree that gravity will not work, that Earth will not orbit the sun or the moon, the earth! Say what it will, SCOTUS may not redefine a person; nor may it decree that words on paper may live, breate and procreate biologically as do real people. SCOTUS has no jurisdiction on this point. Rather, some several million years of biological precedent should humble the likes of Scalia.

Nor can I imagine how 'fundamentalists' reconcile their fundamentalist religious beliefs with the ludicrous idea that by squeezing a 'corporate seal' one may CREATE a person, and a REAL person at that! That SCOTUS may be taken seriously could be understandable in a state like Texas, victimized by the GOP assault on education. Texas ranks dead last in high school graduations, thanks to the GOP incompetence of Bush/Perry. However, it is not only Texas under Bush/Perry that has fallen off the radar with respect to education. Education, logic, intellect are always targeted by a party that has made of itself an enemy of erudition, science, logic and, most importantly, good will.

Real people are interchangeable in a corporation --an abstraction. Moreover, anyone can form a corporation for very little money and they can do it by mail order. The corporation is nothing more than 'data' recorded with a Secretary of State (somewhere, probably Delaware), a corporate seal, and a Certificate of Incorporation:

From Cornell University Law School:

"A corporation is a legal entity [emphasis, EC] created through the laws of its state of incorporation. Individual states have the power to promulgate laws relating to the creation, organization and dissolution of corporations. Many states follow the Model Business Corporation Act. (See Minnesota's adoption.) State corporation laws require articles of incorporation to document the corporation's creation and to provide provisions regarding the management of internal affairs. Most state corporation statutes also operate under the assumption that each corporation will adopt bylaws to define the rights and obligations of officers, persons and groups within its structure."

--Cornell University Law School

ERGO: people are INTER-CHANGEABLE in a corporation. A real person doing business as a 'sole proprietorship' does not have that luxury. To create this Orwellian interchangeability, SCOTUS seeks to bestow upon corporations 'privileges', privileges that real people are denied in the same decision.

The law treats a corporation as a legal "person" only in so far as it can sue and be sued. That is not to be confused with either legal or biological personhood. And the reason that it MAY NOT be so confused is that 'suing and being sued' DOES NOT DEFINE a person. If corporations were people, then DuPONT et al should have been put to death for the deaths it caused at Bhopal.

When has ANY corporation --at any time in history --been held to account for the many crimes to include mass murder and other atrocities in the same way that REAL PEOPLE are held to account?

NEVER!

Moreover, the legal independence of a corporation prevents shareholder liability for corporate debts; ERGO, corporations are NOT people. Real people have NO such exemptions, no such luxuries. Corporations are NOT people; SCOTUS, MITT and the GOP are dead wrong. I will be happy to set them straight.

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