Hmmm... what were we recently discussing on the local Florida thread?
The GOP/RNC hasnt listened to the base for several yrs now....nothing shows me they are going to start any time soon.
Hmmm... what were we recently discussing on the local Florida thread?
Makes little difference what party they call home.
In defense of the stupid party, people are swayed more by emotion than facts and the left is expert at stirring up emotions, especially fear, hate and jealousy.
Country Club Republicans have more in common with the elitist Left than they do with the base.
Therefore, there is NO two party system.
And the people have “government of the elites, by the elites, for the elites, shall be enshrined while we enslave the people with debt.”
I don’t think I can articulate my view of the so called RNC ‘leadership’ without getting banned.
GOP is neither stupid nor timid. In fact it has no psychological attributes. The directors and members of the Party might have those qualities but the Party is a legal person without mental powers such as a comatose patient might be.
Has anyone in the stupid party pointed out that Democrats have blocked the construction of nuclear power plants for many years?No other country can match America's overall technological prowess and yet, because of the collusion of evil Democrats with Stupid Republicans, we now take a far back seat to the FRENCH in nuclear power.
At a certain point, when your responsibilities are grave enough, and your stupidities are severe enough, you cease to become merely Stupid and pass on into the ranks of Evil.
John McStupid, are you listening?
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
I agree generally, but doubt the Republicans are able to reform themselves enough to become a realistic alternative to the Dems. The level of corruption of both parties is too large to continue with them any longer.
Also this:
Social Security does not need to be reformed, it needs to be Destroyed. It is socialism, and all conservatives need to realize that.
Oil drilling off Florida was opposed not only by Dems, but by Republicans like Jeb Bush and others in the Repub leadership. It’s NIMBY.
The reason France is able to use nuvlear power so efficiently is because they developed a standard template for small, efficient nuclear plants and reproduce that across France. In the US, each nuclear plant is individually designed and engineered with the latest technology.
Nuclear engineering in the US is like German tanks in WWII. Each new model was superior, but they kept changing models resulting in an inability to get a standard model in enough numbers into the field.
I cannot remember who first called the Republican Party the “stupid party,”
John Stuart Mill was the first, I believe, to refer to Conservatives as “the stupid party”, and in all this time it doesn’t seem much has changed. ;)
The country club corrupt elite Republicans will be forced to leave the party, and like Squat McClellan, trash it, and become openly DemoRats, in order to get mercy from their DemoRat masters.
What happens to the Republican brand is unsure, conservatives may be able to take control and rebuild it like they did before, but liberal Republicans must be kicked out. There is a place for them in the DemoRat party, as shoe shine boys.
The new McCain GOP has no convictions.
"The unrighteous man flees when no one pursues, but the righteous man is bold as a lion!"
I think this point is beginning to sink in. I haven't heard recently of anybody calculating when the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted. Perhaps people are figuring out that the crisis will come, at the latest, when Social Security begins to draw down the trust fund. It will then become clear to the dullest mind that the trust fund is a fiction, and no fund at all.
An e-mail from a lame duck an d STUPID Florida Senator who need to be unseated!!!
This is a copy of an email from Mel Martinez in response to my request to open up ANWR for drilling. The response is dated 4/29/2005.
Dear Mr......:
Thank you for contacting me. I appreciate hearing from you regarding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and I would like to respond to your concerns.
Finding new sources of domestic energy is critical to our national security. Today, our nation is 58 percent dependent on sources of energy from the Western Hemisphere, including 14 percent from Venezuela. Judging by recent political developments, Venezuela is not a stable or reliable source of oil for our country.
Hugo Chavez has actively been seeking new markets, such as China, for Venezuela’s oil, which would leave us struggling to replace a sizable percentage of our country’s needs with most likely very little warning. With today’s soaring oil and gasoline prices, we need to be forward thinking about world events and their effect on our oil supply.
We also need to think globally about environmental issues. Drilling in ANWR using the most advanced technology and strictest environmental regulations will keep environmental impact to a minimum. Drilling technologies such as multi-lateral drills and directional drilling are just two examples of ways we are now able to minimize environmental impact. Other countries are not necessarily following the same strict environmental standards used in the U.S., and this puts us in the position of exporting our own environmental concerns to countries with much looser environmental standards.
Drilling in ANWR - in a part of Alaska that was set aside by the Eisenhower administration in 1960 for oil and gas exploration, with overwhelming support from its population and congressional delegation, and under some of the strictest environmental standards in the world – is a sound and balanced approach that will help alleviate our dependence on foreign sources of oil.
As a Floridian, I share your concerns of a ‘slippery slope’ effect as it relates to offshore energy exploration, and rest assured, I remain firmly opposed to drilling off Florida’s coast. I have also receive assurances from the administration to keep in place Florida’s moratorium on offshore drilling through 2012, extending it to areas currently not under moratoria, such as the “stovepipe.” In addition, I will be introducing my own legislation in the U.S. Senate to make the moratorium on our Gulf coast permanent, and buy back any open leases.
As we address the need for development of domestic sources of energy, Florida’s moratorium on offshore drilling will remain firmly in place as one of my highest priorities. Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. If you have any additional questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Martinez will never get another vote from me or my family.