Christofascisti – Why the U.S. is under corporate fascism

In previous posts I’d used the term christofascisti to describe the religiously motivated fascism that seems to be pervading political discussion in the United States.

Recently finished reading Ted Nace’s “Gangs Of America: The Rise Of Corporate Power And The Disabling Of Democracy”. The book traces the evolution of the notion of corporations having the same right as human citizens, including analysis of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) case in which a chief court reporter pushed forward the notion that corporations did indeed deserve 14th amendment equal protection.

The book then goes on to detail Roscoe Conklings role in the drafting of the 14th amendment. It’s a fascinating look into the belly of the beast as Conlkling was in the pocket of the railroads at the time and actually perjured himself during testimony.

But what struck me more was Nace’s mention on page 231 of Laurence Britt’s symptoms (or signs) of fascism:

1) Nationalism (Check!)

2) Disdain for human rights (Check!)

3) Use of enemies or scapegoats as a unifying cause (Check!)

4) Militarism (Check!)

5) Rampant sexism (The fight against gay people qualifies here.)

6) Controlled mass media (Whoa yeah – that’s a definite check!)

7) Obsession with national security (TSA, NSA, the land of acronyms)

8) Close ties between ruling elites and predominant religion (I’m giving this a check because of the Republican party ties to the fundamentalists.)

9) Protection of corporate power (What did happen to Halliburton anyhow?)

10) Supression of organized labor (Look at the status of unions in the U.S., and the employment at will bullshit we put up with, or the outsourcing of jobs, etc.)

11) Disdain for intellectuals and the arts (Doh – the anti-science bent of Republicans is obvious!)

12) Obsession with crime and punishment (Law & Order, CSI, et al, misguided drug policy)

13) Cronyism and corruption (Hello, PNAC anyone?)

14) Fraudulent elections (Does Diebold ring a bell? Or how about 2000 and 2004?)

So yes boys and girls, the Unites States is for all intents and purposes being run by a group of corporate fascists. The Republican party has invoked the name of Christ in order to allow their corporate overlords to shit all over the rest of us. It is high time we take back what is rightfully ours.

Nace makes good points on how to take apart corporate power. I strongly recommend you buy the book and read it. It is only $16.95 retail or if you’re a cheap bas^h^h^h, frugal person you can get it on Amazon for roughly $10 or so.

Congress – Net Neutrality is necessary

I’ve been following the whole net neutrality argument for some time now and decided to finally speak up.

Firstly – the plans of Verizon et al are nothing but a money grab. We already pay for bandwidth be we a residential or commercial consumer. At my office we pay what I consider to be a heft price for 10Mbps service in order to push out and pull in information. I do the same at home with 5Mpbs service for a considerably lower price.

What Verizon et al want to do is charge providers for being able to deliver their content to others. In other words, Google would be charged extra if they didn’t want their search results delayed if the person trying to access said results was a Verizon DSL subscriber.

Is it out fault that the legacy Bell’s and their ilk never adapated to the modern marketplace? I’ve seen articles that give good examples of why not having net neutrality is a very bad thing indeed. Imagine if only GM cars could use special high speed lanes on the highway. That’s essentially what they’re trying to do to the net.

In particular I’ll mention Verizon – the company that’s trying to dump unprofitable areas like Maine, etc. If we had regulators with some teeth we’d force Verizon to keep said areas. The reason I believe Verizon is making such bold money grabs is the FIOS rollout. They sunk quite a bit of their market capital into that project and it isn’t generating the returns they’d expected. So from that perspective it makes sense that they’d want to recoup some of their losses. But not on the backs of consumers, thank you very much. My prediction is that a weakened Verizon will become a candidate for a takeover and Mother Bell will be put back together again. All the kings horses and all the kings men indeed.

Whoa be us then.

MoveOn petition.

Call Congress today.

How gutting Net Neutrality affects regular people (Ipod users, Google users), and proof that telecom companies abuse their power.

The Speed of Light is getting creepy

Now it’s been found that reversed light travels faster than light.

I really feel that string theory’s prediction of a multi dimensional universe is true. And I think as we discover more about our dimensional world, we’ll learn more about those other dimensions. We already know of four dimensions, x, y, z and t – these constitute space-time. But there are more dimensions out there that we have yet to discover.

But I believe that recent discoveries will advance our understanding of the cosmos. Lets hope so – because within the cosmos lay the answers to our origins.

Another Republican Governor gets fingered

Not literally of course. Instead Ernie Fletcher, the Republican governor of Kentucky has been indicted on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination. I’m sure the Misanthrope is probably thrilled.

I do wish someone would go after our Republican governor here in Rhode Island. He’s trying to paint we state employees as the biggest problem facing the citizens. By and large we aren’t the problem. The main problem is the legislature but the governor would NEVER call them the pigs that they are. Really – what good does he do if he isn’t at odds with the legislature. I’ve never understood the fact that RI tends to elect Republican governors more often than Democratic governors. Maybe it’s because with a Democrat controlled house and senate it’d just be another rubber stamp. But what damage could a Democrat governor really do?

Interestingly Charlie Fogarty’s (Democrat for governor) campaign HQ is right across the street from me. I ought to volunteer.

Good Dubya Video

Oh this is great. Unfortunately I don’t have time to put together the code to auto-play but just click here to watch.

Converting the U.S. to an Ethanol economy

My friend Doug mentioned the Dateline NBC story about ethanol so I googled and found o this link. According to Vinod Khosla the United States could break our dependence on imported oil, and have fuel that costs less than a dollar a gallon if we simply switched to ethanol.

It was mentioned that Khosla thinks it’ll cost $15-20 million to outfit a thousand gas stations in California.

And one of the biggest sources of ethanol is corn. Here’s what the reply I sent to Doug:

Ok – so 20 mil / 1000 stations equals $20,000 per station. Fuck – that’s nothing in the total realm of things. But they don’t expect many people to divide and get the per station cost.

Here’s another thing – we have the highest sugar prices in the world because native industry demands protections and has the government impose huge taxes on imported sugar. So now they have a captive market. Then people wonder why companies like ADM are peddling high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

So in order for this to work, the government would have to remove the protections for the U.S. sugar industry. That would lower the price of sugar and make it competitive with HFCS. Then ADM would have to find another use for that excess corn, only last time they did that we got MTBE. Next time they might think of making ethanol.

But it’s true – most vehicles on the road today can run ethanol no trouble at all. With the advent of engine management systems (computers) it just alters timing etc. based on input from exhaust sensor, particularly the oxygen sensor.

Same as how diesel engines can run on biodiesel with fairly simple modifications. And by the way – corn oil could run a diesel engine.

Imagine that. But this will be quashed by big oil. Because of greed we’ll all have to suffer.

And I realized something else. You can extract hydrogen from ethanol and someone has already developed a catalyst to do so. Hydrogen in combination with oxygen in a fuel cell produces electrical energy. So you could say, run a vehicle with this, or better yet power a home.

All we have to do is figure out how to stop the oil interests from killing this. I say this because you can also extract hydrogen from gasoline.

The Big Lie with regard to the War on Drugs suffers a hit in the UK

Oh happy day. Seems the UK is now looking to move Ecstasy (E) into a lower drug class, and it’s recommended that pot be moved even lower.

The arguments of David Raynes of the NDPA (The British analouge of the loathesome ONDCP in the U.S.) says that E kills at random. Maybe if you could assure the purity of E you wouldn’t have the sudden death. And maybe if you educated people as to keeping hydrated while on E you wouldn’t have any sudden death.

So tell me, how many lives has pot ruined when you compare it to alcohol. And then think for a moment how big the legal alcohol business is in the United States. That’s why you can still be busted for having a joint.

Bush’s warnings about technology

I hate to break it to the President but we’re already enslaved. Between cable television and high speed net connections we’re pretty well enslaved to the corporations supplying those services.

The son of a bitch goes on about “violation of human dignity” – as if he values the dignity of human life. Sending men to die in a bogus war, that is Bush’s idea of dignity. We’ve already let corporations genetically engineer plants and animals. Engineering humans would provide a workforce with tiny little brains and a built in defense against disease that would bring inexpensive manufacturing back to the U.S., provide tech support drones, or even enough soldiers to fight illegitimate wars. Hopefully you see the sarcasm in what I’ve written.

Aside from the sarcasm – humans mutate and evolve over time. Look at the fact that children born in the last decade or so won’t have the trauma of having their wisdom teeth removed because they don’t have them. Or how about the fact that the overall dimensions of the human mouth are smaller today than they were a bit over a hundred years ago because most of our food is processed to the degree that we don’t need a large mouth full of teeth in order to masticate.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas

K-K-Karl Rove is now a target in special prosectuor Paul Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity in order to discredit Joe Wilson’s claims that Iraq never bought yellowcake from Nigeria.

For those that haven’t worked in the prosecutorial arena, becoming a target means that prosecutors are relatively certain they’ve got you in the bag. I somehow doubt Rove will see jail time because it’s a certainty that Bush will pardon him. This makes it critical that we impeach Bush and Cheney BEFORE a dispostion is reached in the Rove case.

If anything, I’d love to see that lying sack of shit frog-marched out of the White House.

Even die-hard Republicans are abandoning Bush

The founder of USA Today says that Bush supporters are in denial. Neuharth is a Republican no doubt, but there definitely seems to be a theme of throwing Bush to the wolves these days.

This means that those riding the Presidents coattails had better be careful. The battle in RI is coming along interestingly with Sheldon Whitehouse (D) and Lincoln Chaffee (R but a very liberal R) in a statistical dead heat according to recent polls. Having once worked for Sheldon I can say that I’d love for him to be my Senator. He’s a thoughtful, genuous man that would help us flip the majority back to the Democrats.

But this weekend I was at a Cinco de Mayo party (Deliberately drinking Heineken by the way!) with both a town council member and state representative from Coventry, RI. Their attitudes about Sheldon Whitehouse were ignorant. I piped up that having worked both for and with Sheldon I think he’d make a damned fine Senator. Didn’t get any disagreement because neither had been in that position.

In RI it really is Political Theatre.