Of all the myopic, partisan editorials I’ve ever read in the Republic, this column about Tea Partiers’ is among the most ridiculous that paper has ever printed, and during the past fifteen years I’ve read a lot of them.

Where was Barone during the past three decades? He certainly wasn’t living among any one of the millions of people whose jobs were outsourced, as the rest of us were. And he most certainly wasn’t paying attention to the 12 trillion dollars of national debt which was piled up by Republicans under Reagan, Bush one, and Bush two.

I guess Barone is another one of  those “fortunate” media people, like Charles Krauthammer, Mortimer Zuckerman and Sarah Palin. These are people who, if they haven’t quite attained the wealth status of the top one percent of our population who have become millionaires or billionaires during that three decade period, have at least come very close.

When are we finally going to hear the truth about what went on, and who did what? More importantly, whom will we be able to rely on to tell us? As the people who get stuck with all of the bills, aren’t we entitled to the truth for a change so we can know what we’re paying for?

As usual, Barones editorial is filled with half truths and major omissions. I realize that the Republic, and most other newspapers that are still publishing, are more concerned about staying in business, and making more profit every year, than they are about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the way they used to.

Although the circumstances we live with are far different from what they were forty or fifty years ago, that fact doesn’t excuse the continuous revision and falsification of facts. The media in the United States used to be based on honest reportage. It was the one place where truth was always available.

Since guys like Rupert Murdoch, and the leadership of the Gannett Corporation were allowed to buy and own newspapers in a couple of dozen major markets in this country at the same time, and were then allowed to buy TV and Radio stations in those same markets, all we hear is the opinion of the owners of major media.

As this situation grew, our population─the very people who look to our media for truth but seldom find it─have been growing extremely tired of the fertilizer we’re continuously being fed.

The entire media industry needs to become transparent again, as it used to be when Thomas Jefferson said he wanted to know the truth. His exact words were: “Given a choice of only having government or newspapers, I would most certainly choose the latter.”

I’m certain that he would disavow that sentiment today… at every opportunity.

castigating President Obama and the Democrats in Congress for passing the health Care bill. The majority of them were based on costs that are deemed prohibitive by the people who penned them.

I know that there are a lot of people who believe the lies they’ve been told about the costs, just as I know that Insurance Companies have spent a few hundred million dollars to try to make that bill fail.

The 32 million people who don’t have insurance don’t feel that way, and haven’t since they first lost coverage. They die because they can’t get treatment for ills the rest of us get treated for on a regular basis, and illegal immigrants get treated for at no cost. And yet, instead of raising taxes for a pay as we go government, we keep raising our national debt. We now owe fourteen trillion dollars and that total continues to rise.

Of course the Republican governments in charge of everything for the past thirty years didn’t care about how much we owed, or that our citizens must someday face that debt and pay the piper. The people in charge during that period of time only cared about lining their own pockets. Those people included foreign governments, foreign owned corporations, and members of our federal government.

And that is something they’ve done with startling regularity for the past three decades. Nobody in Washington D.C. seems to be willing to do what must be done to stop this country from going bankrupt. They cut services to the bone and wring their hands while lamenting that entitlements are ruining this country. If our citizens knew what was done to us during the past thirty years, they would march through the streets of every city in this country.

Entitlements are things like Social Security and Medicare. What most of our citizens don’t understand is that in 1964, Lyndon Johnson got a bill passed that allowed the social security reserves to be put into the general fund. That has been going on for 46 years. It is estimated that if that money were repaid, social security would remain solvent for the next hundred years.

Instead of doing that, George W. Bush tried to tie social security to the Stock market.

We all saw how well the market performed on October 6, 2008, when the third crash in a thirty year period took place. The Republicans in charge gave banks and mortgage companies almost a trillion dollars of  bail out funds (borrowed money) with no restrictions in how it was used. That money was used by the banks, not to help the citizens who were suckered into mortgages that they couldn’t afford, but to purchase nearly bankrupt  banks, breakage houses, and other businesses that would expand their operations and make them too big to fail.

Meanwhile our politicians whine, “What can we do?” The answer is,    There are, after all, options available to us that would pay off our national debt, and pay for universal health insurance, and the processes are simple, and have a history of being used through out our history. They will produce  some problems, but they will end the ones we’re in.

We could end the trillions of dollars of tax breaks that were given to the rich and to big businesses. We could put a tariff on every product that used to be made in this country, but is now imported because the company that manufactures it in some foreign nation. It was those foreign nations and foreign owned and operated corporations who outsourced the jobs to foreign countries in order to increase their profits.

Most people don’t understand that 80% of the industrial and manu-facturing jobs we used to rely on for the growth of this nation are gone forever. When those jobs were outsourced, the corporate profits went with them. Profits of trillions of dollars a year, and those corporations weren’t forced to do anything for the displaced workforce. In fact, they were given additional tax breaks that paid for the move.

Think about the additional profits created for the foreign corporations that took over many of the largest manufacturing companies in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Tens of millions of American jobs were sent to China, India, and other countries in order to create those profits.

The problem those moves created, is that a full one third of our work-force found their jobs gone, and nothing was done by our government to replaced them. In the past thirty years, we’ve lost more than two million jobs a year. A total of sixty million people were knocked from our middle class in that same three decade period.

The questions are, How can any economy be maintained when one percent of our population now controls half of our national wealth?  And, how can our population progress when one third of the high paying jobs are gone forever?

It’s time for the people who benefited from the theft of those jobs to start paying their fair share of taxes. And it’s time for those multi-national corporations who outsourced the jobs to start paying their fair share of what it costs to fix the damage they created.

We must begin to repair that damage. That means putting a twenty percent tariff on anything we import to the United States as a result of job outsourcing. That means 75 to 80% of everything we use on a daily basis, from construction materials, to appliances, to clothing.

In the past three decades our jobs have been sold, our corporations have been sold, our futures have been mortgaged, and our leaders have been enriched by lobbyists for big business and foreign nations, while kicking the can of responsibilities and repayment to future generations.

What our citizens appear to have forgotten, and our government politicians appear to have ignored, is that this is still the United States of America, and we’re still a sovereign nation whose people are mandated by our national Constitution to be in control of our government. The government is supposed to be run on the basis of the wishes of the majority of our citizens.

When the power cartel of nig business and rich donators can determine who runs for office, the voice of the majority is virtually lost, and the voice of the rich and powerful replaces it.

At the moment, we might as well be a central American third world nation. Our leaders, for the most part, have failed to do their jobs as the Constitution demands. They are too willing to take a bribe and look the other way, instead of doing the job of protecting our citizens as they were elected to do.

Every member of Congress takes an oath when they’re sworn in. That oath is as follows:

I (their name) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter; So help me God.

Politicians who take that oath, and then ignore it are criminals. They need to be investigated, indicted, tried, and imprisoned. If we don’t start doing something quickly, we’ll all be eating rice, and living in tin sheds with no heat or water. Sure, that eventuality might take a few more generations to come about, but look at what just the past thirty years have brought to us.

If we act together, and begin to do something positive, we still have a chance to recreate the United States as our founding fathers meant it to be.

Elective abortion has been legal in this country since January of 1973 when our Supreme Court said, it is an issue that should be left to the woman who needs to make the decision.

While I’m not in favor of aborting a fetus, (I have seven kids) I realize that there are many circumstances under which ending that pregnancy is the right thing to do. For instance, when rape or incest results in pregnancy, or when the pregnancy creates a medical situation where the woman will face a high potential of dying during the pregnancy or during the delivery of that child. In those cases there is a real possibility of that pregnancy having to  be aborted.

The same kind of situation can occur in any case where the child will be born with any of a hundred different major health problems. Rabid pro lifers demand that every child be carried to term and delivered. Even if it kills the woman who is carrying it. Even if the child has no reasonable expectation of being able to live, or that the birth will create a negative effect on the life of the child, and the lives of those whose responsibility will be to care for the child.

In 1994 Newt Gingrich was allowed to cancel the Constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state when he joined with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Those two men, more than any others in our entire national history perverted our Constitution and created the situation we live with  today, as far as religion in the United States is concerned.

Their actions allowed the churches of the southern states to use Religion as a tactic to hijack our federal government. It wasn’t, as they claimed because either man was religious, it was done for power and money. When the fundamentalists of that Christian coalition were promised the control of all federal welfare funds, they helped change the face of politics in this nation. Their actions allowed fundamentalist Christians to take over three out of four House and Senate seats in the same southern states that succeeded from the union over the issue of slavery.

The battle against a woman’s right to choose abortion is in many ways akin to the belief of some  to the right of some people to purchase and own others. That ideological difference was about power and money, just as the

current debate about abortion is.

Since 1994, when neoconservatives co-opted our federal government, no matter what the issue in contention starts out being, it ends up being another religious battle about abortion. The fundamentalist religious movement has been growing steadily. Not because of a serious belief about any facet of religious belief, but again because of a quest for more money, and more power.

During the past fifteen years I’ve written to three presidents, and every federal congressman and senator about the issue of a small minority usurping the right of the vast majority. The rabid anti-abortionists have never answered me. Never presented their idea of why they have the right to negate the rights of 300 million of our citizens, when they only represent 15 to 20 million people in their belief about the right to life.

In those letters, I continuously said, “In my opinion most women don’t want to abort a child,” then I asked, “Why have we removed any assistance to the woman who is forced into making a decision about abortion? Wouldn’t it be more productive to make certain that every citizen of this country knows that instead of having to abort a child, they could receive the help previous generations were able to receive, and raise that child as a productive, educated citizen? Wouldn’t it be better to have children who knew they were loved, wanted, and needed by the entire nation? Wouldn’t it be better for every citizen of this nation, if once again the business of religion, and the people’s business of government were separated?

We are now seeing our federal government and all 300 million of our United States citizens being held hostage by the same handful of people who think it’s okay to murder any doctor who has the temerity to perform what is a legal medical procedure, and who believe it’s okay to blow up the clinics  where those doctors, and nurses perform those legal procedures.

Why are these rabid right to lifers, the people who claim to be working for the sanctity of every human life, so willing to murder doctors, nurses, and patients in the name of God? Is one life more sanctified than another in their ryes? And is there a Political party, or section of this country more deserving of favoritism than another in their eyes?

Why is this relatively small minority of religious bullies being kow-towed to in regard to matters of law? And why are they given such constant exposure in newspapers and on TV when issues of importance to the majority of our citizens are being ignored?

When confronted about their position, they claim that they are only following God’s word, then say every word in the bible comes directly from God.

Don’t they remember that when asked, whether Jews should be forced to submit to earthly authority,  Jesus said,  “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

It is my considered opinion  that many of these supposedly religious people are the same ones who rather than increase the taxes they pay by a dollar a week, recently knocked 500,000 kids off of kid care, and deprived them of any kind of health care. They’re the same ones who knocked another half million adults off of Medicaid for the same reason. Every year, thousands of our citizens die from conditions that are eminently controllable with minimum care, and millions of our citizens do not receive any care for chronic ailments.

These are the same people who allow kids thousands of kids in this country to die every year, because of something as eminently curable as malnutrition. And they’re the same people who rather than assist anyone after they’re born, have cut every social program that could help to the bone. It’s the reason some 15 to 20 million of our citizens now live on the streets of this nation, and it’s the reason that one in five of those people are children.

If there is a God, (and millions of people around the world believe there isn’t) who’s God is it? Whose God reigns in a nation that by constitutional law cannot have a national religion? The answer that we have happily lived with for more than 200 years, is that every individual has the right to make that choice for himself. In every instance where the words “In God we trust” appears, it doesn’t specify which God they refer to.

In Article 1, amendment 1, of Our Constitution, it specifically says: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of (a national) religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

There has been more than 200 years of confirmation of that religious affirmation by the Supreme Court. It is a principle tenet of our nation, and

if we ever allow that tenet to be removed, we will fall into the same kind of

conflicts we see in the middle east today.

There are seven Major religions represented in this country. They are Christianity, Hinduism, Toaism, Judaism, Islam, and New Age. Which of these religions is so universally perfect, that the beliefs of anybody of a different faith can be ordered to be surpressed? Christianity tried to do that during the Spanish Inquisition when Jews were tortured and killed unless they renounced their Jewish faith and accepted Christianity.

The one thing we can all be sure of, is that the God of Christianity is very different in his teaching and demands from the God of Islam, or the God of Hinduism, or any of the other major religions of the world.

Christianity, in the history of the United States alone, has more that a dozen major sects. Martin Luther created the first of them in 1543 when he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and western Christianity and created the first alternate Christian religion, the Luthern Religion. Since then, a dozen major sects were developed including the church of England which was created when the pope refused to allow the English King to divorce his wife. There are also a hundred minor sects of that dozen break away Christian religions. Do the  snake handling Christians of Kentucky and West Virginia have a voice in this anti-abortion brouhaha? Are they equally represented in this Christian uprising? Or are the people creating this major problem in our government only doing those things at the behest of the neo-conservatives who brought this situation about to begin with?

Isn’t it time that we, as a nation, get back to the tenets laid out in our constitution? The ones that say all men (and women) are created equal, and that the will of the majority of our citizens shall prevail.

If we continue to allow the small minority of our citizens who are doing what they’re doing because they claim to be deeply religious, and as such can force their will on us, we will continue to see this country draw closer to the same kind of despotic theocracy that rules Iran and several other middle east nations, finally wind up in charge of this country, and that Theocracy will rule every facet of our lives.

If we allow these things to happen, it will drive our society back to the tenets of the dark ages. This nation will become a place where you will have to get permission from your priest or minister in order to do anything including think for yourself.

Is that what we want for the United States? A nation where the rich, powerful or religious can determine what you can achieve in your life? A nation where you must believe what you’re ordered to believe, and who you must obey. That has never been what this great nation was created to achieve. It was created as a sanctuary. A place where Christian, Islam, and every other religion could live together in harmony.

The United States is a place unlike any other nation in the history of the world. One where character, intellect, and drive allows any citizen of any race, creed, or national origin to      use his or her intellect to achieve whatever they are able to achieve by virtue of their individual intellect and belief systems under our laws. In regard to what is going on today, a tiny minority of our citizens is of the opinion that their beliefs supercede the rights of the vast majority to receive the promise of our Constitution of the United States of America.

Don’t allow that to happen, or we will never be able to return this nation to the promises we were all given in September of 1787 when our Constitution was adopted, and our nation was born. Those promises were of freedom, equality, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of our citizens.

The thing is, taxes have been cut to the bone, and every welfare program has been cut to the bare bone level during that time, and now there’s nothing left to cut except medical care, education, or the subsidies to illegal immigrants.

So 50,000 of our citizens have been cut from the AHCCS rolls. This isn’t the first time Republicans have proven to Arizona Citizens that average people don’t count. We gave a half billion dollars worth of tax breaks to businesses in the past five years so they could build shopping centers and big box stores. That half billion dollars would help a lot today. What good are shopping centers if people can’t afford to buy anything?

Fifteen years ago we were on a building binge that was based on the construction of 3,4,and $500,000 homes that were sold to and occupied by people who had to lie in order to show enough income to qualify for a loan.      The idea of tax cuts is that the rich should be able to keep more of their money. That binge didn’t aid lower middle class citizens, working poor, or poor. Look at what it brought about… one in three houses built and sold during the past five years are in foreclosure. Our unemployment rate continues to rise, and our families and children continue to lose.

So after fifteen years of continuously draining our coffers there’s nothing left to do but increase taxes. Our state government agreed to tax food, and that hurts the poorest of us. What’s wrong with returning tax levels to pre 1980 levels?

I’m waiting to see how our Republican politicians arrange to tax everybody but the rich.

The trouble with the tea partier’s rants is that very little of what they say is actually true, they’re half truths or outright lies. The reality is that the small group of people who created tea-parties, really were a grass roots group. But those who co-opted the movement, and institutionalized it, the people who raised the millions of dollars for the movement that is still being attributed to a grass roots movement, the people who got excerpts of every meeting covered by TV so that we could all see what that movement is, weren’t grass roots by any stretch of the imagination.

Those people were professional fund raisers who raised tens of millions of dollars. They are paid political activists who steered the movement to the direction prescribed by the powers in government behind the take over. And professional public relations people, who worked from a script written by some highly paid employee of a Neoconservative think tank. They were people like Dick Armey whose so called non profit organization called “Freedom Works” pays him $550,000 a year. Freedom Works is right in the middle of the tea party movement, and has been from the time it was co-opted by members of the neoconservative majority of the Republican Party. People like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and other former members of the House and Senate.

A lot of our citizens are gullible, but the vast majority of us aren’t. Why is it that what tea baggers say rates 24-7 coverage on TV, and continuous columns on the newspaper editorial pages of this nation, while what progressives or liberals have to say to refute those statements is only talked about when some “conservative” is there to talk over the progressive and refute what he or she is trying to say. The problem with that situation is that liberals seldom get their statement completed before they’re interrupted, and most TV pundits don’t care if the statements are refuted with half truths or blatant lies. After all controversy draws listeners.

I’ve been involved in politics since 1960. I pay attention to what goes on. I correspond with Representatives, Senators, and even the occupants of the White House. I write hundreds of letters every year. I offer my opinion, suggest things that will correct problems, and ask difficult questions. I investigate the questionable things I see on TV, and most important, I remember what was said last week, last month, and last year, and I research quotes, dates, and circumstances that are relevant.

I know why we were 12 trillion dollars in debt on January 1, 2009. After all it’s public knowledge available to anybody who asks. And I know  who is responsible for accumulating that debt, and why.

I also know why 65 million middle class jobs were outsourced during the past twenty-five years, and who benefited to the tune of trillions of dollars from all of those jobs being outsourced. Believe me when I tell you that it wasn’t people whose average combined household income is $50,000 a year or less. Neither was it labor unions who have been decimated by actions of our government. When 65 million jobs were outsourced, 45 million of them were manufacturing jobs that were covered by labor unions.

I know why we now have 500,000 millionaires and billionaires in this country. Ask yourself, do you know anybody who fits that description? Or is that above your pay grade? I can tell you that I don’t know anybody that fits that description. The closest I’ve come to anybody in that highly praised  group is when I see them on TV.

And when I do, they’re usually telling me why I should tighten my belt, and stop complaining about things I can’t change. Ask yourself if you know any politician you can completely trust? As much as I would like to say yes, I don’t, not of either party, that has been in office more than one term.

Ask yourself why politicians have been on the receiving end of tens of millions of dollars from lobbyists every year? Or why those lobbyists “donated” two and a half billion dollars to our politicians last year alone. Then ask yourself  why that money is referred to as “donations”, when we know they’re really  bribes paid to get the recipient’s vote?  Ask yourself why it costs a million dollars or more to get a job that pays a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and only lasts two years?

Ask yourself why most elected federal politicians started out with fortunes of less than $100,000 and are now worth millions of dollars? Ask yourself where that money came from?

Finally, ask yourself why at least 70% of the members of congress are attorneys? And why 78% of those members have never worn the uniform of our military, and have worked diligently to receive deferments instead of serving this country?

A prime example of this situation is Dick Cheney who received five deferments, before serving as secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, then became the CEO of Halliburton. And why was he paid 93 million dollars in severance pay when he became vice-president? Exactly what did he deliver in the way of sweetheart deals to earn that kind of money?

No man who had the benefit of five deferments, should ever be allowed to send our sons and daughters to face death in a preemptive, non emergency war. Where is the public discussion of any of these things? Where is the equality of purpose that is supposed to guide the actions of our federal government? Tea partiers work to stop forward progress. They want more tax cuts, and end to any attempt to provide universal insurance to our citizens, and whatever else they believe is good for them alone.

If this new coffee cup movement is actually legitimate, bipartisan, and really tells the truth about everything, I will welcome it. If it is not only truthful, but unafraid to expose corruption wherever it is found, and willing to point out what was done to the citizens of this country, and who did it, the probability is, I will even become part of it. How about you?

Although a corporation is considered by law to be an individual, it most certainly isn’t, and never has been. . There is no parity between the two, and the Supreme court Decision basically turns the election process over to the rich, and powerful in contravention to what is required by our Constitution.

During the past three decades, big business has been allowed to insinuate itself into both our government, and our legal system. Big business is now allowed to buy votes from our Congressmen and Senators by virtue of the lobbyists who buy votes, and that situation allows foreign governments represented by those big businesses to create United States policy. In the process of legalizing that situation, it effectively removed the voice of our citizen majority from the position of authority we were granted under the Constitution 225 years ago.

Nowhere in that constitution does it allow big business to take control of our government. Nowhere in that document does it authorize big business to countermand the laws of this country that are supposed to protect all of our citizens.

And nowhere in our constitution does it say that equity and equality can be removed from any equation concerning our citizens… yet that is exactly what was done in that recent Supreme court decision. A ruling that hands all of the power of choice over to millionaire and billionaire members of big business, by equating individuals and corporations as equals.

Isn’t it bad enough that big business created a situation during the past thirty years where average people can no longer even think about running for a federal elective office because their ability to raise the millions of dollars necessary to fund an election has been totally removed? If you aren’t a member of the in crowd, you may as well not bother trying.

What the Supreme Court previously handed big business, in their decisions regarding Political Action Committees, is a situation where funding of political parties by big business could determine who we could  vote for, because the political action committees fund ads for and against a specific candidate, and they can kill a candidacy before the party big wigs okay him or her as a candidate. When big business can decides who we will be able to vote for, it usually comes down to a choice between the despicable, and the ignorant.

That isn’t what the Constitution requires, and it isn’t what our citizens want. How is it that 1% of our population now controls half of our national wealth? Is that equality or equity? Hell no. Especially when the situation came about after Big Business achieved their goals of breaking most labor unions, and is responsible for outsourcing 65 million middle class jobs.

That happened because big business gained control of our federal government, and changed or amended existing laws that allowed big business to do whatever the hell they wanted to with impunity.

How is it that we now have 65,000 lobbyists in Washington D.C. who “contribute” two and a half billion dollars a year to our elected officials “funds”? It’s because big business wanted it that way, and bribed their way to what they wanted.

Isn’t bribery of an elected official illegal anymore? Of course it is, but during the past three decades our laws have been slowly subverted. They were slowly modified according to a long term plan neoconservatives put in place in the mid 1960s. The plan was to change what was then illegal into something that is now, by virtue of political acceptance and changes in our laws, legal. Even if 80% of our citizens find those changes morally reprehensible, and ethically unexplainable in light of the constitutional mandates.

How is it that our constitution has been ignored for more than three decades, and big business has been given the right to do whatever the hell they please during that same period of time? The answer to that question is simple. During those past three decades, neoconservative politicians have worked slowly and carefully to insinuate themselves into leadership positions in our government. Once those positions were achieved, they changed the laws to what they are today. It only takes a small modification of language to change a law. For instance, how much strength is removed when a law that used to say, you shall not, is changed to you should not.

Strangely, even though neoconservatives are no longer in charge of our government, they maintain the  same stranglehold on the leadership of that august body even after having been ousted. They do that although they now make up a minority of both our government, and our voters. The last count showed Independents have surpassed the membership of republicans by more than 10%.

How do they manage to retain control? The answer to that question is so simple that it’s overlooked by people who don’t know what has happened to our government, or why what happened took place. The answer is, even though they make up less than 25% of our registered voters, neoconservatives maintain control the Senate, and as a result of the Senate control, of our federal government, because of their constant use of the threat of filibuster.

The facts behind the control created by the use of filibuster have never ever been fully explained to our citizens. If you want to know exactly how it works, rent the 1939 movie Mr. Smith goes to Washington. It is an accurate depiction of what filibuster was designed to do.

Filibuster is a Dutch word for “Pirate” and was first used a hundred and fifty years ago to pirate, and take over, the bill under consideration. Filibuster was used very sparingly during the next hundred years. In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes needed to invoke cloture of filibuster, from two thirds, (67 votes) to thirty percent. (60 votes)

But at the same time, The Senate made the filibuster “invisible” by requiring only that 41 Senators state that they intend to filibuster; critics say this makes the modern filibuster “painless” and no longer requires a time consuming actual filibuster to kill any possibility of a vote on the bill in question.

That’s why it requires 60 members in the Senate to be available to vote for cloture, and although all it takes is the threat of a filibuster to end debate on any issue, it actually takes 60 votes in order to close a filibuster.

Neoconservative Republicans have invoked the threat of filibuster more times in 2009, than the procedure was used during the entire decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The threat of filibuster was used an average of six times a week. A total of 294 bills were passed by the House and never voted on by the Senate because of the “invisible” filibuster rule.

But what the hell, neoconservatives and their supporters are of the opinion that our citizens no longer deserve the rights provided, and guaranteed to us, by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. So, whenever anything comes up that is beneficial to average people, the threat of filibuster is made, and that bill dies.

Their goal is to frame the problem in a way that makes the democratic president, and the democratic congress, to appear feckless, irresponsible, and unable to deliver any part of what they promised during the campaign.

I listen to the news every day. And every day I wonder what the hell happened to our government. I wonder what ever happened to equality, comity, and justice? What ever happened to the people’s right to be governed under the body of laws put forth in our Constitution?

We hear that the changes to our rights put forth by our Supreme  Court, will be good for our country and our citizens, and that it will balance the rights of all of our citizens. How can it do that when the majority of major corporations doing business in this country are multi-national in nature, and are owned or operated by foreign nations?

The exact wording from the Constitution differs one hundred and eighty degrees with what we’re being told by the Supreme court. I just finished reading that 183 page decision. It’s based on canceling federal laws court interpretations and rulings in place for as long as a hundred years. Those laws and rulings were intended to retain parity between the rich and powerful of big business, and average citizens.

The Supreme court justices must take two oaths before being seated. The first is the Constitutional oath that every federal employee from secretary to president must take. It’s mandated by Article 1 of the Constitution and backed up by federal law.

That oath is as follows: “I_________ , do solemnly swear, (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will, well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

The second oath, known as the Judicial oath of office, originated with the judiciary act of 1789 and continues as a requirement under 28 USC and 453, but was amended slightly in 1990:

That oath is taken as follows:

I ____________,  do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as a member of the Supreme court under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So Help me God.”

Everything created by this ruling negates what is ordered by our Constitution. When swearing to uphold that Constitution and then doing the opposite, those justices open themselves to the possibility of being impeached, and even the possibility of being charged with treason. Supreme court justices are supposed to be unbiased, and non-partisan. That is not the case, and hasn’t been for decades.

In addition, the opening line of section two of  the Constitution is specific in it’s admonition. That specific is simply that  “The judicial Power shall extend to all cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority…”

There is one key word in that opening line of section 2, that’s being ignored by the recent Supreme court decision proffered by chief justice Roberts. For the most part the decision was accepted without comment by the Neocon politicians in Congress, and by every neocon area of our media. That word is equity.

According to the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Equity is defined as equal or fair. It’s defined as justice according to natural law or right. Specifically, freedom from bias or favoritism. Something that is equitable. A system of law originating in the English Chancery, and comprising a settled body of formal and procedural rules and doctrines that supplement, aid, or override  common and statute law, and are designed to protect rights and enforce duties fixed by doctrines of equity.

How does assigning unlimited power to influence our elections to big business equate with equity, fairness or justice? The answer is it doesn’t. We need to inundate our elected politicians with calls, letters, and E-mails, demanding the passage of a law that cancels out the decision by the highly  partisan supreme court members who did this injustice to our citizens.  By the way, the vote was 5 to 4 in favor of the decision to change the rules.

The citizens of these United States are sitting on the cusp of revolution. It may not be an armed revolution that creates body country, as we became familiar with during the Viet-Nam war, but it will surely leave this country changed from what it was just a few short years ago.

What the outcome will be is very hard to tell at this time, and even if our citizens grow the balls necessary to take this country back from the people who virtually stole it during the past three decades, it will not be the

United States we all knew and loved until the late 1900s.

I have explained the differences between then and now quite often. I try not to create a mental picture of what the United States was like when it worked well, but even though times were tough. The great depression, World War II, The Korean War, several recessions, and a rise in divorce,

were seen by all, even though in those days our government worked to help all of our citizens.

In the United States we used to live in, programs were put in place that allowed the poorest of us to move toward prosperity. There were jobs

available for anybody who wanted to work. There were education programs available for anybody who wanted to move up the ladder, and the largest segment of our middle class were factory workers.

I’ve asked myself a thousand times what changed all of that? And after almost ten years of constant researching on an almost daily basis, I’m not certain I can answer that question to anybody’s complete satisfaction. What I’ve learned, is that no one single issue is responsible for where we are today, there are dozens, and maybe more. And they’re interwoven like threads in a piece of fabric. They’re so closely aligned that you can’t point to one specific item and say if we fix this, it will allow the country to change to a point where it will benefit everybody again.

Now… What do I mean by benefiting everybody? As it stands we have three distinct classes of citizens today. The rich and pampered, those who work their asses off every day, conform to the laws, pay their taxes, and serve their country, and those who barely eke out a living, and are generally shoved aside. Are those three classes new? Hell no. They were here from the dawn of the industrial revolution.

But, our government wasn’t a hindrance to the progress available to our citizens of any strata. The rich have always been with us. But until recently, they weren’t allowed to do half of what is legal today. In 1941 the average person worked in a factory producing armaments of some kind. The average pay was around twenty dollars a week, and that small pay day paid the rent, provided food for the average family of four, and allowed an occasional evening at the movies.

Today in order to do that well, the average family of four must earn forty to fifty thousand dollars a year. That is forty to fifty times what they made in 1941. By 1960, that average wage had quadrupled, to eighty dollars a week, and everyone was living better. Every major corporation in the United States was producing new products, and every one of our citizens was busy working so they could afford those new products.

We were working to send men into space, and the products developed that allowed us to do that were adapted to our use. Electronics were miniaturized, and brought about the birth of the primitive micro chips. Plastics were becoming more common, and new alloys were being created that were lighter, stronger, and longer lasting. We no longer marched to the future, we raced to it. And the people who were supposed to keep control of everything were slowly losing their grip on the things they were in charge of.

In 1960 TV was injected into politics, and professional PR men were hired to make certain candidates presented the proper image to the voters. Professional writers were hired to produce speeches that were on topic, and acceptable to our voters. In 1960 Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy held the first TV debate. And yet, our citizens were still making progress.

The question I have in my mind, is how the hell can I make 200 million people understand what happened to them in just fifty years. There has been so much, that we now have three generations of our citizens who have no first hand knowledge of what the world was like in 1960. From what many historians have called the pinnacle of our golden age, we did what amounts to a dive off of a high cliff, and wound up in the depths of change for the worse.

I said before that the problems we live with today are interwoven like the threads that merge to create a fabric. But you must understand that so were the things that created the high points of our history. We lived through the deepest depression in our history. We lived through the most horrendous  war the world has ever seen. and we’ve lived through a transition in our political system that went from working on behalf of our citizens, to working on behalf of whoever paid the highest bribes.

The connecting link to every problem any United States citizen faces is in fact the unwillingness of our federal government to do their proscribed jobs in the manner outlined by our Constitution. As a result, the citizen majority that made this country so successful for so many decades, no longer rules. It’s been replaced by special interests who define what happens in this country by the use of political bribery.

Look at what happened to our federal government during the past half century. It now costs as much as five million dollars to run a single race for the House of Representatives. The last presidential election took almost a half billion dollars between both candidates, and Political action committees spent another billion dollars. The important part of that statement is that collecting that money wasn’t done on the basis of what was good for our citizens, it was done on what was good for the politicians who were running, and for the wealthy, and big business donors who made up the lions share of the contributors.

In the past ten years lobbyists have been used to get what big businesses and foreign governments want from our federal government. What they want is access to markets, and money. So they gladly spend ten million dollars in order to get a law passed that will give them a billion dollars in additional profit.

That is the basis of breaking our unions, NAFTA, WTO, Free trade, and the movement toward borderless countries. Every time some new law is passed that broadens any of those organizations, our citizens are fed some line of crap about how it will help us. The fact of the matter is, it increases

our liability, our debt, and our inability to maintain a solid economy, a pattern of growth, and a stable federal government.

The thing we have to learn is how all of this came about, and more importantly, how it all got started. In order to fully understand everything, we have to disregard what we think we know, Because most of that information is false, and hides behind the façade of reality.

What does it take to get back to where we were? First of all it takes truth. Truth is immutable. It doesn’t change depending on who’s talking, what day it is, or what the subject is. The sky is always up, the sun always projects heat, water is always wet, and a politician’s sole purpose is to represent the citizens of these United States.

We say we want our politicians to be as free from vices as the Bishop’s wife. Show me one politician who has been in power more than one year who retains the ideals he entered politics with and I’ll help you

elect him president of the world. As Shakespeare said, “There’s the rub.”

There are realities in politics just as there are ideals in politics. They are very much like pendulums on a clock.

Most of the time they are in a safe, neutral zone. But they also swing to the extremes in each direction. If you time those swings, they swing far to the right 10% of the time, and far to the left 10% of the time. The remaining 80% of the time they are somewhere in the middle.

Politics in the United States emulates the pendulum. It just happens that we are in one of those far right swings, and have been since 1980. The people behind that swing got their toe hold in 1965 after Republicans lost the presidency they fully expected to win against Lyndon Baines Johnson. The big business tycoons were extreme right wing conservatives in regard to their political bent.

They were involved in funding a movement meant to change our federal government to one that obeyed the conservative dictum. They believed that if they could arrange a changeover from liberal to conservative, they would profit exponentially. That fact had never been challenged by any economist, but it had been impossible to implement for almost a hundred years because labor was now as strong as big business.

The organizations that proved most able to stifle the increased profit of big business were the labor unions of this country that came to power in the 1920s and 1930s. They represented fully 75% of our blue collar workforce.

So, in order to implement their plan, the titans of industry had to break the labor unions, and force our workforce into a position of subservience to Big business. The problem with being able to do that was that our federal government had placed oversight and controls on big business.

The Titans got together an din the course of their discussions, began to put together a plan they believed would work. It wasn’t something that could be done overnight, but what the hell, They had a lot of time, and were willing to spend a lot of money to achieve their goals. What they lacked was a method of propagandizing the public to their goals, without alienating that public.

The method they chose was the creation of a couple of hundred think tanks and institutes that would promulgate their ideas directly to elected representatives of the people. In addition, they needed a specific set of circumstances to come about. They included the right kind of political climate, a candidate people could believe in, and a world wide change in the response our federal government was capable of making.

In 1965 those things were believed to be attainable. We were just past the assassination of a very popular democratic president, (JFK) deep into the cold war with the USSR, and open to new ways of doing things because of our involvement in the Viet-Nam war.

The new movement was labeled Neo-conservatism. It was actually a rebirth of a movement that was born at the time of the Russian revolution in 1917. Strangely, the movement which began as a far left movement in 1917,

meant to create a workers paradise, had morphed into a far right movement controlled by the scions of big business by 1965.

Neo-conservatism in it’s current form, was totally funded by the same  titans of industry who had invested tens of millions of dollars in the 1964 presidential election that was lost by Barry Goldwater.

The titans decided that it was time to put their plan to work. They began holding meetings across the country in which they developed a unified strategy of conservative politics. Instead of the hundred things Democrats worked toward passing, Conservatives reduced the number of issues to less than a dozen.

That dozen issues were wrapped in the flag, motherhood, and apple pie. After all, who could argue with a smaller, more efficient federal government, a balanced budget, more opportunity for our citizens, and a better, brighter future for everybody? The problem with those statements, was that they were never meant to be achieved.

By 1970, our citizens were being deluged with statements by people whose names were recognizable in every facet of business, academia, and politics. That set the stage for a leader that would represent the Neocon movement. He came around in the late 1970s and everybody recognized him. That leader was Ronald Reagan. A movie and TV actor who had been around for more than thirty years. Reagan had been elected governor of California, and in the opinion of many, he had done a good job.

Reagan began to be interview on TV and submitted columns to newspapers. His words were treated as if they were from the sermon on the mount. In i979 he told the world that he would run for the presidency of the United States. He ran against Jimmy Carter whose term had been mixed in both results and popularity, and was inaugurated in January of 1981.

Reagan surrounded himself with Neocons, and announced that his intention was to destroy the evil empire of the USSR. Our citizens all agreed that ending the cold war would be a good thing, and Reagan was given virtual carte blanch.  He began his term by publicly stating that government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem.

He began to make deals with other nations. For instance his plan was to borrow the money it took to destroy Russia. The Congress agreed and by the time his first term ended, we had borrowed two trillion dollars from Japan. What we didn’t realize, was that part of the loan deal required Japan to gain control of the TV and electronics industry from the United States.

I can’t tell you exactly what the deal was, but we removed a million or so good jobs from this country, and increased our debt to four and a half trillion dollars by the time he left office.

That was part of the Neocon plan, and was just the first steps that led to the outsourcing of sixty-five million blue collar, and white collar jobs. It was the conjunction of computerizing, and miniaturizing that began the problems our citizens live with today. In the 1970s Silicone Valley in California, was the most growth oriented in this country. By 1985 it was shrinking, and by the beginning of our new millennium, it had shrunk by half, and the majority of the engineers were imported from India or some other foreign nation.

Of course, by then, the unions had been reduced to a mere shadow of themselves, and our workforce had been forced to find secondary employment. In addition, our national debt was at five and a half trillion dollars, and our tax collections had been reduced by a third to a half. It’s hard to tell because  I’ve been unable to gather any true figures.

Plus, we now had more than twenty thousand illegal immigrants living, working, and educating their children at our expense. We also subsidized their medical care at a time when more than twenty-five million of our citizens had no access to it. The policies of our federal government had changed steadily during the previous twenty years.

In 2001 George W. Bush was given the presidency by the supreme court ending the extended vote count in Florida caused by questionable ethics that discarded more than a hundred thousand democratic ballots by order of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

When that happened, Neocons achieved their thirty-five year old goal of controlling the Presidency, both houses of congress, and the supreme court at the same time. The house and Senate were already under Neocon control since Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and Tom Delay circumvented the law, and arranged to deliver pre-marked ballots to hundreds of churches in the bible belt.

At any rate, when everything came together, they were free to do whatever they pleased, with absolutely no possibility of being overridden. We know about some of the things that were done under Bush Cheney. But it might take the next fifty years to learn them all, if we ever do.

During the past thirty years, Neocons have either been instrumental in arranging the direction of the country, or openly told those who disagreed with them to kiss their asses. We saw millions of our middle class jobs disappear, our economy turned upside down, and our citizens ripped off at every turn for the benefit of businesses, the majority of which are foreign owned and foreign directed. Businesses who owe no allegiance to either our citizens or our nation.

The previous pages describe much of what happened to us, and it describes some of the why those things happened, but if described very little of how those things were accomplished, and almost nothing of who was behind the Neocon movement. I will attempt to delineate those things in the next chapters.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the way the game of politics is played anymore. It hasn’t been for the past thirty years. Politics has become a big business where the people represented by the winners get rich, and those represented by the losers get screwed. A business that is controlled by think tanks.

A think tank (also called a policy center or is an organization institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts market research, and engages in the advocacy of public policy.

Many think tanks have non profit status which in countries like the United States and Canada are given tax exempt status. Many of these tax exempt think tanks are funded by foreign governments, special interest groups, and businesses. The vast majority of these think tanks are self-serving, and work on behalf of the goals of their sponsors. Many are little more than highly paid public relation fronts, who continuously strive to get things of little interest to 90% of our citizens presented as the most important issues in the country.

Think tanks are never neutral. They all have a decided political leaning. There are more than twice as many think tanks who represent ultra conservative points of view, than there are who represent liberals. That’s because conservatives generally have a lot more money than liberals do.

Conservative think tanks were involved in the take over of both houses of congress in 1994 by Newt Gingrich and Ralph Reed. Those think tanks are responsible for ending the separation of church and state.

The thing is, long before we ever hear the issues involved in any election, those issues have been fabricated, chewed over by experts, framed by highly paid P.R. men, and have been proselytized to small representative groups as a test of the idea, and the presentation. It’s all done by people we’ve never heard of. People who are being paid enormous sums of money by the political groups who created the issue to either make the opposition look bad, or gain backing for an idea most people don’t even know is in play. Are these issues based on truth? Most of them have been proven not to be.

This situation began in the mid 1960s, and is now the accepted way of doing business. The important thing to remember, is that when it began to be the way politics was conducted in the mid 1960s, these new organizations, were funded by the Republican party who were at the time out of office.

The battle to regain power by the Republican party, came to a head 1n 1964 when Barry Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency to Lyndon Baines Johnson. The sole purpose of the new political techniques was to run Democrats out of Washington D.C… Forever if possible. If not, for long enough to instill the new ideas of Republican conservatism strongly enough that they would last a hundred years.

Today, these organizations permeate every state government, and they still have that goal of keeping Democrats out of power. I realize that it’s very hard for most of our citizens to believe these things happen in this country, but they do, and they have been happening for more than forty years.

Think tanks are like Universities that have no students, and no peer review mechanisms. Where universities employ real academics who conduct their research prior to drawing conclusions in order to promote diversity of thought.

Think tanks, reverse that process, and  begin with a stated opinion, and work to come up with what appear to be legitimate explanations for their positions. The Think tanks and foundations all have high sounding names. From the name of the organizations, you would think they are all benevolent. The fact is, they are anything but. They don’t think, they justify.

For instance, many of them are avidly anti-abortion, but if they influence a woman to keep the child, they don’t do anything to help that single parent to house, feed, or clothe it. In truth, they continuously work to end any assistance any family can receive. How pro-life is that?

Here in Arizona, the most powerful of our area Think Tanks is called the Center for Arizona Policy. Sounds nice doesn’t? After all, we don’t want our public policies to run wild… do we? So what the hell is the Center for Arizona Policies, you might ask. The simple answer is, it’s a behind the scenes Conservative funded, “non-profit” organization that has had a hand in creating Arizona Issues for more than 15 years.

For the most part, those issues aren’t created in order to make life better for our citizens, They are created in order to keep Republicans in power. I’m not surprised if you aren’t aware of it, because they work under the radar, and basically restrict their lobbying and funding to the halls of our State Capitol, instead of in the public spotlight.

The Center’s staff writes bills, tests the reaction to them, strengthen any weak spots with private hearings, then take them directly to our state law-makers who chair the committees in which those bills will be heard. Then, they testify on the veracity and necessity of the bills they wrote.

Members of the center, (Lobbyists) keep Republicans updated through Blogs and E-Mail blasts. Things most people aren’t aware of. The center makes their followers  aware of new issues, and directs them to contact their legislators directly about them, It also puts Republican voter guides together for registered Republicans, in order to remind their supporters of who opposes their efforts. (In most cases, they name Democrats)

According to the March 4^th Republic article by Alia Beard Rau, The Center for Arizona Policy has grown from a small organization when it was founded in 1996, to one with hundreds of volunteers that collected one point six million dollars in 2007 alone. 2008 was the latest year CAP would release figures for, and spent $230,906 of the money collected on it’s lobbying efforts to our Arizona Lawmakers. I wonder how much of that money wound up in the lawmakers pockets, and who those lawmakers were?

The Center for Arizona Policy was founded in 1996 by Len Munsil, a phoenix attorney with political aspirations. Munsil ran an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 2006, against then governor Janet Napalitrano. He no longer serves on the CAP board, but he supports the organizations ideals and efforts.

So what exactly are those ideals and efforts? According to the CAP web site, they primarily work for the sanctity of marriage, the Sanctity of Human Life, Religious freedom, Parental rights, Education, and complain about the evils of gambling.

However, What the center actually does, is create bills that are meant to be divisive. The kind of bills that highlight the differences in our citizens instead of the things that unite us. They create situations where conservatives are pitted against progressives, the rich are pitted against the poor, religious are pitted against non religious, or those of another religion.    The Center has written and supported 72 very divisive bills during the past 14 years that were enacted into law. For example, one bill they wrote allowed bible clubs to be placed into middle schools, in contravention to the separation of Church and State written about in article 1 of the Constitution. Another bill they passed concerns their desire to limit abortion. It stopped  several attempts to bring legal, lawful, abortion services into Arizona.

CAP statements have been read about, and heard in Arizona for more than a decade. For the most part, they work to influence what we read, hear, and think.

The issues of constant comment by CAP are:,

1. The sanctity of life, (which in their opinion means Ending abortion)

2. The sanctity of Marriage: The members of CAP say Gays should be deprived of their right to marry whom they choose. This isn’t about who marries whom, it’s about removing Constitutional rights from Homosexuals.

3. Religious freedom: CAP distorts the right of religious freedom, and bastardizes the separation of church and state, by lobbying for prayer in public schools, and the institution of religious prayer groups in publicly funded schools. It claims to me working equally for all religions, but in fact a great number of it’s members are fundamentalist Christians who actually write their bills.

4. Education: CAP lobbies for the right of parents to include the creation theory in science classes, so it can vie against evolution. CAP also works diligently to weaken our public school system by fighting for the right of charter schools to receive tax payer dollars.

5. Parental rights: CAP wants everybody but parents to but out of the lives of their children. They want parents to be solely responsible for every facet of their children’s lives, including all health related decisions, including immunizations, and counseling.

6. Gambling: CAP opposes all gambling in Arizona, including the state lottery, and Indian casinos.

7. Judicial Reform: CAP is working to label all judges who don’t work toward their goals as being reformers. They claim the judicial system needs to be revamped so that an appointed panel can overrule and cancel the decisions of any judge. They claim it’s so the courts won’t be able to create Judicial activism.

8. Pornography: CAP supports the regulation of sexually oriented businesses to the fullest extent possible. The question they’ve never answered is , Who is going to define pornography? Will it be CAP, or some activist court?

The areas of particular interest to CAP, are generally not of  primary  importance to average people. But those ideas are presented to the public as if they are the most important things to every citizen of Arizona.

Every single area represented by CAP is defined that way. When interviewed, CAP presents the issues they create as being benign. They’re anything but. This use of think-tank brain washing is based on the proven history of the more than 200 national Republican think-tanks that were formed by a group of conservative millionaires during the 1960s and 1970s. Did you know that Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, two disgraced Republican Speakers of the house of representatives who were ousted, now work for think tanks, and each of them earn in excess of a million dollars a year.

Think-Tanks have been proselytizing the Republican goals of the people who fund them since they were first created in the mid 1960s. The thing about the National Think-Tank system currently at work on a daily basis in Washington D.C, is that they were created by Neoconservative Republicans, and follow the Neocon philosophy.

Most of our citizens think conservatives and Neoconservatives are interchangeable. They aren’t and it would take too long to adequately define them in this essay. If you’re interested in what the difference is, go on line and type in What is a Neoconservative. The answer you seek is all there.

The way neoconservative work is simple. They use front people in the form of think tanks. The Center for Arizona Policies is a neocon organization that works primarily on religious issues, and works to represent the ideas of 5% of Arizona citizens to the general public as being representative of 90% of the state’s populace.

The thing is, most of this country’s people are religious in some form or another, so they are basically neutral about what they hear. The problem is, most people don’t know that what they hear is being written about, or broadcast, in order to create a separation of our citizens. In addition, it’s being created and broadcast on a secret basis. When you read an article in the paper that presents a policy change you’re not in favor of, does the article tell you where it came from? Hell no.

When we hear those kind of statements, or read about them, they’re presented in a way that purports to have the backing of every citizen of Arizona. In addition, the political electorate of the state is said to unanimously back the ideas. The truth is, CAP generally represents somewhere between 5 and 10% of our citizens. (depending on the issue)

On the other hand, the think tanks that create the problems that have regularly come out Washington, don’t settle for small things. Those organizations create all of the propaganda we hear on a daily basis. They create the issues debated on TV by a hundred corporately paid pundits every day.

The crap that guides our elected officials on their path to passing the laws lobbyists want passed, for the benefit of the big businesses and foreign governments who silently, and secretly, control enough of our elected officials to block any measure that would end that control.

We all know that most of the crap we’re forced to live with today, is the result of politicians receiving bribes from lobbyists for think tanks, foreign governments and big businesses, in order to pass the think tank bills into law. After those bills are passed, we, the general public, are forced to conform to them.

Those Washington think-tanks work like CAP. They create issues. As opposed to state run think tanks, who work mostly on local issues, Those in Washington, create issues in both foreign, and domestic affairs on a national and international basis. They operate using high sounding names, and are represented by people who purport to represent our top educators, top thinkers, and most forward thinkers.

Here are just a few of the names of Republican Think tanks .American Enterprise Institute.

American Political Action Committee.

Center for Individual Freedom.

Coalitions for America.

Conservative Victory Committee.

Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Radio America.

Americans for Fair Taxation.

National Tax limitation Committee.

U.S. Taxpayers alliance.

American Family Association.

Campus Crusade for Christ.

Center for Reclaiming  America.

Christian Voice.

Traditional Values Coalition.

Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.

United Seniors Association,

Center for Equal Opportunities.

Institute for Justice.

Gun Owners of America.

National Rifle Association.

American Policy center.

Freedom Alliance.

These organizations are only 23 of the more than 200 organizations that work to attain neoconservative  goals,  Pick one, and look it up on the web. You will find that what they represent is usually diametrically opposed to the public face they put forth.

Removal of government oversight from banks, mortgage companies, big business, and government itself, started out as issues created and spread around to our elected officials, by Republican funded Think-tanks.

The war in Iraq was created as part of the Neoconservative philosophy that says it’s better to bomb, than discuss or negotiate any issue of importance to any other country, because our goals are what should be reached. After eight years of war, and the loss of more than 4,000 of our kids, what the hell have we accomplished by the war in Iraq?

When we finally leave that misbegotten country, I would bet a dollar to a hole in a donut that we will see a major civil war erupt within six months.

What benefit did we gain by being there, except that using the Iraq war was the thing that enabled George W. Bush to put a veil of secrecy in place over everything they did. In addition, the outsourcing of sixty million jobs by big business was instigated by those same Republican funded, Republican run think tanks.

One thing you need to remember, is that that all of those more than 200 think tanks are funded by the very same big businesses that sold us out to foreign owned multinational corporations, and who currently divide an additional trillion dollars in profit every month by screwing United States workers.

But if you bother to investigate what started the Think Tank take over of our public media and our government information processes. That take over includes all of this nations failing newspapers. You’ll also learn that most of the troublesome situations we live with today, were initiated by those very same think tanks who began working to create the problems decades ago. The ever growing number of lobbyists for those think tanks, actually write the majority of the bills they push for adoption. For most of the past three decades those bills have been presented directly to key members of our federal congressional committees, and were accompanied by appropriately sized bribes to the politicians required to ensure their passage.

Were you informed of the deals made between Think Tanks and  our elected officials that allowed sixty million of our middle class jobs to leave the United States during the past 30 years? I sure as hell wasn’t. were you asked your opinion about amnesty for illegal immigrants? I wasn’t.

I had to dig for months to even find the area where I finally started to get answers about what think tanks were and what they did. It was only after several months of research that I finally found the hundred page document that explains how to outsource your company’s jobs, and how a corporation can get federal tax money to subsidize the move.

If you type in the words “Republican Think Tanks and Foundations,” on the web you’ll be able to learn what they’ve been up to. Then, if you type in, “What are Neoconservatives”, you’ll learn when and how that political organization came about, who they are, what they’re up to, how they’re funded, who they get their funding from, and what their ultimate goals for this country are. You’ll also learn who the public faces of the Neocon movement are. It’s all there.

I believe average people should join together and file a joint, class action lawsuit against Neoconservatives, Neocon think tanks, and crooked politicians of both parties. That law suit should be for rape… After all, we’ve been getting screwed for thirty years without our permission. I’m certain 200 million of our fellow citizens would sign on to the lawsuit.

The citizens of these United States are sitting on the cusp of revolution. It may not be an armed revolution that creates body country, as we became familiar with during the Viet-Nam war, but it will surely leave this country changed from what it was just a few short years ago.

What the outcome will be is very hard to tell at this time, and even if our citizens grow the balls necessary to take this country back from the people who virtually stole it during the past three decades, it will not be the United States we all knew and loved until the late 1900s.

I have explained the differences between then and now quite often. I try not to create a mental picture of what the United States was like when it worked well, but even though times were tough. The great depression, World War II, The Korean War, several recessions, and a rise in divorce,

were seen by all, even though in those days our government worked to help all of our citizens.

In the United States we used to live in, programs were put in place that allowed the poorest of us to move toward prosperity. There were jobs

available for anybody who wanted to work. There were education programs available for anybody who wanted to move up the ladder, and the largest segment of our middle class were factory workers.

I’ve asked myself a thousand times what changed all of that? And after almost ten years of constant researching on an almost daily basis, I’m not certain I can answer that question to anybody’s complete satisfaction. What I’ve learned, is that no one single issue is responsible for where we are today – there are dozens, maybe more. And they’re interwoven like threads in a piece of fabric. They’re so closely aligned that you can’t point to one specific item and say if we fix this, it will allow the country to change to a point where it will benefit everybody again.

Now… What do I mean by benefiting everybody? As it stands, we have three distinct classes of citizens today. The rich and pampered, those who work their asses off every day, conform to the laws, pay their taxes, and serve their country, and those who barely eke out a living, and are generally shoved aside. Are those three classes new? Hell no. They were here from the dawn of the industrial revolution.

But, our government wasn’t a hindrance to the progress available to our citizens of any strata. The rich have always been with us. But until recently, they weren’t allowed to do half of what is legal today. In 1941 the average person worked in a factory producing armaments of some kind. The average pay was around twenty dollars a week, and that small pay day paid the rent, provided food for the average family of four, and allowed an occasional evening at the movies.

Today in order to do that well, the average family of four must earn forty to fifty thousand dollars a year. That is forty to fifty times what they made in 1941. By 1960, that average wage had quadrupled, to eighty dollars a week, and everyone was living better. Every major corporation in the United States was producing new products, and every one of our citizens was busy working so they could afford those new products.

We were working to send men into space, and the products developed that allowed us to do that were adapted to our use. Electronics were miniaturized, and brought about the birth of the primitive micro chips. Plastics were becoming more common, and new alloys were being created that were lighter, stronger, and longer lasting. We no longer marched to the future, we raced to it. And the people who were supposed to keep control of everything were slowly losing their grip on the things they were in charge of.

In 1960 TV was injected into politics, and professional PR men were hired to make certain candidates presented the proper image to the voters. Professional writers were hired to produce speeches that were on topic, and acceptable to our voters. In 1960 Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy held the first TV debate. And yet, our citizens were still making progress.

The question I have in my mind, is how the hell can I make 200 million people understand what happened to them in just fifty years. There has been so much, that we now have three generations of our citizens who have no first hand knowledge of what the world was like in 1960. From what many historians have called the pinnacle of our golden age, we did what amounts to a dive off of a high cliff, and wound up in the depths of change for the worse.

I said before that the problems we live with today are interwoven like the threads that merge to create a fabric. But you must understand that so were the things that created the high points of our history. We lived through the deepest depression in our history. We lived through the most horrendous  war the world has ever seen. and we’ve lived through a transition in our political system that went from working on behalf of our citizens, to working on behalf of whoever paid the highest bribes.

The connecting link to every problem any United States citizen faces is in fact the unwillingness of our federal government to do their proscribed jobs in the manner outlined by our Constitution. As a result, the citizen majority that made this country so successful for so many decades, no longer rules. It’s been replaced by special interests who define what happens in this country by the use of political bribery.

Look at what happened to our federal government during the past half century. It now costs as much as five million dollars to run a single race for the House of Representatives. The last presidential election took almost a half billion dollars between both candidates, and Political action committees spent another billion dollars. The important part of that statement is that collecting that money wasn’t done on the basis of what was good for our citizens, it was done on what was good for the politicians who were running, and for the wealthy, and big business donors who made up the lions share of the contributors.

In the past ten years lobbyists have been used to get what big businesses and foreign governments want from our federal government. What they want is access to markets, and money. So they gladly spend ten million dollars in order to get a law passed that will give them a billion dollars in additional profit.

That is the basis of breaking our unions, NAFTA, WTO, Free trade, and the movement toward borderless countries. Every time some new law is passed that broadens any of those organizations, our citizens are fed some line of crap about how it will help us. The fact of the matter is, it increases our liability, our debt, and our inability to maintain a solid economy, a pattern of growth, and a stable federal government.

The thing we have to learn is how all of this came about, and more importantly, how it all got started. In order to fully understand everything, we have to disregard what we think we know, Because most of that information is false, and hides behind the façade of reality.

What does it take to get back to where we were? First of all it takes truth. Truth is immutable. It doesn’t change depending on who’s talking, what day it is, or what the subject is. The sky is always up, the sun always projects heat, water is always wet, and a politician’s sole purpose is to represent the citizens of these United States.

We say we want our politicians to be as free from vices as the Bishop’s wife. Show me one politician who has been in power more than one year who retains the ideals he entered politics with and I’ll help you elect him president of the world. As Shakespeare said, “There’s the rub.”

There are realities in politics just as there are ideals in politics. They are very much like pendulums on a clock.

Most of the time they are in a safe, neutral zone. But they also swing to the extremes in each direction. If you time those swings, they swing far to the right 10% of the time, and far to the left 10% of the time. The remaining 80% of the time they are somewhere in the middle.

Politics in the United States emulates the pendulum. It just happens that we are in one of those far right swings, and have been since 1980. The people behind that swing got their toe hold in 1965 after Republicans lost the presidency they fully expected to win against Lyndon Baines Johnson. The big business tycoons were extreme right wing conservatives in regard to their political bent.

They were involved in funding a movement meant to change our federal government to one that obeyed the conservative dictum. They believed that if they could arrange a changeover from liberal to conservative, they would profit exponentially. That fact had never been challenged by any economist, but it had been impossible to implement for almost a hundred years because labor was now as strong as big business.

The organizations that proved most able to stifle the increased profit of big business were the labor unions of this country that came to power in the 1920s and 1930s. They represented fully 75% of our blue collar workforce.

So, in order to implement their plan, the titans of industry had to break the labor unions, and force our workforce into a position of subservience to Big business. The problem with being able to do that was that our federal government had placed oversight and controls on big business.

The Titans got together and in the course of their discussions, began to put together a plan they believed would work. It wasn’t something that could be done overnight, but what the hell, They had a lot of time, and were willing to spend a lot of money to achieve their goals. What they lacked was a method of propagandizing the public to their goals, without alienating that public.

The method they chose was the creation of a couple of hundred think tanks and institutes that would promulgate their ideas directly to elected representatives of the people. In addition, they needed a specific set of circumstances to come about. They included the right kind of political climate, a candidate people could believe in, and a world wide change in the response our federal government was capable of making.

In 1965 those things were believed to be attainable. We were just past the assassination of a very popular democratic president, (JFK) deep into the cold war with the USSR, and open to new ways of doing things because of our involvement in the Viet-Nam war.

The new movement was labeled Neo-conservatism. It was actually a rebirth of a movement that was born at the time of the Russian revolution in 1917. Strangely, the movement which began as a far left movement in 1917,

meant to create a workers paradise, had morphed into a far right movement controlled by the scions of big business by 1965.

Neo-conservatism in it’s current form, was totally funded by the same  titans of industry who had invested tens of millions of dollars in the 1964 presidential election that was lost by Barry Goldwater.

The titans decided that it was time to put their plan to work. They began holding meetings across the country in which they developed a unified strategy of conservative politics. Instead of the hundred things Democrats worked toward passing, Conservatives reduced the number of issues to less than a dozen.

That dozen issues were wrapped in the flag, motherhood, and apple pie. After all, who could argue with a smaller, more efficient federal government, a balanced budget, more opportunity for our citizens, and a better, brighter future for everybody? The problem with those statements, was that they were never meant to be achieved.

By 1970, our citizens were being deluged with statements by people whose names were recognizable in every facet of business, academia, and politics. That set the stage for a leader that would represent the Neocon movement. He came around in the late 1970s and everybody recognized him. That leader was Ronald Reagan. A movie and TV actor who had been around for more than thirty years. Reagan had been elected governor of California, and in the opinion of many, he had done a good job.

Reagan began to be interview on TV and submitted columns to newspapers. His words were treated as if they were from the sermon on the mount. In i979 he told the world that he would run for the presidency of the United States. He ran against Jimmy Carter whose term had been mixed in both results and popularity, and was inaugurated in January of 1981.

Reagan surrounded himself with Neocons, and announced that his intention was to destroy the evil empire of the USSR. Our citizens all agreed that ending the cold war would be a good thing, and Reagan was given virtual carte blanch.  He began his term by publicly stating that government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem.

He began to make deals with other nations. For instance his plan was to borrow the money it took to destroy Russia. The Congress agreed and by the time his first term ended, we had borrowed two trillion dollars from Japan. What we didn’t realize, was that part of the loan deal required Japan to gain control of the TV and electronics industry from the United States.

I can’t tell you exactly what the deal was, but we removed a million or so good jobs from this country, and increased our debt to four and a half trillion dollars by the time he left office.

That was part of the Neocon plan, and was just the first steps that led to the outsourcing of sixty-five million blue collar, and white collar jobs. It was the conjunction of computerizing, and miniaturizing that began the problems our citizens live with today. In the 1970s Silicone Valley in California, was the most growth oriented in this country. By 1985 it was shrinking, and by the beginning of our new millennium, it had shrunk by half, and the majority of the engineers were imported from India or some other foreign nation.

Of course, by then, the unions had been reduced to a mere shadow of themselves, and our workforce had been forced to find secondary employment. In addition, our national debt was at five and a half trillion dollars, and our tax collections had been reduced by a third to a half. It’s hard to tell because  I’ve been unable to gather any true figures.

Plus, we now had more than twenty thousand illegal immigrants living, working, and educating their children at our expense. We also subsidized their medical care at a time when more than twenty-five million of our citizens had no access to it. The policies of our federal government had changed steadily during the previous twenty years.

In 2001 George W. Bush was given the presidency by the supreme court ending the extended vote count in Florida caused by questionable ethics that discarded more than a hundred thousand democratic ballots by order of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

When that happened, Neocons achieved their thirty-five year old goal of controlling the Presidency, both houses of congress, and the supreme court at the same time. The house and Senate were already under Neocon control since Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and Tom Delay circumvented the law, and arranged to deliver pre-marked ballots to hundreds of churches in the bible belt.

At any rate, when everything came together, they were free to do whatever they pleased, with absolutely no possibility of being overridden. We know about some of the things that were done under Bush Cheney. But it might take the next fifty years to learn them all, if we ever do.

During the past thirty years, Neocons have either been instrumental in arranging the direction of the country, or openly told those who disagreed with them to kiss their asses. We saw millions of our middle class jobs disappear, our economy turned upside down, and our citizens ripped off at every turn for the benefit of businesses, the majority of which are foreign owned and foreign directed. Businesses who owe no allegiance to either our citizens or our nation.

The previous pages describe much of what happened to us, and it describes some of the why those things happened, but if described very little of how those things were accomplished, and almost nothing of who was behind the Neocon movement. I will attempt to delineate those things in the next chapters.



Since November of 2008, when Barack Obama was elected by the largest plurality in the past couple of decades. (6%) There hasn’t been one day since he began to work on universal  health care, that he hasn’t been lied about, demeaned, and debased. He’s been portrayed as another Hitler, and describes as a burgeoning Joseph Stalin whose goal is socialism. No day goes by with out those two accusations being made by Republican politicians.

I don’t really understand how Neoconservatives were able to insinuate themselves into the Republican Party forty years ago, or were allowed to dominate and take over the party completely by 2000. But however it happened, unfortunately it did, and there is no Neoconservative Republican I’ve ever met, who is willing to act in what up until the aftermath of 1980, we always considered to be a sane manner.

That sanity meant compromise by both parties, and compromise has virtually disappeared under today’s Neoconservative Republicans. The think tanks put together by Neocons in 1965 and later, began telling politicians that they didn’t need to work for the benefit of every one of their constituents. Their only responsibility was to work on the behalf of those who actually elected them. Why waste your energy working for people who don’t believe in what you want to do?

As that attitude took hold, it put half of the voters of this country in a position where their vote no longer counted. Those disgruntled voters were put in a position of making a decision of whether to bother to vote when they didn’t receive any benefit from it. The decision of many, was not to vote.

Somehow, with the backing of Neocons in the Reagan administration, Reagan was able to usher in a new way of governing, (Actually Ruling) our citizens. A way that allowed the immediate dismantling of every bulwark of strength for our citizens that had been put in place by previous presidential administrations.

The things being dismantled were the very things that built this country’s middle class, which was why they were the first to be destroyed. I’m talking about the separation of Church and state, Killing unions, ending Congressional oversight of business, banking, and mortgage financing, and Judicial oversight of our government.

I’m talking about the beginning of the reapportion of wealth in this country that now has the top one percent of our population controlling half of our national wealth, and the next highest ten percent of our population controlling another twenty-five percent of that wealth.

I’m talking about a population where 90% of us have lost a lot during the past forty years. For instance, schools have dropped thirty levels on the international scale, and as a result, we’re now tied with some 3^rd world countries in our teaching ability.

I’m talking about people who controlled, or influenced what happened in this country from behind the scenes for more than thirty years. I’ll just name a few of the culprits I hold responsible. Let’s begin with Richard Nixon whose idea was to ruin the Democrat chances of being elected, by robbing their Watergate offices. Then we’ll move on to Ronald Reagan whose idea was to break every Union in this country. He almost accomplished his goal.

When George W. Bush, claimed to be the decider, and informed us that because the Constitution said the President was supposed to be  the Commander in Chief of the military, it also meant, he was supposed to have absolute control of Congress, every citizen of this country, and everything they did. If people countered his ideas, they were considered traitors.

Then we have Dick Cheney who from his early days in the administration of Ronald Reagan, put forth the premise that we didn’t need to negotiate with anybody. Friend or foe alike could be bullied into doing what we wanted done. Cheney said, “If we didn’t like what foreign nations were doing, we should just bomb them. And if we didn’t like what opposition politicians were doing, we should ruin their credibility in what-ever manner was easiest.”

Next there’s Donald Rumsfeld who told Bush, “You’re in charge. Mr. President. Do whatever you want to, then simply have your attorney General say it’s legal. After all, he works for you.

And of course, the pièce de resistance of this little club was Karl Rove. He was a guy who from his college days, lied, cheated, and stole his way to whatever position he wanted. He became close to George Bush during President George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign. When “W” ran for congress, Rove became his top advisor. Bush and Rove were of the same mold, and got along well. Bush wanted to show his father how smart he was, and Rove wanted to show the world.

During “W”s terms of office, Rove was ordered  to appear before Congress on three different occasions. He openly told Congress to go to hell, because, he claimed, everything he did was covered by executive privilege.

When both the House and Senate Judiciary committees cited Rove for contempt, and went to court to force him to appear, he finally agreed to do so. But only on his terms. He agreed to appear in front of two members of the house Judiciary committee and two members of the Senate Judiciary committee. He did in fact meet with four members in March of 2009, months after the Bush Administration ended, and was out of office.

This time he only answered specific questions, and claimed executive privilege on the rest. The House and senate officers were basically told to kiss Rove’s ass.

Today Rove is a member of the Fox News editorial staff, a commentator on Fox News and a contributor to several Republican think tanks. His opinions on who should be in charge have never coincided with the majority of our citizens, but now he’s paid a million dollars a year for spewing them, just as Newt Gingrich, and Tom Delay are.

What most people don’t know, is the influence of these people and a hundred others, have guided our path through the past thirty or forty years. The thing is, some of the most important of these manipulators have stayed hidden behind half a dozen public faces we all recognize. Some of those people, we’ve never heard of, are responsible for more of the trouble created during the past forty years, than we’ll ever know. Documents released in August of 2009 by the  Judiciary Committee, showed that Rove was heavily involved in everything from the firing of federal prosecutors who claimed Rove and other White House officials misled Congress, to the outing of Valerie Plame, as well as many other things of importance to our citizens.

Rove is known as the Architect of the Bush Years, including Things  like executive privilege, and the secrecy Bush claimed about everything including the temperature on any given day.

The short list of men I’ve named, are responsible for more damage to United States citizens than we will ever be aware of in our lifetimes. After all, They were the men who were responsible for The Iraq war, torture, the Canceling by government of oversight on Banks, Mortgage Brokers, insurance companies, and big business. They were also responsible for writing, passing, and implementing the Patriot Act, ignoring the FISA courts and recording the conversations of our citizens.

The Wall Street Crash and many other things we have yet to hear about were the end result of thirty years of Neoconservative manipulation.

Look, I’ve been around a long time. Since before World War II. I remember listening to the radio the day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And I was there when the North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950. I remember the first 7 million car sales year in these United States, and I remember when Washington Politicians actually did the job they were elected to do.

The first TV set I ever saw was in 1947. The first dial phone I ever saw was in my grandmother’s home in 1950. I remember when there was a separation from the secular and religious, and when there weren’t laws against half of the things that are considered illegal today that were put there by somebody’s religion.

I remember when there were no limitations on what a child could achieve other than their talent, ability, and desire. And I plainly remember when there were sufficient good jobs for every United States citizen who wanted a job, to have one.

I remember when our national corporations were taken over by foreign owned multi-national corporations between 1977 and 1979. And I remember Ronald Reagan saying we don’t need government, because government is the source of our problems.

The problem, as I see it, is that almost two thirds of the people alive in this country today, have no idea of what this country was like when it worked the way it’s supposed to.

I believe Neoconservatives, funded by the ultra rich began to undermine politics in the United States in 1965 after Barry Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency.

The Neoconservative movement was funded by a couple of hundred people we’ve never heard of in the course of our daily activities. People like the billionaire owner of Coors beer, and others who headed up corporations that were eventually sold or merged to foreign corporations. People who were willing to donate millions of dollars to the people who designed the new Republican take over of the country.

Karl Rove is often quoted as saying if people had only followed his directions, Republicans would have been in control of this country for the next 100 years. If you doubt the statements I just made, I would suggest that you look them up on the web. They’re all there. Type in the Words What is Neoconservatism on the web, then take the time to read the more than thousand pages of information that will be made available to you.

As long as Neocons remain in control of the Republican Party, nothing of benefit to average people will ever get done in Washington D.C. How can it” When the only strategy Neocons currently recognize is to just say no to anything of importance to us?

How can it, when the only political process Neocons have recognized for the past year, is the filibuster? Filibuster is there to stop things from happening. During 2009 alone, there were 254 bills the House passed that Republicans stopped from ever reaching the floor of the senate for an up or down vote. Up or down translates to pass or fail.

Are all of those bills beneficial to our citizens? I really doubt it. However, I am absolutely certain that some of them were. The thing is, not one of those bills was allowed to be voted on in the senate. If the Republicans in our Senate refuse to even look at what our citizens want or need, Why have we allowed some of them to be in power for twenty or thirty years?

The answer to that question is that every state is divided into congressional and Senatorial districts, and ever district has been become so gerrymandered during the past thirty years that it has become the virtual property of one political party. Since 1980, 90% of that gerrymandering was done by Republicans who controlled the states. Gerrymandering has allowed the 65% of our citizens who want change, to be controlled by thirty-five percent of our politicians. It’s why the borders of districts resemble pieces of a picture puzzle today.

When Bush was handed the presidency in 2000, Karl Rove oversaw all of the things that were said by him. He was the guy who said Republicans were patriarchal  in nature, and needed somebody strong to tell them what they have to do.

Democrats on the other hand, according to Rove, tended to be matriarchal in nature, and are in need of an easy going philosophy that is protective of all, and capable of allowing everybody to make progress in their own way using their own abilities. All they want is equal opportunity. Unfortunately, Rove said, “Democrats don’t believe that equal opportunity isn’t available to everybody when A strong patriarch is in control, and they’re right.”

That statement by Rove doesn’t respond to the needs of 75% of our citizens who fall somewhere in the middle. The actual fact is that somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of our population don’t give a damn about what today’s politicians want. The reason for that is we don’t trust politicians after seeing what they’ve done to us for the past forty years.

There is a movement today to fire all politicians and replace them. It isn’t the true Tea Party movement which wants Neoconservatives to gain complete control again. But it is close enough to be lumped in with the Tea Partiers. This new movement blames Democrats for not getting anything done since Barack Obama was elected.

That is as false a belief, as saying we’re in boom times. Anybody who bothers to look at the facts will see that the reason we don’t trust politicians, is because during the twelve years Republicans had iron fisted control over both houses of Congress, they harmed this nation and our citizens in ways we’re just starting to understand. And the reason we get nothing done isn’t the Democrats in Congress, (or at least, not all of them), it’s every current  Republican who threatens to filibuster any bill that’s of value to average citizens.

Does Obama need to be tougher? You bet. Does he need to emulate Dick Cheney in order to get what we want done? Hell No. What he needs to do is to begin calling a spade a spade, and begin pointing his finger at the people who are stopping the progress our citizens are demanding on a daily basis. They do that while setting it up to further enrich Big businesses, and the people who continue to manipulate our citizens from behind the scenes.

There is a difference between firm guidance from a beneficent government and absolute control by a tyrannical one. Until our citizens learn the difference, they will continue to be scammed, sold out and raped, by the people in our government who already have thirty years of practice.