Depression and Authoritarianism go together

Paul Krugman is trying to warn us frogs that the water we sit in is heating up dangerously.

It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

[...]

[In poorly understood Europe] The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

The results of this is a discreditation of democracy in Europe and a rise in the popularity of authoritarianism. Krugman describe several European examples, of which the following is one.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Essentially what has happened is that the bank-created economic disaster has destroyed the lives of a large number of Europeans and they want to know who to blame. But the banks are in charge of solving the economic problems, so they are demanding austerity solutions.

Austerity does not end a Depression. It never has and it never will. So things are getting worse as austerity is imposed by bank-advised governments.

As things get worse, the governments are being blamed. They are imposing the austerity, after all. Since the governments are failing, obviously they need to be changed. There are people out there saying "Give me control and I will fix the economy!" But they can't get control in the existing democracies. So the problem will be solved by eliminating democracy and putting those who promise solutions into control of government.

Welcome to authoritarianism! Will the new authoritarians when installed stop listening to the bankers who are demanding austerity "solutions"? Yeah, for a while anyway. But authoritarianism brings its own set of new problems with it.

This is a bit different from the set of economic problems here in America. Here we have a minority political party with discredited solutions to the very economic problems they themselves created who are using provisions of the Constitution to paralyze government in the face of those very problems that minority party created. The purpose of paralyzing the government is to force the American public to return the failed minority to power because they will not permit the government to act to solve problems while they are out of power.

The link between European problems and American problems is that the very banks which created the economic problems both national entities face are demanding that the governments install socially destructive and economically ineffective austerity "solutions" to fix the economic problems the banks created. The so-called solutions will actually do nothing more than shift wealth From the middle and working classes who create the wealth to the financial predators who make up much of the top 1% of the economic classes in both America and Europe.

If the bankers have to install authoritarian governments to get their way, they will not hesitate to do so.

Krugman's right. The problem has moved far beyond just a really severe recession. Both America and Europe are now in the early stages of another Depression, one which combines economic hardship with very strong threats to democracy.

American conservatives are Evil. Compromise with Evil is itself, Evil

David Broder has been remarkably silent as the movement conservatives have been shredding the American Constitution and destroying the American Republic as long as they were in power. I don't recall any compromise with Democrats or progressives any time in the last seven years. And now the disasters the movement conservatives have brought down on America are coming home to roost - this has been a Republican show, Iraq was a war for the Republican Party, not for America, and the financial disaster that looms before us was largely created by Alan Greenspan for the specific reason of getting Bush reelected - now that all the predictable results [*] are occurring and the Republicans face the appropriate electoral result, David Broder wants Democrats to compromise with the Evil that is movement conservatism.

Broder would, I'm sure, have recommended that the Italian Partisans who finally caught Mussolini during WW II should have compromised with him instead of stringing him up on a lamppost. They shouldn't have embarrassed Mussolini that way.

Digby has an excellent post on the subject. Now that the Republicans, dominated by the movement conservatives, are going to get their well-deserved removal from power, for some odd reason Broder and his bipartisans think the Democrats should let the losers share the power the Democrats are gaining.

Right. As if the movement conservatives have any compromise in their bodies. If the Democrats compromise with the defeated conservatives, they will get the same treatment that occurred to so many governments threatened by Communist rebellion got when they tried to compromise with the Communist insurgents. Give the Communists any power at all, and they took over the government. The fools and idiots who compromised with the Communists realized their error from the grave or from reeducation camps.

It is the nature of authoritarians not to compromise. Instead they demand that others compromise with them, then they destroy those who tried to act with honor. Conservatives, Fascists, and Communists are all Authoritarians. They all act the same way, and any effort to compromise with them will give them the tools to destroy those who attempt to conciliate them.

Authoritarians are inherently evil and anti-democratic. We have seen the way Bush acts that democracy is nothing more than a word used in rhetoric when he tries to sound like he is human and conceals his horns and tail. The 1776 American dream of Liberty that is built into that fascinating Enlightenment political document, the American Constitution, is under attack today like never before. The attackers are movement conservatives, a group of people fully as Evil as any other groups of authoritarians in history.

Compromise with Evil is itself Evil.

Is David Broder simply an ignorant fool who is letting the forces of conservatism use his for Evil purposes, or is he himself part of the Evil wave that has caught America up? Either way, he is an Evil man himself.

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One thing that Digby wrote that I totally agree with and which needed to be said. Regarding the use of the word "Fascist" to describe the movement conservatives:

*Now that Jonah Goldberg has made the word acceptable for use against liberals, it's back in circulation as far as I'm concerned and I'm using it.

There really is not better word for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, John Bolton, Norm Podhoretz and his current master, Rudy Giuliani, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and the other anti-democratic members of their cabal like Rupert Murdoch.

[*] The results of movement conservative policies and behavior, like death, were predictable even though the timing when those results would become known was not.

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What Broder and the "bipartisans" want is what is called the Rachet effect. It is a political method of moving America constantly to a right-wing authoritarian corporatist model (which is the definition of Fascism) and never allowing any backsliding towards government support for the American public.

Broder's proposed bipartisanship is the political rachet that moves America away from Liberty and democracy based on the Constitution and the Rule of Law and toward aristocratic and corporate rule.

Paul Rosenberg has an excellent essay on the importance of partisanship and polarization.

An authoritarian welcome to Bush's America

This is Bush's authoritarian America. Our government, under the Republicans, has gone mad.

Read this story: A young blonde Icelandic woman's recent experience visiting the US.

Who gained by humiliating this woman except some jackbooted Republican thugs who got to show that they were in command?

Why does this remind me of the Nazi ghettoization of the Jews?

The Counterterrorism Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department has a plan to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in that city.

I assume that the next step in their thinking was to make all Muslims in Los Angeles wear a badge emblazoned with a star and a crescent. Do they also intend to require Muslims to carry government issued ID that declares their religion is Muslim?

Obviously the Los Angeles Police Department is in need of adult supervision.

Paving the road to an authoritarian government

Amitai Etzioni provides the description of what is needed to achieve a liberal democratic government.

First, there must be an effective government. Why?

Most importantly, political development can thrive only after basic security is established first.

Government exists first to provide security for the people.

Let me add: As long as the government effectively provides security and stability in the face of apparent strong threats, most people will accept that the cost of government in terms of graft, corruption and injustice can be pretty high, because the absence of security in terms of deadly violence, maiming, and torture is itself extremely expensive. So what if the cop on the beat is corrupt as long as he protects most middle class and especially wealthy people from muggings, robberies and murder?

In his response to Robert Kagan's article Dr. Etzioni describes what elements and institutions - in addition to and after security and stability - are required to achieve a liberal democracy.

Robert Kagan’s argument that “free elections come first” (Washington Post, Oct 28) is based on an elementary logical fallacy: that two negatives make one positive. Kagan shows that sheer economic development does not pave the way to democratization (see China). Furthermore, he demonstrates that the rule of law—by which he means a fair, even handed law, not the one that protects people from violence, terror, and anarchy (see China)—cannot be established in non-democratic nations. However, it does not follow, as he suggests, that free elections per se can produce a liberal democracy.

Democratic history shows that political development must include

• freeing of the press,
  
• the introduction of competitive political parties,
  
• a growing middle class, and
  
• increasing respect for a fair law,
  

in addition to free elections—all of these measures have to be introduced more or less simultaneously, albeit gradually (See the US, Western Europe, and India).

When free elections do come first, as Kagan wishes, we see the election of the representatives of terrorist organizations (e.g., Hamas), unstable governments and failing states (in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan), increasingly authoritarian governments (e.g., Russia ), and the rise of populist movements but not liberal democracy (e.g., Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan).
[I have reformatted Dr. Etzioni's writing with bullet points - Editor WTF-o]

This article is a welcome antidote to the simplistic idea that all you need for democracy is free elections.

Is it becoming clear what the Bush administration did the democracy thing wrong in Iraq after the misbegotten, understaffed, poorly planned and unnecessary invasion? It should be obvious from reading the above quotation.

Democracy is a lot more than just getting voters into a voting booth. If you get frightened voters who do not feel the government is providing security and stability, they will use the power of the vote to elect the candidates who promise the most extreme remedies.

Leaders, be they government leaders or leaders of corporations and private organizations, do not like to be interfered with by overseers. It complicates their job. In politican-speak that means that the overseers won't let the leader "Be efficient." "Being efficient" means that the leader simplifies the situation by ignoring many bad side effects of his actions. Those side effects usually cause more difficulties than the problem the leader was trying to solve. Democracy is an institution that allows all the effected groups to voice their opinions before they get hurt by intemperate and hasty government actions. Those groups who are being damaged by the government actions become opponents of the government.

A government leader who promises the most extreme measured to ensure security and stability will also, by their very nature, use the most extreme measures to eliminated political opposition their rule. Many of those extreme measures include eliminating or censoring press organizations which publicly disagree with them and, if possible, eliminating opposition parties.

This is done by the government in the name of providing safety and security to the nation. What it actually does is eliminate the approved methods of democratic conflict, forcing the opponents to themselves use more extreme measures. The government then responds with even more extreme measures. The downward spiral away from democratic government is obvious. If the voting population is sufficiently frightened and insecure, then the sacrifice of democracy for safety is easy to justify.

Without this mechanism, George W. Bush could have never justified invading Iraq, nor would he have been elected in 2004. Nor could he justify the use of torture, abandoning habeas corpus, abandoning the Rule of Law (which is what the theory of the Unitary Executive does) or conducting warrantless wiretaps on anyone the government decides they want to monitor.

Even with this fear-of-insecurity-and-instability mechanism working for him, Bush has had to resort to operating the government in secret so that the the American voting public does not know what he is doing. He claims that things like torture, warrantless wiretaps, abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo are justified, but refuses to respond to Congressional requests for the documents that purport to be the legal justification for those actions.

Then, to top it all off, Bush has not delivered on the promise to make us more secure. His intemperate, extreme and thoughtless actions have created more enemies for America than they have eliminated. His thoughtless fiscal actions have set America up for the next recession, one which will be a doozy. Bush has also destroyed the effectiveness of our Army and Marine Corps, including the Reserves and National Guard, obviously damaging our national security.

In short, in his ignorance, ineptitude and extremism, Bush promised us greater security, and America had paid the price for his undelivered promises in greater insecurity. Instead of giving us greater security, Bush (and Cheney) have been paving the way for an Authoritarian government in America. But Bush isn't the end of the story.

Rudy Giuliani wants more of the same, just more extreme and less rational. Giuliani is America's answer to Benito Mussolini, another prime example of an extremist politician who took power by promising to provide safety and security to the population.

Mussolini, like Bush and Giuliani, also promised to run a more efficient government - "Make the trains run on time" - and like Bush, he too failed. Giuliani's efficiency can be measured in the effectiveness of the radios the New York Firemen carried into the World Trade Center. The commanders could not communicate with them to recall the firemen before the collapse of the WTC. This was seven years after Giuliani was informed of the problem with the radios and had promised to replace them. Rudy's corrupt dealings with Motorola prevented the replacement of those radios, so over 200 New York firemen died needlessly in the collapse of the WTC.

So do we Americans want to abandon our democracy because some extremists are promising that their extremism will provide us greater security and more efficient government? If so, then vote Republican. But recognize that Bush was elected on that promise, and has failed to deliver. And it's not just Bush. Rudy Giuliani is, if anything, more extreme, more authoritarian and less effective running government than Bush and Cheney have proven to be.

Voting Republican in 2008 is the direct route route to more authoritarian, more corrupt, more expensive, and less effective government.

Giuliani's authoritarian history

The Republican front runner for the nomination for President is Rudy Giuliani, by a long shot. So what kind of President would he be? Rachel Morris has looked at how he governed New York and reports on the issue.

The short answer is that he refused to follow any law that slows down getting what he personally wanted, and refused to provide accurate reports on how the city functioned. He refused to let the Auditors operate in city hall until forced to by the courts and refused to provide accurate reports on such things as crime statistics even after ordered to by the courts.

In short, Rudy practices all the worst management methods of the Cheney - Bush administration and could be expected to be a great deal worse than the current President.

Is America really ready for King Rudy the First? The Republican Party seems to think so.

Why hasn't America been attacked by terrorist since 9/11?

To answer that question you can take the Bush administration's self-serving excuses. Those are that 1. "We are fighting them in Iraq so that they won't come over here.

Yeah, right. We invaded a country without a connection to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and only after we invaded and occupied their country, destroyed their government and economy, did they create an all new set of terrorists to try to force our occupying forces out. This stops terrorists from attacking America -- how? The mechanism is, to put it politely, highly unclear.

What is clear is that by invading Iraq with no justifiable reason the American Republican Party was starting an unnecessary war that would create its own opponents. the opponents, facing the most powerful military in the world they adopted asymmetric warfare and invited outside help for training and materials from existing terrorist organizations.

Then, not only did the Bush administration Republicans motivate the creation of bands of insurgents who had to use what the Republicans call "terrorist" techniques of fighting, they stupidly failed to control Iraq while they destroyed the Iraqi Army and Police who might have stopped the growth of the insurgency.

Now Iraq has numerous militias and insurgent groups using asymmetric warfare on each other and on the occupying American troops. The American troops in Iraq are a great recruiting and fundraising tool for the insurgents and militias, and the fighting teaches them the best and most effective techniques with which to take on the most powerful military in the world.

The so-called terrorists in Iraq were not their before the Republican invasion of that country. They are a creation of the U.S. Republican Party militarists and nationalists. They wouldn't have been there had George Bush and Dick Cheney not created them!

Then we get Bush excuse no. 2. The terrorists have not attacked America because the newly created Department of Homeland Security has greatly increased America's defenses against terrorists.

It is hard to know whether DHS has actually been in any way successful, since The Bush administration keeps everything behind a wall of secrecy. The secrecy itself is a major destruction of open democratic government, but the secrecy seems primarily intended to protect the Republican Party rather than to keep "terrorists" from learning the more effectively attack America.

But the secrecy is doing the job it was intended to do. It keeps Americans from knowing what their government is doing to them.

For a more extensive description of how effective DHS has been, go read Amy Zegart at the Reality-Based community.

This is all an American-centered view, focused on why there has been no follow-up to the 9/11 attack. But there is more information to look at, and James Wimberly asks the next great question - Why Hasn't Spain Been Attacked Since 11-M?, then provides a short set of answers.

Gen. Petreaus was asked the key question during his interview Monday. Is America safer for the invasion of Iraq? Gen Petreaus waffled and did not answer at that time, getting a rebuke from his boss, George Bush. More lies and secrecy from the Bush administration.

Democracy does not work when the leaders of the government are allowed to keep their actions secret and lie to the public. Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party are working hard to destroy the American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government run by plutocrats like themselves. There is no other explanation for what is happening.

Not only are we not safer from terrorists than we were September 11, 2001, they have successfully changed the subject to the (relatively minor) threat of Islamic-based terrorism while they put basic American democracy into grave threat!

There is no left-wing, right-wing or center, just Progressives and Authoritarians

George Lakoff gets it (mostly) right. The idea that there are political left-wingers, political right-winters and political centrists is a fiction, created by People who do not understand people or politics. The apparent linear spectrum is a creation of ignorant people who want unrelated things to be related.

There are two systems of values and modes of thought -- call them progressive and conservative (or nurturant and strict, as I have). There are total progressives, who use a progressive mode of thought on all issues. And total conservatives. And there are lots of folks who are what I've called "biconceptuals": progressive on certain issue areas and conservative on others. But they don't form a linear scale. They are all over the place: progressive on domestic policy, conservative on foreign policy; conservative on economic policy, progressive on foreign policy and social issues; conservative on religion, but progressive on social issues and foreign policy; and on and on. No linear scale. No single set of values defining a "center." Indeed many of such folks are not moderate in their views; they can be quite passionate about both their progressive and conservative views. [Snip]

Get rid of the very idea of the right and the left and the center. American ideas are fundamentally progressive ideas -- the ideas this country was founded on and that carry forth that spirit. Progressives care about people and the earth, and act with responsibility and strength on that care.

The progressive view of government is simple. Progressive government has two aspects: protection and empowerment. Protection is far more than the military, police, and fire departments. It includes consumer protection, worker protection, environmental protection, public health, food and drug safety; social security, and other safety nets. It also includes protection from the government itself, and hence a balance of powers, openness, fundamental rights, and so on.

Empowerment include roads and bridges; public education; government-developed communications like the internet and satellite communications systems; the banking system; the SEC and institutions that make a stock market possible, and the court system, mostly about contracts and corporate law. Progressive government makes business possible. No one makes any money in this country without the progressive empowerment by government. A progressive foreign policy is not based solely, or even mainly, on the state -- about the "national interest" defined as our military strength and GDP. Progressive foreign policy focuses on individual people's interests as well as national interests: on poverty, disease, refugees, education, women's and children's issues, public health, and so on.

These are simply American values. The progressive movement is a patriotic American movement. People who call themselves "centrists" share progressive views on important issue areas, but have conservative views on other major issue areas. The areas vary from person to person. There is no single moral perspective, no single set of agreed upon issues.

I disagree with Lakoff that there are progressives and conservatives. There are actually progressives and authoritarians. Progressives want to empower other people. Authoritarians, operating from fear of those who are different from them or who are not under their power, want to control and tyrannize others.

People who cannot understand comedy are authoritarians. Authoritarians cannot accept the ambiguity that is the bedrock of good comedy. They base their decisions and actions on fear of being wrong or of losing something, or on fear that someone else will get something they don't have. Authoritarians demand certainty and control of those near them. That's why the authoritarians like Tom DeLay have removed the progressive Republicans from their Party.

We Democrats have strayed too far from Progressivism. Instead of fear, progressivism is based on respect for others, curiosity regarding the unknown and a tolerence for ambiguity (assuming that it will be resolved in its own time.) It is time to return to the roots of America.

Republicans - tough, determined, relentless and incompetent

Steve Benen over at Talking Points Memo reports on a New York Times story that explains in detail what has gone wrong in Afghanistan after Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invaded that country.

...after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush seemed to appreciate the importance of his responsibilities and the task at hand. He was aware of the fact that Afghans had been abandoned by the West before, and the president, in April 2000, vowed to avoid the syndrome of "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure."

"We're not going to repeat that mistake," he said. "We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless."

Apparently incurious and incompetent trumps tough, determined and relentless. Afghanistan is now (again) a disaster.

Rumsfeld made his classic mistake of thinking all it took was a fast invasion. He then not only did not failed to send in enough troops to occupy the country, he refused European offers of a multi-national force to do that job. Then he pulled out most of the effective forces in Afghanistan and sent them to the stupid distraction that we now call the War in Iraq. The result is that both of those nations require more American blood and treasure, and there is no certainty (and in Iraq not even a likelihood) of any degree of success.

The string of similar failures to government have followed. FEMA, an agency which under Clinton had performed brilliantly, was a total disaster in New Orleans. Bush's promises to rebuild New York and assist the first responders with health care remain unfulfilled, as do Bush's promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The American housing and mortgage markets have been sacrificed to Bush's need to be reelected in 2004. Money to fund Medicare has been stripped from the budget to use to pay for his disaster in Iraq and the corruption of the contractors he has hired to do the work an Army needs to do. The Republicans in Congress who have supported all of this incompetence silently have been too busy selling their votes and ear-marks to bother to govern.

The Army and Marine Corps, both active and Reserve, are digging down to barely competent recruits and bribing them to become cannon fodder because Bush has destroyed both institutions.

Bush has been forced to try to censor public opinion against his incompetence it has gotten so bad.

And yet his incompetence seems to know no bounds. Bush has supervised the estblishment and use of the most detailed set of torture procedures seen since the Nazi period. His security seems to consist of a secret list of people who are not allowed to fly on American aircraft. What gets someone on that list is classified (but appears mostly to be people who have written and spoken out against the idiocies of the Bush administration or people, even children as young as age six, who have names that resemble such political naysayers) and it is well known that once you are on the list, there is no way to get off.

The use of the National Security Agency to evesdrop on phone calls and email by anyone has been expanded beyond all reason, but it is concealed behind a cloak of secrecy to keep its political misuse from being made obvious. This was an expansion of the earlier National Security Letters used by the FBI to search people's bank accounts, book purchases and library records without a warrant or probable cause. An audit showed that the FBI was using these letters for all kinds of investigations unrelated to National Security without any effective control. Since the letter made it against the law for someone addressed by such a letter to tell anyone, including their own lawyers, there is no effective control on the police state at all.

These are just some of the things we know about.

When more of them come out, the Republicans will have either of two responses. The first will be to run for election or reelection, and with their reputations they will lose it. The second is to take lessons from the Chinese.

China? Take a look at the report by the New York Times entitled China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People.

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency. [Snip]

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. [Snip]

While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.” [Snip]

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth.

A system like this an more of the authoritarian measures like the "No-fly" list hidden behind a veil of total secrecy, the similarly secret FISA wiretaps and FBI National Security Letters, together with an expansion of the existing bush program to simply "disappear" people (see 39 individuals the Bush administration have "disappeared" in violation of the rule of law..)will be the only alternative to total defeat in fair elections.

If you don't think the Republican Party is carefully looking at when to adopt this procedures, you either aren't watching them or you are a Republican yourself.

Housing values continue to decline

Countrywide Mortgage Co is the largest mortgage company in the U.S. Here is what they have to say about home prices.:

"Company is seeing home price depreciation at levels not seen since the Great Depression"

-Previously, the company had stated they expected a turnaround in mid-2008; now, they say they are not sure when housing declines will cease. Refuse to rule out house price declines in 2009;

The value of the home is the largest piece of wealth normally owned by members of the American middle class. This decline in housing prices means that the American middle class as a whole is losing a great deal of its wealth.

Bush has frequently spoken of creating the Ownership Society in which every person's value will be the total sum of the values of what he or she owns. (And nothing else counts for value. Mother Theresa, for example, was worthless at her death, since she owned nothing.)

This is the new America. This is the America given to us by the Goldwater Revolution. It is the America brought to us by Nixon, Reagan, the Bush family and Dick Cheney. It is an America in which the U.S. Constitution is rapidly becoming a quaint document left over from that strange period of the American Republic, where criticizing the government or the vice President can get you arrested, investigated and fired from your job.

It is also an America in which only the extremely wealthy count. That's what the Ownership Society really means. Remember that. In the Ownership Society your only value is what you own and the government can take that away with a policy, a whim, or the anger of a government official. If the government decides to take your property there is nothing you can do. From TPM Muckraker:

The order empowers Treasury, in consultation with the State and Defense Departments, to target those individuals or organizations that either "have committed, or ... pose a significant risk of committing" acts of violence with the "purpose or effect" of harming the Iraqi government or hindering reconstruction efforts. It applies to "U.S. persons," a category including American citizens. It had not previously been disclosed -- and still hasn't -- that U.S. persons are abetting the Iraqi insurgency, nor that Iraqi insurgents have property in the United States, raising questions about who in fact the order targets.

"The part where they reserve lots of discretion to themselves is the list of conditions that goes beyond determination of acts of violence. 'Threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq,' that could be anything," says Ken Mayer, an expert in executive orders and a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "Think of the possibilities: it could be charities that send a small amount of money (to groups linked to) the insurgency, or it could be the government of Iran that has assets in the U.S. and has money that flows through a U.S. bank or something like that."

The order permits the targeting of those who aid someone else whose assets have been blocked under the order -- wittingly or not. And under Section Five, the government does not have to disclose which organizations are subject to having their assets frozen

Surely the Department of Justice, filled with government officers who have each sworn to Defend the U.S. Constitution, would not let these injustices against Americans get out of hand? Well, that is the Department of Justice led by Alberto Gonzales, who no longer even tries to appear as though he is not lying to Congress about how little respect they have for the Constitution or for the American people.

There has been a coup. The wealthy no longer pay taxes to keep the country going, the middle class does that. Now we can begin to see that this is a country that works to protect and build the wealth of the super rich while it allows the wealth of the middle class to be destroyed. And the government is using every police power it has to expand this new aristocracy of the super rich from the rest of the American citizens.

The sharp decline in the value of homes is just one more step in the coup.

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Addendum 07 25 2007 11:01 CDT
Here is what I suggested be watched for in December 2006 -

• Watch the dollar in 2007

It is dropping, and that will be a major consideration the Federal Reserve has to keep in mind if they want to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. Any significant increase in the interest rates will increase the loss of value of the dollar greatly.

The fed is in a bind, and the economic problems are largely created by the Bush administration policies.

The wealthy, if they have any good sense, will take any money they get from tax cuts and immediately invest it outside the U.S. in EUROs or Yen. The result will be a hemorrhage of money that should have gone into investment. That will further depress the economy. The poor and the middle class will continue to see their financial situations deteriorate, and the middle class will see their wealth melt away.

The Republicans will try to delay the worst of it for 28 more months so that they can blame the Democrats. In the meantime, the Republicans will continue to do everything possible to keep Congress from doing anything successful, and as long as they have 41 votes in the Senate, they will be able to paralyze Congress. They have done this for six months now, and they are already blaming the Democrats for not doing anything. we can expect more in the future. They want control of the government back, and they will put the American economy into the toilet to achieve their takeover.

How do you create an authoritarian state out of a democracy? Easy. Ten steps.

Naomi Wolf discusses what is required to take down a democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government in the Guardian.

If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. [Snip]

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Let me provide just an overview of her excellent article:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - "war footing"; a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation"; terrorists. (But terrorism is a technique of fighting, not an identifiable enemy.)


2. Create a gulag - Guantánamo Bay; The CIA's secret gulag. Prison camps in isolated locations for "illegal immigrants."


3. Develop a thug caste - Blackwater and other security firms deployed in New Orleans. Privately run and staffed prisons. The Republican thugs who shut down the vote recount in Miami in 2000.


4. Set up an internal surveillance system - The secret program to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions; Uncontrolled National Security Letters that include a total gag order on the people who have to turn over the documents, like librarians, booksellers, income tax preparers, etc.


5. Harass citizens' groups - Infiltrate and investigate organizations like Churches and Environmental organizations. IRS investigations to remove tax exempt status of churches that oppose Bush while giving funding to those churches that support Bush.


6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - The ways to get on the No-Fly list are completely arbitrary, while there are no known ways to get off. Any citizen or other person in the U.S. can be arrested, declared an “enemy combatant” and refused all access to an attorney, the courts, or habeas corpus. The federal government is not even required to tell people who inquire if you have been detains, or if so, where. This is outside the law, by definition it is arbitrary at the whim of the individual who decided to detain you.


7. Target key individuals - The U.S. Attorneys fired in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre are an example.


8. Control the press - See Moyers delivers the goods. The Washington Press corps should wear hoods and sunglasses and Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report.


9. Dissent equals treason - "Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage". Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"." [*]
   
   Just listen to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the commenters on Little Green Footballs.


10. Suspend the rule of law - "The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens." [*]

[*] Quote from Naomi Wolf

This process of creating an authoritarian state is not a new one. It hasn't been done here in the U.S. before, but we are further down the process than we have ever been before.

The really scary part if that people just don't want to hear or to believe this is possible.

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And don't bug me about the difference between an authoritarian government and "Fascism," the term used by the headline writer in the Guardian. There is no distinction that matters. None at all.

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Addendum 8:37PM
Consider the above post with the summary of techniques listed above with those Bill Moyers illuminated last night in his PBS show last night and which are summarized at FireDogLake. A lot of overlap there. Why did Bush and the NeoCons really want to attack Iraq?

The deeper problem revealed by the US attorney Purge

The questions regarding whether the US attorneys have been misused for political purposes or were fired in order to prevent the further investigation of criminal wrong-doing by Republican office holders as was the case of ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (CA-R) has been rather obvious. But the close scrutiny of the management and misuse of the Department of Justice under Ashcroft and Gonzales has begun to reveal even deeper problems. CBS News.com Legal Analyst and attorney Andrew Cohen presents his take on this:

the concerted effort by the White House to undermine the professional class of lawyers at the Justice Department has been rumbling like thunder for years. The immediate crisis concerning the federal prosecutors will be over soon enough. The Administration's forced brain drain at Justice threatens its stature and effectiveness for years to come.

Thanks to the spotlight's glare on how and why the Justice Department and White House conspired to fire eight loyal U.S. Attorneys last year, we now are hearing about how career professionals at Justice — nonpartisan federal lawyers who make up the backbone of the department — have been squeezed out or otherwise marginalized over the past few years by ideological (and in many cases underachieving and intellectually weak) attorneys chosen more for their partisan views and political connections than for their ability to offer unbiased and sharp stewardship over the nation's federal laws. [Snip]

Regent University School of Law, [is] a Christian institution founded by televangelist Pat Robertson which is ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the 136th-best law school in the nation (other rankings are only slightly more kind). Savage reports that Regent became a feeder school for executive branch positions after the Bush administration in 2001 "picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James, to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management — essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch."

One year later, Savage reports, in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft — who led prayer meetings at the Justice Department, remember — changed the hiring rules at the Department to make it easier for ideological candidates (and for candidates with unimpressive academic credentials) to be selected to serve as career lawyers. Our government, our Justice Department, no longer seeks only the best and the brightest from our nation's law schools. Instead, it allows itself to be overrun with fourth-rate lawyers (Regent was ranked in the fourth tier of law schools) whose political views and loyalties are convenient and useful to implementing the administration's policies. [Fourth-rate. Rather like our illustrious President himself, who couldn't even get into law school. Editor.]

"This Administration's decision to forego traditional selection processes that have been used by both Republican and Democratic administrations is a reflection of the White House's determination to politicize, to change, an agency where lawyers of all political stripes have served in a non-partisan way for years," former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, Jr. told me via e-mail on Monday. Another former Clinton official at Justice, Jamie Gorelick, offered this via e-mail: "To politicize the selection of this corps of professionals, to ignore their advice, to make decisions without bringing to bear their experience and values is to risk undermining the rule of law." Legal historians agree and so do other Washington insiders, including Republicans, all of whom hearken for a return of the professionals to the Justice Department.

So with personnel like these we get totally bogus cases brought for political purposes such as the one in which Georgia Thompson of Wisconsin was convicted without a shred of evidence that a crime had been committed. We get ethical US attorneys like Iglesias of New Mexico who are removed from office because they refused to prostitute the justice system to elect more Republicans and find them replaced by individuals like Rachel Paulose who have no managerial experience and little in the way of legal experience, but are full of Party zeal and ideology.

The White House and Justice Department, under the reign of attorneys general Ashcroft and Gonzales, have encouraged over the past half decade an atmosphere that sullies the coin of the realm under our rule of law — the perceived legitimacy and authority and objectivity and neutrality and professional competence of the men and women who are tasked with enforcing our laws uniformly, fairly and without fear or favor. Without that legitimacy, the legal system devolves down into Third World status, perceived by those within and without it as subject to manipulation for political purposes.

When you populate an office with ideologues and partisans and underachieving talent, you get an ideological and partisan office with underachieving results. ... This sorry state is true today, regardless of how and when the scandal over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys is resolved. Of all the dismaying legal legacies left by this administration, this one surely ranks near the top.

I learned in graduate school that in the USSR promotions came from ideological zeal and political effort rather than competence. It has long been my opinion that this emphasis of ideology and politics over reality and effectiveness was a major reason that authoritarian government was a necessity there, since without such authoritarian measures the existing top leaders would be removed by the people who demanded an effective government. Gorbachev attempted to reform the Communist Party and redirect the USSR so that effectiveness and reality were more important than politics and ideology for promotion. The first result of Gorbachev's attempted reform was that the Communist Party, along with Gorbachev himself, was removed from control of the USSR.

The Bush administration and the Republican party wish to bring to America all the "joys and blessings" of ideological rule. They will not be able to do that without applying authoritarian methods, such as eliminating habeas corpus and the Rule of Law. That is what is so scary about the Jose Padilla case. The Bushies have done exactly that.

The Bushies are well on the way towards a right-wing theocratic authoritarian state here. To accomplish that, they first have to gut the Department of Justice. US attorney Biscup, Rachal Paulose and Monica Goodling demonstrate that they are well on the way to accomplishing exactly that.

Isnt' this illegal? DoJ under Bush used to "skew" elections

"Joseph D. Rich was chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil right division from 1999 to 2005." Yesterday the Los Angeles Times published an OpEd by him that described how the Department of Justice has been used for the last sick six years to skew elections in favor of Republicans. It ain't just the U.S. attorneys, Folks. Here is what Mr. Rich wrote:

Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats. [Editor - underlining mine.]

Both of those U.S. attorneys have stated that they refused to prosecute those alleged voting fraud cases because there was no evidence to show that any voting fraud had occurred.

This means that if any U.S. attorney does bring a voting fraud case in the next two years, it should be viewed with an extremely jaundiced eye. So far the Bush administration has eliminated jury trials only for those they (arbitrarily) declare to be Enemy Combatants and hide away from the justice system, habeas corpus, and access to defense lawyers in Guantanamo. Now the Bush administration has brought the "Justice" Department to such a low reputation that a defense attorney needs only refer to that reputation and provide an otherwise sketchy defense to convince a jury to find defendants not guilty when accused of voter fraud.

In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. [Snip]

Schlozman ... was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.

Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent. [Snip]

This administration is also politicizing the career staff of the Justice Department. Outright hostility to career employees who disagreed with the political appointees was evident early on. Seven career managers were removed in the civil rights division. I personally was ordered to change performance evaluations of several attorneys under my supervision. I was told to include critical comments about those whose recommendations ran counter to the political will of the administration and to improve evaluations of those who were politically favored. [Snip]

For decades prior to this administration, the Justice Department had successfully kept politics out of its law enforcement decisions. Hopefully, the spotlight on this misconduct will begin the process of restoring dignity and nonpartisanship to federal law enforcement. As the 2008 elections approach, it is critical to have a Justice Department that approaches its responsibility to all eligible voters without favor.

The difference between "Rule by Law" and "Rule of Law" is that in the "Rule by Law" those who administer the law are above the law themselves. They use it only to control those who oppose them. In "Rule of Law", everyone is subject to the law, including the law enforcers themselves.

"Rule by Law" is a major element of control in an authoritarian nation. Rule of Law is what protects us from this kind of authoritarianism. That's what this brouhaha about the U.S. attorney firings is really all about.

[h/t to Josh Marshall at TPM.]