In the spring of 2009, nationwide polling in the United States indicated that approximately the same number of people identify themselves as Republicans as support a socialist economic system over capitalism: 20%. It is certainly a difficult time to identify oneself as a member of the Republican Party, while party leaders vocally oppose civil rights, support and defend torture and applaud violence and war – long after their own misguided justifications have faded. But something more significant is happening here in America – something that will not be undone anytime soon.

Certain areas of private life must be subject to the “intrusion” of government.  The roads are paved, licenses are issued, water is tested for toxins before it reaches families. Minimum safety requirements are placed on companies who make products like medicine, food, and automobiles. As a society we recognize that the companies that create the poisons cannot be relied on to determine what amount of poison can enter the water supply before it becomes a public danger.

In 2008 and into 2009, large banking institutions looked to the government  to take a step further, and insure economic stability by providing direct government support to banks, insurance companies and financial institutions; all of this in order to avoid what was widely believed would be a complete economic meltdown. Government assistance extended beyond these institutions to large corporations, which received direct subsidies from the United States Government.

In October 2008 Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich stated what many were thinking about the manner in which these billions of dollars in government funds were being allocated:

“We have socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.“

But as the large corporations apply for government aid to survive, the nation’s attitude towards so-called “socialism” has begun to change. Less than a generation ago, the idea of universal government healthcare was opposed by many who called it “socialized medicine.” They cited concerns about the quality of care, the availability of treatment options, and the costs of funding a first-payer government funded health care system. When this ideology – publicly funded by professional doctors organizations and large pharmaceutical companies – won, Americans suffered.

Now, every 30 seconds a person in America goes into bankruptcy due to their inability to pay heath care costs. In almost every European country as well as Canada, Japan, Cuba and Iraq – where health care is subsidized by the government – no one is ever forced to make a decision choosing between bankruptcy and lifesaving medical treatment. Here, medical problems are estimated to cause over 60% of all personal bankruptcies.

78% of those people had medical insurance at the start of their illness or medical issue. Even more surprising is that most of these people were living a middle-class lifestyle before their lives were changed by medical bills; over 60% were people that owned homes and had college educations.  Laissez-faire Reganomics and the selective politics of personal responsibility – for the struggling working and middle classes only with bailouts for the rich – have literally had a crushing effect.

The prospects of the next generation re-growing the middle class are dim.  People who are now in their twenties who bought into the myth of middle class prosperity by borrowing student loans from educational funding services, with high interest rates and impossible demands, face an unfavorable job market and with no health insurance and mountains of debt that their parents and grandparents can only imagine.

Young students who attempt college come away with student loans the size of home mortgages.  A whole generation of former students, saddled with a capitalist system of education, have come away owing the prior generations who created and endorsed the system – and will pat with years of salary from their early working lives.  The Republicans endorsed this system, actively looking the other way while the student loan industry was rife with corruption.  As early as 2001, the incoming Bush Administration was warned that lenders were trying to improperly influence college financial aid offices.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ Barmak Nassirian put it this way:

“The day Bush was elected was the beginning of the gilded age for the loan industry.”

After years of the financial services industry donating heavily to the campaigns of Republican members of the House Committee on Education and Labor – including leading donor Sallie Mae – who donated a staggering but not surprising three-quarters of its campaign contributions to Republicans.  Ohio Republican Congressman John Boehner – who served as a chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor – has received over $170,000 in combined campaign contributions between direct donations and donations to his “leadership” PAC.  While buying a home can’t be a 10-year goal for young people who are already saddled with repayment of enormous loans, Boehner told a group of Sallie Mae executives a 2004 fundraiser to “Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands.”

The net result is an entire generation that has only known war and debt, and is ready to accept the virtues of a government-provided health care system.  For every Meghan McCain living on a cloud, spouting rhetoric but never having to worry about money, responsibility or going without, there are thousands of young people who are well educated but who have nothing else – including the prospect of one day living without debt. For many, it will have been more profitable to be less educated and less burdened with high interest loans. Average Americans who are not heiresses now have a financial incentive to avoid being educated or educating their children. That’s the capitalist form of education.

They are living in another world, or living in denial. In the same Rasmussen Poll where 20% of those polled said that socialism was superior to capitalism, adults younger than 30 were essentially evenly divided between socialism and capitalism.

As of 2007, the economic inequality in Atlanta, New Orleans Washington and Miami is similar to that of Nairobi, Kenya and Ivory Coast. The “civil unrest alert line” is used by the United Nations to warn governments when economic inequality is likely to have a “destabilizing effect on societies.”

Republican policy, Reganomics, and Bush-Era Deregulation – which fought against government intervention, and for the financial industry, big business and the rich who got richer – has locked America’s children into debt. Not just the debt that the teabag-swinging screamers echo through the Republican party, but personal debt in a way that the wealthy among us will never understand; and which those who claim concern for the debt load on young people have completely and totally ignored.

Beyond the bankruptcies; beyond the alienated and ignored youth; in America, where over 10% of the population (more than 40 million people) have no medical insurance -  that 10% contains absurdly disproportionate numbers of minorities. That number also ignores the 12 million undocumented people within the U.S. who face real fear of deportation and open hostility should they seek care at a hospital. For uninsured people, every preventable illness or accidental injury represents a potential economic life sentence to poverty.

20% of African Americans and 30% of Hispanics in America have no health insurance. Both of these groups comprise the fastest growing demographics of the American population despite the fact that the life expectancy of African American people in the United States is roughly equal to the rates in much poorer countries where premium health care services are not available – places like China, and certain states in India.

American minority women have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, AIDS and obesity, and in general are more likely to be in fair or poor health.

If Census Bureau projections are correct, by 2050 the number of Hispanics in the United States will double proportionally to the rest of the population.  Where Latinos comprise 15% of the population now, that number will grow to 30%. In two generations, as the population of Hispanics and other minorities, including African-Americans, grows, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority.

As these demographics change, an educated and hopelessly indebted class emerges. And widespread dissatisfaction with the quality and availability of medical care in the U.S. has already soured the country to arguments advanced by doctors and insurance companies that “socialized medicine” will not work.  This dissatisfaction is well founded when the United States’ ranking in areas like infant mortality is 29th in the world in 2008 – well below Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, France, and Canada where medical care is provided by the government.

It is clear that “for profit” medical treatment has not kept the country healthy.  Strong lobbying groups funded by doctors, insurance companies and multinational pharmaceutical corporations are less concerned with the overall health of the nation and patient care than they are with the health of profits. The very idea that insurance companies which exist because of capitalism are relied on to provide the basic human necessity of medical treatment for an entire country is untenable. Not only is it untenable, it is irresponsible. Medical care should not be subjected to a capitalist model, where the rich can afford the best care, and the poor rely on minimal emergency care or treatments which plunge them into debt and bankruptcy.

When 10% of the country has no medical insurance coverage, the emergency treatment centers bear the brunt of unpaid services. Hospitals around the country are closing, leaving fewer options for people in need of care; this weighs most heavily upon those neighborhoods of poor who receive their medical care solely from emergency rooms. The net result is an increase in unemployed and uninsured people who must rely on emergency rooms for all of treatment they receive.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it would seem that the best way to keep one’s massive wealth would be to protect it by sacrificing some wealth to promote widespread growth, economic equality and social stability rather than by hoarding wealth and promoting civil unrest.  While the UN understands that high levels of inequality lead to “negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilizing effect on societies,” they do not see this.

Even in difficult times they see growth through inequality, the consolidation of massive wealth, and the continued growth of massive corporate institutions.  The rich get richer, get education, get health care and get access to congressmen to have a say in how the government administers the social programs and regulations for everyone else.  They fight against raising the minimum wage, expanding the availability of healthcare and creating restrictions on the maximum rate that credit card companies can charge.  They believe they deserve this control because their hard work is more valuable than the hard work of everyone else.  It should not be surprising that their response to calls for “change” has been paternalistic vitriol damning any solution incorporating economic balance as “utopian delusions”.

The real delusion is held by a group of people who believe that, by clinging to “values” which are on the verge of extinction, they can revive the influence of failed and outdated ideas. The real delusion is believing that the public call for change represents a “shift,” rather than what it really is: social and political evolution.

In 2009, there is worldwide anger at the United States based on years of failed economic and military policy. This hostility is grounded in the resentment of Bush-era American arrogance and a reaction to the residual effects of an unregulated American economy and deliberate lies from American leadership.

In 2009, the “anti-war candidate” who campaigned against and defeated fellow Democratic Primary candidate Hillary Clinton on the basis of his opposition to the invasion of Iraq vowed to substantially increase American military presence in that country. It was reported that 2,100 Afghani civilians were killed as a result of American military action in 2008. The election of an anti-war President was supposed to remedy the senseless loss of human life caused by “Bush Doctrine” policy.

What are the lessons of Iraq? Has America learned that 9/11 should not be used as a justification for aggression against a foreign national population? Have Americans learned that attacking a small radical potion of a population with air strikes which also kill innocent civilians results in a net growth and the spread of Anti-American ideology and terrorism?

Afghan Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, founder and editor of Kabul’s Aina-E-Zan (a newspaper for Afghan women), and also a co-drafter of the Afghanistan Constitution, is engaged in the difficult battle for women’s rights in her country. Barakzai responded to Obama’s plan to increase American military presence in her country:

“Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops – it will just bring more violence.”

The growth of anti-American groups is indirectly but inexorably tied to poverty, lack of food, lack of drinkable water, lack of medicine, regional American occupation and violence. It rises from regions dominated by American military forces seeking to install governments capable of subduing its own population, but powerless against outsiders. These political conditions, tied to longstanding feelings of indignity and a lack of political freedom, drive terrorism. Terrorists are not poor, not undereducated, not desperate. The demographic is closer to middle class, above average education and subject to a repressive regime.

There remains a massive segment of the population that not only supports military aggression in Afghanistan, but also the failed war in Iraq. John McCain, who received over 50 million votes from Americans to preside over both wars, stated that he believed that the War in Iraq was “necessary and just”, as told to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute:

“I understand the frustration caused by our mistakes in this war. I sympathize with the fatigue of the American people. But I also know the toll a lost war takes on an army and a country. It is the right road. It is necessary and just.”

If the 2008 American Presidential election was a referendum on war policy, the ideological turn the country was seeking was for the responsible use of the military. There was a recognition that “Supporting the Troops” meant supporting responsible engagement of the troops, not just blind support for killing and imperialism.

The war in Afghanistan is not about the so-called “War on Terrorism”. Obama’s administration has ceased using the term. Though several months into office, his administration’s policy is essentially identical to that of his predecessor.

The criticism that has emerged against this war is that the real battle will not be won with bullets and missiles; that the ignored lesson of Iraq is that military presence does not secure a country so much as it projects imperialism and occupation. In Afghanistan – a place filled with poverty and subjected to foreign military powers for decades – the future depends on a change in policy. In Afghanistan and America, the future depends on real change, and the Administration depends on a resolute public that demands it. If the only voices of dissent are those of people waving teabags, demanding more tax cuts for the rich and more military solutions to foreign policy issues, the country will move in that direction, despite a growing acceptance of socialism in America (likely tied to the voices on the right screaming “Socialism” at every form of social government assistance program).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, said that a nation which “continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Dr. King argued that “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.” America, who has not lead the world in this revolution, now has the opportunity to do so. Obama wasn’t elected to make concessions to the right wing – he was elected to lead and bring change. But when the anti-war movement does nothing but hope for a revolution of values, without demanding action, there comes a time when that silence is betrayal to those values. That time is now.

The lack of American debate and protest over the planned escalation of the war in Afghanistan – “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is deafening. As former anti-war Presidential Candidate Barack Obama vows to increase military presence – including bombing the country with unmanned “drone” planes and a surge of as many as 30,000 additional troops – the anti-war movement, largely built on opposition to the six-year-old war in Iraq, is virtually non-existent.

Many “progressive” voices have failed to provide any leadership. Moveon.org, whose membership was largely built on opposition to the war in Iraq, has not taken a position opposing the Afghanistan War. The Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has not taken a position on the war in Afghanistan. Even the War Resisters League has qualified its opposition to this war. The Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus in the House of Representatives (chaired by Representative Maxine Waters) has been silent on the escalation.

The Dixie Chicks, the Pope, and anointed liberal-cause leader Bono have failed to publicly express the outrage that characterized much early opposition to the Iraq War. In fairness, Bono has never publicly opposed the War in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Dixie Chicks endured severe popular backlash for lead singer Natlie Maines’ 2003 stage banter:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas…”

The Dixie Chicks were pulled from radio station play rotations and record store shelves. “Patriotic” listeners publicly burned their records and, in some cases, ran them over with tractors to express their disgust with the Chicks. The band received death threats and were publicly boycotted. Lipton Ice Tea dropped its sponsorship of the band. And in June of 2006, American Idol Chris Daughtry returned to Greensboro, NC for a homecoming celebration sponsored by Classic Rock 92FM. A DJ announcement regarding free tickets for an upcoming Dixie Chicks concert was met with substantial booing from the crowd.

The planes which crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 have been used as a political tool – from George Bush standing on a pile of rubble and human remains with a megaphone, stirring up bloodthirst (declaring to New York that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon”), to Rudy Giuliani’s single-minded presidential campaign. Despite the Bush administration’s lie saying so, the war in Iraq had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11. Iraq was not invaded to liberate a country, bring civil rights to women, or stabilize tremendous economic imbalance. Iraq was invaded, on its face, to eliminate the threat of a nuclear attack.

Bush himself addressed an angry, grieving country that had just been attacked, as its leader; explaining the need for military action in Iraq despite scant evidence which was largely manufactured and/or misrepresented, declaring that evidence was there, warning, that ”the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

There were rallies where people adamantly opposed anti-war sentiment, strongly supporting the War effort in Iraq. Signs at so-called “Support the Troops” rallies read:

“Freedom is not free”

“Arrest the traitors”

“Peace is the result of victory”

“We love Bush”

“Make love after war”

“Hey, Boeing! Ignore these other idiots and keep the missiles coming!”

“Kill, kill, kill. Annihilate Iraq”

“Ending the Iraqi war will drag it back to our door”

“Veto France”

“God hates fag terrorists”

“If you don’t stand behind our troops why don’t you stand in front of them”

“Gitmo rocks”

“Got freedom? Thank the military”

They traveled to New York City where they organized and chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” in Times Square, explicitly to show support for the war.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths in the war have ranged as high as 655,000 as reported in a 2006, according to an MIT study. For comparison’s sake, in 2006, the population of Alaska was 670,053. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no justification for the invasion or killing of anyone in Iraq.

There is a tendency on the East Coast to dismiss the politics of fear that led to the advent of “Freedom Fries” and the opportunistic Republican-hatched enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001 (officially the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”). In the 2004 presidential election, the first wartime election in America since 1972, the one state and the District that were attacked by “terrorists” voted in large numbers against George W. Bush and his policies.

In 2008 in a speech in Greensboro, NC, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin displayed open hostility to the East Coast and, explicitly, Washingtonian D.C.-.ers:

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe…” (interrupted by cheers and applause) “…We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

The hostility was nothing new, and was largely reflected in the absence of any real Republican concern for the prevention of future terror attacks after 2001.

In per capita terms, by 2004, New York State ranked 49th out of 50 states in Homeland Security funding. Fox news was accused of fueling hysteria and fear in the people of the Midwest, the West and the “red states.” These states had not been party to the attacks or even likely targets for attacks. Yet, this was the constituency which drove public policy by re-electing the Bush Administration in 2004. In 2004, when the New York Fire Department was still asking for radios that worked, the fire department in Zanesville, Ohio was learning to use federally funded thermal-imaging technology to find victims in dense smoke and test kits for lethal nerve gasses. Per capita federal Homeland Security funding in Wyoming and Guam dwarfed spending in New York.

In 2006, with the pointless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long over, and the Halliburton-Blackwater war-profiteering machine in high gear, Bush’s DHS actually cut federal funding for terror prevention in New York City and Washinton D.C., surging new funds into places like Omaha, Nebraska and Louisville, Kentucky. And while pro-war John McCain suggested, with no evidence, in 2001 on the David Letterman show, that the anthrax may have come from Iraq, the mailings all turned out to come out of New Jersey. The planes that hit the World Trade Center flew out of New Jersey as well. And New Jersey resoundingly voted against Bush in 2004 (and against McCain in 2008. The plain fact was that the anthrax, the planes and the terror were directly aimed – solely aimed – at those parts of the country that Palin and her constituency don’t consider a part of the “wonderful little pockets” of “real America.” Those wonderful little pockets were unwilling to accept that the war was based on a lie. That American soldiers were dying for motives that had nothing to do with the “mushroom cloud” Bush used to terrorize the living rooms of his own country.

While anti-war groups struggled to combat a popular U.S. war policy based on fear and the promise of revenge, champions like Bono failed to oppose the war in Iraq. The Associated Press reported in 2005, when he met with President Bush, that the reason Bono failed to oppose the war was because:

“the rocker admits that a certain diplomacy is necessary in order to accomplish his goals [of fighting poverty], which is why he keeps mum about the war in Iraq even though he disagrees with it.”

It’s clear that he has avoided the subject intentionally in order to gain access and photo appearances with world leaders like Tony Blair and George Bush. If one truly considers the merits of celebrity activism in the context of Bono’s failure to oppose war, it all appears as an ongoing unmistakably hollow publicity grab using the poverty and suffering of millions as the key to access. The 2005 Man of Peace award was given to a man who never demonstrated against any war and who owns a large stake of war-friendly Forbes Magazine.

Even Bono’s advocacy of helping the poor is belied by his personal tax avoidance behavior. While he advocates world governments spend millions to help the poor, the Irish singer has moved his publishing company from Ireland to the Netherlands to avoid paying a 12.5% tax rate to the Irish government and to avoid funding the projects he advocates to help the poor. Bono takes that money home. And Bono doesn’t understand. When he was criticized by a Christian Aid report in 2007 for ‘tax avoidance,’ he responded by saying:

“It hurts when the criticism comes in internationally. But I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit. People who don’t know our music – it’s very easy for them to take a position on us – they run with the stereotypes and caricature of us.”

It’s hard to imagine that someone who is a leading advocate for helping the poor could be so clueless concerning the damage done to “third world” nations by capital flight from their countries into schemes like he employs. Or as African law professor Issa Shivji, the former director of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, put it:

“What the donors give is peanuts compared to the wealth that goes out.”

That wealth that goes out from the developing countries goes directly into tax avoidance centers, just like those used by Bono. A multi-millionaire cannot expect to be taken seriously when he advocates a worldwide moral obligation to fund aid programs to help the poor, but sees no moral obligation on himself to fund those programs though taxes.

Does an artist really want his or her political activism to be taken more seriously than, say, a cartoonish Elvis Presley meeting with President Richard Nixon?

On election night 2008, following the victory speech by the newly elected president-elect Barack Obama, the first song that blasted out into the Hyde Park crowd was Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising”.  It was the culmination of what The Boss had become – the definitive background music to the populist progressive movement. Reactionary left-wing pundits then expressed disbelief when it was revealed that Springsteen had entered into a exclusive release deal with Walmart, similar to the kind that had yielded unexpected success with the AC/DC’s Black Ice last year.

Springsteen’s political advocacy peaked in the ‘08 presidential election when he played numerous benefit shows for Democratic candidates in key swing states – undoubtedly causing some people to hear a message which they may not otherwise have heard – right up to Election Day.  Springsteen brought his predominantly white audience a liberal message in an election which Barack Obama was able to win, even where 5% of voters said they wouldn’t vote for a black man for President, and 25% of white voters said that people they knew probably would vote for a black man. 

Springsteen has demonstrated his principles by publicly turning down 12 million dollars from Chrysler, which he was offered for use of his song “Born in the U.S.A.”, an anti-Vietnam War protest song.  The song was so widely misinterpreted that it was used by Ronald Reagan during his 1984 presidential campaign:

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

When Bob Dole used the song during his failed presidential campaign in 1996, Springsteen himself was prompted to write an open letter to his local newspaper:

“I read in The [Asbury Park] Press this morning that my music was appropriated for the Republican rally for Bob Dole in Red Bank [New Jersey] yesterday. Just for the record, I’d like to make clear that it was used without my permission and I am not a supporter of the Republican ticket.”

Springsteen is more of a populist than a party supporter, however.  He recently called out Ticketmaster, owned by Democratic Party supporter Irving Azoff, for engaging in suspicious secondary ticket marketing of concert tickets though Ticketmaster subsidiary TicketNow. Then, he joined other populist voices in calling for a halt to the proposed Ticketmaster merger with venue monolith LiveNation – owner of 90% American amphitheaters – claiming that it would create a “near monopoly” in ticket marketing. 

The decision by Springsteen to enter into an exclusive agreement with Walmart during a time period when he was actively promoting Obama’s candidacy for President was certainly surprising.  Most of the left wing has been critical of Walmart’s unsavory labor practices – President Obama himself publicly criticized the company before beginning his campaign for president in 2006:

“Unlike the manufacturers who are under enormous competitive pressure from global low-cost producers, Wal-Mart is making enormous profits and yet it has chosen to go with low wages and diminished benefits … The battle to engage Wal-Mart and force them to examine their corporate values and policies is absolutely vital to America today.”

At that time, Obama reportedly pointed to Walmart’s rival Costco, where the average pay is 60% higher and health-care benefits are provided to more than 80% of its employees, compared to less than half at Walmart.

Americans appreciate the value and power of contrition. In an American courtroom, an admission is accepted as so compelling that it is generally accepted as evidence, even if it would be otherwise inadmissible hearsay.   When Bruce apologized for marketing a Greatest Hits record through Walmart, he acknowledged that it was done incorrectly, identified why it was done incorrectly, noted that he was used to doing better and seemed genuinely appreciative that his “fans” cared enough about those issues to bring it to his attention.

“We were in the middle of doing a lot of things, it kind of came down and, really, we didn’t vet it the way we usually do,” he said. “We just dropped the ball on it.” Instead of offering the exclusive collection to Wal-Mart, “given its labor history, it was something that if we’d thought about it a little longer, we’d have done something different.” He added, “It was a mistake. Our batting average is usually very good, but we missed that one. Fans will call you on that stuff, as it should be.”

The Boss’ latest record, Working on a Dream – which includes the Obama campaign trail title track and a song from alleged Oscar-megasnub The Wrestler – has five or six pretty great songs.  Anthems like “Queen of the Supermarket” (although I was initially disappointed that it wasn’t an updated “Supermarket Fantasy” by Screeching Weasel) and the Arcade Fire-sounding “Outlaw Pete”, with its really imaginative production, make those five or six songs different when compared to most of the Springsteen that you probably know.  That makes this a good record.  It’s hardly the beginning of this direction if one heard the wall-of-sound production on “Girls in Their Summer Dresses” from the Magic album – and the results are enough songs for half of an awesome record.

Republicans in Congress hate Bruce Springsteen.

In 2005, New Jersey Senators Frank Lautenberg and Jon Corizine proposed, in an entirely routine ceremonial vote, for a resolution honoring the anniversary of the record Born to Run.  According to the Associated Press, Republicans in the Senate refused to bring up the resolution for consideration, despite the fact that resolutions in the Senate honoring artists, athletes and events are routinely unanimously entered. Republicans refused to honor Bruce Springsteen, but Republican House Majority Leader Bill Frist’s suppiorted the same recognition of right-wing gun-nut Ted Nugent.

Bruce is in good company in consideration of the policy decisions of the Republicans.  In addition to opposing Bruce Springsteen, Republicans and their (at least ideological) leader Rush Limbaugh publicly voiced support and/or votes for:

1.    Walmart

2.    Allegedly advocating and directly causing people to be tortured,

3.    Legalizing the unconstitutional warrantless search and wiretapping of innocent people

4.    Engaging in exploitation of fear of terrorism and racism to gain public support for a five and a half year war rife with war profiteering by Republican political cronies, horrifying human rights violations, and the death of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children

5.    Lies about weapons of mass destruction directed to capitalize on fear, anger and confusion

6.    The serious suggestion of privatizing Social Security

7.    Opposition to mandatory carbon emissions controls

8.    Consistent objection to any significant regulation of the private sector economy

9.    The politicization of the judicial branch of government and the Department of Justice

10.         And the blatant and shameless manner in which disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina was handled and

11.         Cuts in Veterans Administration spending which led to the mold, mouse droppings, cockroaches, and rotted holes in the walls at Walter Reed Veterans Hospital just miles from the White House. 

Parenthetically, it must not be forgotten that the Walter Reed injured veterans, who suffered for George Bush’s administration’s lies, received such poor care from the Bush Administration that our wounded soldiers actually managed the care of one another – and were put in charge of others at risk for suicide.  As of February 2008, every day in Iraq five U.S. soldiers attempted suicide.

George W. Bush mislead a country into going to war in terms so certain that “mislead” is euphemistic.  His administration authorized interrogations on foreign soil by contractors who followed no protocols or real limitations in what they could do to people.  Human rights abuses took place.  Innocent people were tortured by the United States with the approval and, likely, at the direction of our Republican leaders.  Our own soldiers were sent to war by Republicans, based on lies propagated by Republicans, without appropriate equipment and body armor that Republicans knew were needed but did not supply.  Our soldiers came home from the war to a Republican administration that did not treat them appropriately. 

Republicans attempted to shift arguments away from the question of why the war was taking place, to the measure of tactics employed in the war. This was a smoke screen for absolutely incompetent leadership that led a country into a war that did not need to occur.

It took strength to stand up to the 2002 lie which ultimately led to the Iraq war.  296 Republican and Democrats in the Congress voted to approve the war – including 81 Democrats.  77 Senators voted to approve the war.  The unapologetic right wing continues to endorse an illegal war and push for the country to overlook the atrocities America waged on the world though its “Bush Doctrine”-diplomacy and the endorsement of a grossly inappropriate torture policy:

“If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” claims Republican Senator Arlen Specter.

While the country debates the necessity for investigation of torture, and the newly-elected progressive president waffles in his support to push for prosecution of people who advocated torture, the CIA has revealed that its has already destroyed almost 100 videotapes of terror interrogations.  CIA lawyers have already indicated that the identity of the people who watched the tapes prior to their destruction may be classified information. 

One might ask, quite frankly, if John McCain was such a leader, enough of a leader to be president through two wars and a an major economic meltdown – why is the Republican Party is floundering for someone to give them direction, looking to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal and Joe the Plumber? 

Nearly 2.2 million people between the ages of 16 and 29 lost their jobs during this Republican policy-driven recession.  The Republican Party has destroyed the early work life for a generation of young workers who have been utterly marginalized by the results of the fiscally irresponsible Bush economic policy.  He cut taxes and started wars while the economy motored along based on irresponsible lending and unregulated markets. 

The result has forced younger workers entering the workforce into unemployment or underemployment right out of high school or college.  They live in or move back to their parents homes to compete against others with college degrees and fight endless battles against monster student loans, working hourly wage jobs with mediocre benefits. There is a social safety net, but some short-sighted Republican governors like Jindal of Louisiana, Mississippi’s Barbour, Georgia’s Perdue – governors of some of the poorest people in the United States – keep it from their citizens for ideological reasons. 

And unlike their nemesis Springsteen, no Republican has ever apologized or admitted a single policy mistake, with the possible exception of mild Presidential regret concerning the premature declaration of an accomplished mission in Iraq on May 1, 2003.  Republicans have not identified what they did incorrectly or assured anyone that their track record is usually reliable, and they don’t care for criticism, even from each other.  And if one doesn’t know or understand that a mistake has been made, it is impossible to be contrite or to seek redemption.

Rather, the self anointed “3-strikes-and-you’re-out” “party of self-responsibility” is actively seeking further misery for the entire country and world in order to avoid taking responsibility for taking the country so far in the wrong direction. They cheer for America to fail and for regular Americans to suffer:  to lose our jobs, to have no healthcare, education, or social security and to rely forever on offshore drilling, religion, guns, and fear.

Over the past year and almost without objection, Adolph Hitler has been pushed to the front of the American consciousness. The constant barrage of Hitler imagery – like prominent remarks by publicly elected officials and celebrity personalities – has literally had an anesthetic effect on the public. What once appeared as an outlier segment of the population that survived by mail order is now, without controversy, available worldwide – electronically.

Almost immediately after the election of now-President Barack Obama, Republican Georgia Congressman Paul Broun compared Obama to Hitler, saying:

“We can’t be lulled into complacency… You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him [Obama] to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

Congressman Broun has advocated the bombing of Athens, Georgia because it leans Democrat. In 2008, he introduced a Constitutional Amendment to Congress in 2008 designed to Constitutionally ban gay marriage. He has voted for a ban on pornography for members of the military, voted against regulating the subprime mortgage industry, and voted against legislation that would prevent employment discrimination against homosexuals. Broun did, however, support warrantless wiretapping, and voted for immunity for telecom companies that engaged in illegal wiretapping. And Broun has unequivocally stated that Obama has the potential to be Hitler.

Ben Stein - Nixon aide and American cultural icon – made a comeback in 2008 with Expelled – a documentary which postulates not only that there is unexplored definitive evidence for the hollow anti-scientific “theory” of “Intelligent Design”, but also that Darwin’s Evolution “theory” and “Darwinists” (he avoids referring to them as “scientists”) caused the Nazi Holocaust. This work is a less than fascinating follow up to Stein’s eye drop commercials.

Stein offhandedly brought up Hitler again on July 23, 2008 during a Fox News interview. He did not “like the idea of Senator Obama giving his [Democratic National Convention nomination] acceptance speech in front of 75,000 wildly cheering people” because “[t]hat is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America.” “Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that’s something the Fuehrer would have done. And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past.”

In the Republican stronghold of Hunterdon County, New Jersey, a Holland Township couple named their child Adolph Hitler. Then, in an apparent effort to gain publicity, the couple contacted the media to report that a local grocery store was engaging in discriminatory treatment of them by refusing to personalize 3 year old Adolph Hitler’s birthday cake with his name. The story drew intense local international media attention, and actually raised the question: was the store was correct in making the moral decision to deny the request to have Hitler’s name on a birthday cake?

Hitler’s ideology has seen a recently meteoric resurgence in Europe. The current leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, was himself a member of the Hitler Youth as a child in Germany. Recently, in December 2009, Pope Benedict lifted the ex-communication of a British Bishop who publicly declared that no Jew died in gas chambers in World War Two. The Bishop said in November 2008 that he agreed with the “most serious” revisionist historians of the Second World War who had concluded, he said, that:

“between 200,000-300,000 perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber”

And publicly stated:

“I believe there were no gas chambers”

Regardless of the correctness of the Israeli action in Gaza, it has preceded an explosion worldwide of anti-Semitic attacks. A 300-percent rise worldwide increase.

Anti Israeli demonstrations have been marked by Hitler references, specifically in the Netherlands, where anti-war demonstrators have been heard chanting a rhythmic “Hitler, Hitler!” Dutch politician Harry van Bommel stood at the front of the march.

Civil rights activists, like Maqsood Alshams, founder of the Asia Pacific Human Rights Institute, wrote that Israel had overshadowed the Holocaust in its treatment of Palestine. Mr. Maqsood said Israel’s actions in Gaza were more serious than the Holocaust, comparing the conflict with Hitler’s treatment of Jews.

And when Tom Cruise interrupts Monday Night Football and every NBA basketball game wearing a Nazi uniform form months, its easy to overlook the fact that iTunes carries a wide range of neo-Nazi hate music, available for you to download 24 hours a day, on a moment’s whim. That’s a long way from sending a mail order to the red state one-room shack where survival enthusiasts stockpile automatic weapons and burn books. This is no free speech issue; there’s clearly sexual material – unquestionably profitable sexual material – that Apple doesn’t carry because Apple makes its own moral decision that it doesn’t want to. There is no actual test to prove that boobs on an iPod are more damaging to society than the dangerous hate-music bringing profits to iTunes.

And it’s more than the moral question of the public acceptance of the largest retailer of online music making money from blatant racism and anti-semitism. The issue is desensitization to Hitler, Nazism, racism, anti-semitism, hate, and violence. As we become accustomed to these things, it becomes less and less shocking to hear the President called Hitler; to hear enthusiasm for a progressive candidate cast as a frenzied pro-fascist racist fury. The hate becomes acceptable. The shock of Ben Stein’s “Fuhrer” reference becomes a harmless comparison; Paul Broun’s bizarre views seem less unsavory; and iTunes is less the store that sells racist hate-music that you cant find anywhere else, and more of just another store where people buy music.

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Jack Sanders, Esq.
Certified as a Civil Trial Attorney by the Supreme Court of New Jersey
Piro, Zinna, Cifelli, Paris and Genitempo
Nutley, NJ
973.661.0710