posted September 28, 2007 12:08 PM              

American workers have a chance to be heard.

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade [as of 2006]. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.

Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.

Most Americans reject such notions. But the true challenge is for everyone to understand that the current economic divisions in society are harmful to our future. It should be the first order of business for the new Congress to begin addressing these divisions, and to work to bring true fairness back to economic life. Workers already understand this, as they see stagnant wages and disappearing jobs.

America's elites need to understand this reality in terms of their own self-interest. A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish real wages and rising inequality, there is a serious risk of a protectionist backlash" in America that would take us away from what they view to be the "biggest economic stimulus in world history."

More troubling is this: If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.

With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.

BY JIM WEBB
Wednesday, November 15, 2006

posted September 29, 2007 01:54 PM            

Leftist morons just don't seem to understand they are tipping everyone off when they use words from past communist propaganda campaigns.

Words like:

social justice
economic justice
workers
equality
class struggle

Of course, it never occurs to leftist morons...those who utter these useless nonsense words...or those who lap those words up like mother's milk...that in all the murderous communist regimes of the 20th Century...in all those regimes and those still in existance...there is no social justice, no economic justice, no equality and no JUSTICE whatsoever...none at all.

Lenin had it right when he labeled communist followers and hangers on as useful idiots. Useful that is until they managed to bring a communist government to power. Then those useful idiots were discarded...fast, if they were lucky and executed immediately if they were not so lucky.

Just ask friends of Castro who were stood against the wall by Castro firing squads when they asked Castro, "Hey dude, what happened to our revolution for equality, social justice, economic justice? We gave you a class struggle to bring all that about and you give us a murderous communist dictatorship. Of course, Castro and the little bast@rd Che gave them all nice collections of bullets for their assistance.

I swear, I don't understand how anyone could be so utterly stupid as to be swayed by Marxist propaganda and communist buzz words.

posted October 03, 2007 11:19 AM            

Of course, I also never said US corporations were engaged in fascism either.

I'll leave that bilge to the Marxist moron set. It goes so well with the rest of their Marxist drivel.

posted October 03, 2007 02:24 PM              

Perhaps the darkest days for rockfish research occurred during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. These problems were the direct result of a speech given by Senator Joseph McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, on 9 February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia. In that speech, Senator McCarthy declared that the State Department, with the full knowledge of the Secretary of State, had become infested with Reds.

In 1997, to get a more intimate view of what might have led to this speech, the Lovelab interviewed Ms. Lillian DesConzo. In 1950, she was the head chef of the State Department commissary. The interview with the now retired 77-year-old Ms. DesConzo took place at the home she shares with Anthony, her husband of 52 years, in Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

"I had been hired in 1949 as head chef at the State Department commissary and I was really trying to liven up the meals, particularly the dinners. My goodness, I don’t think they had changed that menu since the Wilson Administration, what with all those heavy sauces and whatnot. I think Mr. Acheson [Secretary of State] first brought it to my attention when he came into the kitchen and said ‘Mrs. DesConzo’, he was always so polite, that Mr. Acheson, ‘Mrs. DesConzo, I wonder if you could see about perhaps modernizing the menu. Perhaps you could add a more few fish dishes.’ And I thought he was right, because really all the fish we served was the Friday baked cod fillets dipped in breadcrumbs.

So, I contacted a fish distributor in Los Angeles, I’m from here you know, and he sent me, oh, I think it was 2 dozen red rockfish. And I was going to bake them whole, like the Spanish do with their seabass. Well, the fish arrived and they were just lovely, all bright red with clear eyes and really firm muscle. Just beautiful fish. And I had just lined them up in a baking dish when Senator McCarthy came in. As I recall he was asking about getting a second helping of the sweet potato pie. And as he passed those fish, well that poor man stopped dead in his tracks and looked and the veins in his forehead just started to throb. And he said, and I remember like it was yesterday, ‘What the Sam Hill are those?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘those are reds’, because that’s what my father had always called them. He was a commercial fisherman in San Pedro [California] before the War and he called them red snapper, even though they aren’t real red snapper.

Well, Senator McCarthy gets all excited and he demands a box and just like that puts the fish in it and walks out. And you know what? Well, it was a good thing we had some frozen cod fillets in the deep freeze or else we wouldn’t have had much of anything to serve for dinner that night.

And I think it was, oh, 1963 or 1964 before I could serve a red fish in the commissary. And I had trouble with orange and yellow ones too up to maybe 1959."

posted October 04, 2007 12:51 PM            

We only discovered the absolute truth of Joseph McCarthy's allegations when a "Freedom of Information" request was filed for the contents of the Verona Project.

Of course, leftists...communists of every stripe abhor Joseph McCarthy...and anyone else who exposes their treason, corruption, lies and murderous objectives. I'm not at all surprised to see you bring up Joseph McCarthy, the man leftists loath. Truth or facts are meaningless to leftists. It's whatever leftists can make others believe...by lying through their teeth...that counts as truth or facts...to leftists.

In Defense of McCarthy

By Chris Kulawik

April 07, 2005

Now commonplace in the liberal lexicon, the word McCarthyism has come to represent a “government witch-hunt seeking to punish unapproved thoughts or political stances.” Today’s liberals throw the word around in countless situations: discussing history, when society rejects their radical ideas, or, most noticeably, when losing an argument . The claims levied against Senator Joseph McCarthy, historical fallacies which have stuck through the decades, have wrought a grave injustice. Agree or disagree with the second Red Scare, any individual who rejects indoctrination and accepts the facts of history cannot justify the modern association of McCarthy with political repression.

Many believe that Senator McCarthy was on the House Un-American Activities Committee. In truth, Senator McCarthy couldn’t sit on a House committee; he was on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Another claim attacks Senator McCarthy for unfairly criticizing, questioning, and pressuring many writers, actors, and directors in Hollywood for being communists, thus ruining their careers. There’s one problem with this claim: the only people investigated by Senator McCarthy’s committee were individuals in government. Everything ever conjured up about McCarthy having anything to do with the Hollywood Ten, Arthur Miller, et. al., is simple fiction.

Next? That popular claim that McCarthy made wild accusations, never rooted in sound evidence and always disproved. While a viable claim 55 years ago, the Freedom of Information Act has recently made available the VERONA project. The VERONA project was the American interception and decoding of cables sent by the Soviet Union to their communist operatives in the United States. Senator McCarthy couldn’t come out and reveal the VERONA project, as the Soviets would realize the breach and cut off the incriminating communications. History has vindicated Senator McCarthy; liberals haven’t.

So why did he imprison some people and ruin the lives of others? Well, the government employees who admitted their communist connections or pled the Fifth when approached by the committee were given a preordained period of time to pack up and either retire to the private sector or leave old jobs, which had often required security clearance. I’ll chalk it up to coincidence, but a good number of them left their old jobs to lecture at Harvard, write books, or keep high company in the parlors of society’s elite.

Lastly, there’s that relentless stream of ad hominem attacks that are now in history books. Despite numerous accusations, McCarthy was not a grumpy, pathological liar with no friends. Rather, McCarthy was a trusted confidant to the Kennedy family. Robert Kennedy made McCarthy the godfather of his child, while John F. Kennedy spent most of his life defending McCarthy from blatant character assault. Once, at a Harvard dinner, a speaker compared McCarthy with convicted Soviet spy Alger Hiss, prompting JFK to rise above the Crimson crowd and scream, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” before storming out of the building.

Senator McCarthy was a great man who put the safety of his nation and fellow citizens above his own personal stature. For challenging the communists and proving the liberal institution wrong, the left has launched a vendetta against McCarthy’s name by associating it with a violation of liberties and the all-too-common notion of “witch-trials.” So next time some one asks you about McCarthyism, let them see for themselves that all they’ve been taught is part of a partisan ploy in the struggle for history.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1379283/posts

Alger Hiss and the "Verona Project"
Posted: Nov 29, 2005

When Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers of being a Soviet spy, FDR, Dean Acheson, the NY Times and most large newspapers, and numerous academics stated that he absolutely could NOT be a Soviet spy.

Even after Chambers produced hand-written spy documents written by Hiss, typed spy documents by Hiss (the infamous "Pumpkin Papers"), Hiss denied the charge. And when the FBI proved that the letters to Soviet agents had been typed on Hiss' typewriter, Hiss claimed that Chambers had typed them, saying, "I still cannot figure out how Chambers managed to use my home typewriter."
Chambers was vilified by the media, while Hiss was treated like a hero. (Hiss had been a key aide to FDR at Yalta and had even been instrumental in the creation of the U.N.)

Given the evidence, Hiss was convicted of perjury. (He could not be tried for treason, since the statute of limitations had expired.)

After being released from prison, Hiss, the media, and his political friends still insisted that he was innocent. Even the NY Times published hundreds of articles claiming that Chambers and the FBI had trumped up the charges and that Hiss was completely innocent. Hiss even had a "university chair" named in his honor (by Columbia, I think).

On the other hand, Chambers was treated as a pariah. He was offered his old job at TIME magazine, but the offer was retracted after the publisher (Luce) was pressured by the meida and politicians. He found work in only menial jobs.

THEN in 1995 the Federal government released once top-secret documents from the "Verona Project". Some of these documents were decoded messages among Soviet agents and included lists of Soviet agents within the U.S. (The documents had been kept secret so as not to inform the Soviets that their codes had been broken.)
Among the numerous Soviet agents listed, Hiss was one - and considered extremely valuable since he was a confidant of FDR, Trumanm Dean Acheson (Secretary of State), and numerous other high level officials. Hiss' brother was also listed as a Soviet spy.

posted October 04, 2007 01:37 PM              

The grave of Senator Joe McCarthy has been pillaged. In the think tanks of the Republican right, in the broadcasts of Fox News, and in the pages of some of the most popular books in America, he lives again. From the mid-1950s until 2001, there was a consensus in America that McCarthyism was a brief period of political psychosis. The Senator's drunken belief that the democratic American left consisted mainly of closet Reds working to subvert the United States was seen as risible; a sulphuric firework that threatened American civil liberties and democracy for a moment but then deservedly died away.

No longer. The fourth best-selling book in the US last year - Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism - was an explicit apologia for McCarthy. "What this country needed [in the 1950s] was Joe McCarthy," she says. "Amid all the mandatory condemnations of Joe McCarthy, the little detail about his being right always seems to get lost. His fundamental thesis was absolutely correct... He was not terrorising people purposelessly. His targets were Soviet sympathisers and Soviet spies." She describes the Hollywood blacklisting of suspected Communists as "honourable", and concludes, "McCarthy's gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion."

She is not a lone madwoman. The rehabilitation of McCarthy is currently a major theme on the US right. William Buckley Jr, the grande dame of American conservative intellectuals, has published a tedious but aggressive novel, The Redhunter, which glorifies the Senator. The historian Arthur Herman has published an acclaimed revisionist biography which says McCarthy's fears "weren't paranoid delusions. They were true." Campaigning group Accuracy in Academia recently staged a conference entitled "Rethinking McCarthy". Henry Kissinger has noted - echoing Coulter - that McCarthy "did not go far enough."

Is it possible that there was a vast Communist plot to subvert American democracy, and only McCarthy understood the depth of the problem? The new McCarthyites claim their reappraisal was triggered by new evidence: the declassification of a series of documents from the Soviet archives known as the Verona cables. These documents do indeed show that some of the individuals defended by the 1950s left and savaged by McCarthy were actually Soviet spies. The most prominent is the left's old cause célèbre, Alger Hiss.

This is a serious blow, and it should be honestly acknowledged. A minority of people on the left are still inclined to see 1950s Stalinists as misguided idealists, decent believers in equality and liberty who somehow went astray. This is unsustainable. By the time Hiss was offering his secrets to Stalin's agents, the news about the gulags - vast concentration camps which slaughtered over 15 million innocent people - was out and beyond dispute. The US has many flaws, but it is lunatic to believe it is domestically equivalent to this; there are no mass graves in Kansas.

Too much of the left for too long implied there was moral equivalence between the two sides in the Cold War. They're wrong: the defence of a basically free society is not the same as the defence of a totalitarian state. A society where minorities can organise and fight for recognition is not the same as a society where minorities are herded up and executed. Hiss was not swapping secrets between two equally bad tribes.

But it's a wild leap to say that these cables therefore vindicate McCarthy. A handful of his allegations have turned out to have been right. A handful of Mystic Meg's predictions no doubt end up being accurate too. McCarthy made so many accusations - with virtually no evidence - that it would be extraordinary if he did not hit the target a few times.

More than this, it is a blatant distortion of the historical record to claim that only McCarthy was opposed to Communist spies. Most of the democratic left saw the menace of Stalinism and the crucial importance of defending America's imperfect democracy. If anything, McCarthy damaged the cause of anti-Communism by associating it with paranoid madness.

Some people will see this as an arcane historical debate. They are wrong. The Verona cables were decoded in 1995, but they have only been vigorously debated since 11 September 2001. There's a reason: at the start of a long war against Islamic fundamentalism, Americans are thinking about the launch of their last long war. How McCarthy is viewed provides us with an indication of how the "War on Terror" will proceed.

If the errors of the early stages of the Cold War are not acknowledged now, they will be repeated. The history of the 1950s is a must-read today. The first lesson is clear: within America, dissent must be defended vigorously from Coulter-style charges of treachery. The way to defend democracy is not to shut it down but to embrace it. Public debate and a frank analysis of American mistakes will make the battle against Islamic fundamentalism more efficient, not less.

In particular, it will help us to distinguish between when the US acts in a legitimate war against Islamic fundamentalism, and when it uses this as a pretext aggressively to extend its own business interests. This blurring went on throughout the Cold War: uppity democracies trying to fend off US business exploitation, like Guatemala, were crushed in the name of the war on communism. The neo-McCarthyites must not be allowed to silence opponents of aggressive US businesses with a howl of "Treachery!" It is one thing to die fighting Stalinism or Bin Laden; it is another to kill for the United Fruit Company or Halliburton.

The second lesson is that to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, Americans must repudiate their own far right. A Cold War in which America was led by McCarthy and his acolytes might not have been winnable at all. An America that jailed people for their political beliefs or that launched "limited nuclear wars" (another McCarthy obsession) might have been an America that collapsed under its own lunacies before the Soviet Union did. The US side in the Cold War was at its weakest - and its most morally indefensible - when it was fought by the President politically closest to McCarthy: Richard Nixon.

The third lesson is that the US and Britain should not back the far right abroad - foreign McCarthys - in the mistaken belief that they will help us to prevail. The Cold War led the US to overthrow many decent democratic regimes that it feared were pro-Soviet (or simply found economically inconvenient): Salvador Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran. This damaged the American cause by making it - in foreign policy terms - for a time as totalitarian as the Soviet Union.

The same mistake may be repeated today. If the US continues to back fascistic dictatorships like the House of Saud, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and now Colonel Gaddafi, in the mistaken belief that they will help us in the "War on Terror", then the US will continue to haemorrhage its moral superiority over Islamic fundamentalists. The best way to defend democracy is to spread democracy, not supress it in the interests of fair-weather friends.

The corpse of Joe McCarthy is being paraded before us. The more extreme wing of the US right believe he offers us a model for how to fight a war against Islamic fundamentalism. They're right - and it's a model that leads straight to liquidated democracy and defeat.

posted October 04, 2007 01:37 PM            

Or

"How to Lie Out of Every Bodily Orifice"

Or

posted October 04, 2007 01:50 PM            

Those codes were broken and transcrips of those coded communications between the Soviet Union and Soviet Union spies in the US were stored in the Verona Project files...which were top secret.

A freedom of information request was submitted and because the Soviet Union no longer existed, those files were released.

Within those files were the names of Soviet Union spies in the US...among which were those named by Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

So, all the lying leftists can groan, wheeze, shriek, whine, pout, hold their breath and stamp their feet until they turn blue in the face...as usual when leftists are caught red handed lying through their teeth; but the fact remains that Joseph McCarthy was right. He was right, not only in the allegations he made but he was absolutely right to investigate communist spies in the government of the United States who were reporting back to Stalin.

No amount of leftist bullshiiit blather can overcome the fact that Joseph Mccarthy was right.

Those top secret files from the Verona Project were hidden for more than 40 years so as to not compromise US intelligence and tip off the Soviet Union that their coded communications were being intercepted, decoded and read by US intelligence agencies.

posted October 04, 2007 02:00 PM              

But it's a wild leap to say that these cables therefore vindicate McCarthy. A handful of his allegations have turned out to have been right. A handful of Mystic Meg's predictions no doubt end up being accurate too. McCarthy made so many accusations - with virtually no evidence - that it would be extraordinary if he did not hit the target a few times.

More than this, it is a blatant distortion of the historical record to claim that only McCarthy was opposed to Communist spies. Most of the democratic left saw the menace of Stalinism and the crucial importance of defending America's imperfect democracy. If anything, McCarthy damaged the cause of anti-Communism by associating it with paranoid madness.

posted October 05, 2007 01:09 PM            

McCarthy batted 1000 and that cannot be bettered.

Leftist loons still bemoan the fact their spies got identified and shut down by McCarthy.

Too bad demented leftists don't have the same regard for the United States as they had for the communist government of the Soviet Union and Stalin. It still escapes any mention from lying leftist lips or their keyboards that the murderous government of the Soviet Union murdered at least 70,000,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000,000 of it's own citizens.

When Joseph McCarthy exposes Soviet Union spies in the government of the United States, it's Joseph McCarthy who is the enemy of these demented loony leftists and not those attempting to help the murderous regime of Stalin.

Go figure.