Online Freedom of Speech Act Back on the Floor

Props to Mike Pence!

Dear Speaker Hastert, Majority Leader Boehner, and Majority Whip Blunt,

In light of mounting pressure to increase federal regulations on citizens groups known as “527s,” we wanted to alert you that we will not vote for any legislation containing an increase in campaign finance regulations that does not also contain a simultaneous decrease in other campaign finance regulations.

As Republicans, we should always accompany any increase in federal regulations with a concurrent increase in freedoms for Americans elsewhere in the federal code.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter and your continued leadership of our Conference.

Most sincerely,

Mike Pence
John Doolittle
Jeb Hensarling
Trent Franks
Todd Akin
Lynn Westmoreland
Dave Weldon
Patrick McHenry

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‘Pro-Business Capitalism’ vs. ‘Corporatism’

I am Pro-Business.

I believe in making money and a profit. I am a capitalist after all.

Corporatism is not the same as capitalism.

Anti-Corporatism DOES NOT mean Anti-Business.

Corporatism is not an old fashioned American can-do business attitude either.

Corporatism is the merger of Corporation and Communism.

Corporatism = Corporate Communism

Business seeks to support and enhance individuals willing to put forth an effort for a common goal.

Corporatism stifles and subjugates individuals. Just as government regulation stifles freedom, so do the corporatist powers.

Increasingly, corporatism has become linked with technology, which provides the tools and means to expand and dominate, and the economic motive for doing so.

Having lived thru and been a part of the Open-Source Movement, I can tell you the collective knowledge of individuals far outpaces that of the corporatist machine.

The death of the Open Source Movement was symbolized by the death of the original Napster. Corporations did not like the free flow of information, even though record sales were at all time highs.

*Corporatism, money and lawyers are a toxic mix.

*Individuals and smaller companies don’t stand a chance against modern corporatism. Everywhere, they are losing ground.

*Corporatism isn’t synonymous with capitalism, Big Business, or familiar notions of the corporation. This is different.

*”The acceptance of corporatism,” John Raulston Saul said in “The Unconscious Civilization”, “causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t.”

*Corporatism could, if it chose, create workplaces that fostered loyalty, security and nurtured creativity. They had the freedom to take political, ethical or moral positions. Some even did.

*These corporations stopped taking responsibility for their workers, or for the cities in towns in which they functioned, focusing increasingly only on their marketing missions and whatever it took to get them accomplished.

*Control of these companies has gone from individuals with idiosyncratic missions to amorphous boards of directors, stockholders, analysts and executives.

*Corporatism permits only two goals: growth and profit. All other ethics and notions are subordinate, sometimes even considered malfeasance.

*Prior to corporatism, individuals had more freedom and opportunity. There was room for small businesses. “Can-do-capitalism” that has been such a tradition in the United States occupied one economic niche, smaller businesses and entrepreneurs another.

*Corporatism is something different, something new. It goes far beyond the usual concept of Big Business.

*Corporatism brings a whole set of values to competitiveness, relationships with workers, and morality. Corporatism is the corporation unchecked, the corporation becoming a political force as or more powerful than the government in place to oversee it.

*Individuals and individualism have taken a battering at the hands of this brand of corporatism, especially in the past two decades. Tens of thousands of retail businesses have shut shutdown because of the spread of Wal-Mart,a company whose ambition is to set up shot every 30 miles across America. Many millions of Americans have been down-sized, laid-off, re-engineeered, human sacrifices to the new corporatism. Dead-end jobs with no prospects, benefits or security have become a staple of the American workplace. Almost everyone is a free-lance worker.

*Communities have lost factories, business, sports teams. Writers, painters, other creative entrepreneurs are driven from creative market by cultural corporations only interested in huge numbers. Media has been almost totally corporatized, no longer able to fulfill traditional roles - like watching corporations.

*The Net is hardly Utopia, but perhaps one reason it’s experienced such rapid growth in so short a time is that it gives individuals the ability, at least for now, to create their own environments, to speak freely, and to preserve their dwindling individuality. The open source movement is a perfect example of a media/social/technolgical-movement that’s booming, even mainstreaming, online (it’s no accident that many of the Seattle protesters used free software to connect), but has no equivalent offline.

*Our knee-jerk political system tends to reduce all issues to left versus right, but this issue is bigger and much more complex. Corporatism has no ideology now but to grow and prosper at all costs, and in any context. No other mission is possible, and increasingly in the Digital Age, technology is the pathway as well as the result. In a corporatist society like ours, other considerations - workers? security, idealistic impulses, stirring visions - get lost in the details of marketing, data-gathering, bureaucratic manipulation.

*Leftists clinging to Marxist rhetoric may denounce corporations as fascistic - old ideas struggling to confront new realities - but corporations aren’t ideological enough to be fascistic. They are profoundly anti-democratic, but mostly as a by-product of their devotion to profit. Run by marketeers, they simply acquire markets, moving from one to the next like some unstoppable glacier, grinding everything in their paths.

*It doesn’t take Machiavelli to grasp that in order for corporatism to prosper and grow, it has to confront the Net’s culture and potential in the same way it confronted the other one - by lobbying the government for regulation, by entering technologically -driven markets with a flood of new products, by offering services and enticements no one can compete with, by ruthlessly blocking, acquiring or shutting down potential competition - all the things Microsoft has been trying to do.

*Corporatism de-humanizes everyone, from the pharmacist who has to close down when Rite-Aid moves in to the kid working in a fast-food franchise to the consumer on hold for hours, awaiting tech support that never comes.

*Perhaps the real political campaign of the Millenium won’t unfold on the irrelevant streets of New Hampshire, where politicians and co-dependent journalists gather every four years to bolster their own sense of importance. Maybe it began on the streets of Seattle.

*Excerpts pulled from “Seattle Postscript at Slashdot.org”

FreeRepublicans.com’s Port Policy

No matter what kind of deal the powers that be make, this story will be followed.

I will also be investigating other instances of our Infrastructure being Sold For Profit.

Debunking the FreeMarket Argument on UAE

Dubai Ports World is a State-owned corporation.

United Arab Emirates is a Corporate State.

Thus, Dubai Ports World is nothing more than a subsidiary of United Arab Emirates.

United Arab Emirate’s largest investor after the United States is Iran.

Iran is also the largest investor in Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

United Arab Emirates is a State-Sponsored Corporate State supported by the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism.

Thus, United Arab Emirates is nothing more than a subsidiary of Iran.

FoxNews tells us the United States must attack Iran.

Iran is an enemy because it supports Hamas and wants to build a nuclear arsenal.

So where are the United Arab Emirate’s loyalties?

The United Arab Emirates of America, Inc.

The United States is being bought, piece by piece by our enemies.

The UAE’s top 3 investing nations are: #1 USA, #2 Iran, #3 China.

This explains why the Neo-Cons say “deficits don’t matter;” our infrastructure is being put up as collateral.

We are not becoming an Empire. We are being Re-Colonized, under the flag of Free Trade and Capitalism.

The UAE is the finest example of what the Middle East has.

They have so much power and money because of their oil that when they have decent leadership they can overpower any company and make a huge profit.

They are the Netherlands of this generation.

A small country that gains immense power.

The UAE is a Corporate Nation.

It is not a Nation State.

It is a Nation Corporation

It should be called UAE Inc.

This is the most outrageous thing in American history since slavery, and its being downplayed.

Tie this to the push for a Service Economy - and it is anew form of slavery, or at least indentured servitude.

The UAE is the real-life incarnation of SPECTRE.

The State of the Republican Party Today

The Republican Party has been hijacked. Hijacked by power hungry elitists who have ultra-conservative ideologies that disguise their real agenda; a new form of leftist thinking. This may seem like a strange statement, but if one compares the Machiavellian manner in which the Neo-Cons have taken control, the idea’s that the promote, and the crowd that they surround themselves, one will see the similarities.
Like all elitist takeovers, it is a small majority who have supplanted themselves in the hierarchy of the party. Even if it does not go all the way to the top, surely that goal cannot be far off as well.
What has made this coup de taut possible? Good, honest, idealistic individuals looking to make thing better motivated by a sense of public service and personal advancement. Some seek out making a name for themselves within the party, often with the best of intentions. But as they say about good intentions, so too it is true here.
Many times, when these individuals do make it to positions of influence within the party, the corrupting influence of our nation’s capital takes over and good people turn into greedy, power hungry people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and zero accountability makes that corruption even worse.
From a historical stand point the Republican Party platform has stood upon the pillar of conservatism - balanced fiscal policy and where possible balanced budgets, leeriness of foreign wars and alliances, a non-interventionist stance to armed conflict, and a support of traditional values at home. The last bastion of the Reagan Revolution within the mainstream party resides within its tax policy, and even that has become yet another tool of social engineering. As Pat Buchanan has succinctly stated, the current state of the party could be summed up as follows -

“To hell with principle;
what matters is power,
and that we have it,
and that they don’t.”

Ronald Reagan said “government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” George W. Bush says “Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.”

Liberalism: The Easy Way Out

Why is it that Liberalism in its modern form is so attractive to so many people?

For Millinia, many a conservative has asked this. The answer is really quite simple.

To find the answer, one must begin to think as a Liberal.

Imagine for a second that you are trying to get a Democrat elected in a Republican district. How will you do this? Well, the Democrat must sound like a Republican, but not too much to lose his/her Democratic base.

The way to do this would be to promise to fund a lot of Republican causes along with your base’s Democratic causes.

When you do this, you realize why Liberalism is so attractive: It’s easy to give away other people’s money.

(A Note on Capitalization:
Liberal = Modern, Democratic ideology; see also: George W. Bush
liberal = classical, Jeffersonian liberal
Conservative = ideological Republicans
conservative = Reagan, Goldwater; not George W. Bush
Democratic = of the modern Democratic Party; see also: self-serving
democratic = adherering to the principles of democracy
Republican = of the modern Republican Party; see also: self-righteous
republican = to carry ideals and a moral compass

In other words: Small letter good, big letter bad)

Rational Republicans and Logical Liberals

What is a Rational Republicans and a Logical Liberal?

It is someone who will deviate from his or her respective ideology when given ligitimate numbers and math that disproves their original thinking.

Who are the Nationalists?

Our country has always been the ethnic “Melting Pot.” This terminology needs no further explanation. While we have had racial problems since our beginning as a nation, for the more part we have united in times of tumult.

Our current situation has deviated from that historical norm. Instead of pulling together as a nation, we have not so gradually started to separate. Rather than ethnic, racial, or geographic grounds, we have separated on ideological grounds.

While this could be said to be an evolutionarily advancement of human divisions based on intellectual grounds; it could also be said that without the unity that has held us together for 230 years we are doomed to devolve into what we have escaped.

At some point, we must put aside our ideological differences just as we have, for the most part, put aside our racial prejudices, for the good of the country as a whole.

At some point, being an American must come before being a Republican or a Democrat.

And at some point, Corporations that have profited because of the Freedoms granted to them by this nation and its people must put this nation and its people about all else, including profits.

In a time of war, with the economy on shaky ground, corporations must understand that the long term economic well being of the country is far more important that any short term gains that they may make. In other words, they must make a sacrifice now so that they can succeed in the future. This is not a Leftist viewpoint. This should be common sense.

An Oil Company that Really is Part of the Problem

Exxon: America will always rely on foreign oil
HOUSTON (Reuters) - The United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp. executive said on Tuesday.
“Realistically, it is simply not feasible in any time period relevant to our discussion today,” Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Stuart McGill said, referring to what he called the “misperception” that the United States can achieve energy independence.
The comments, in a speech at an energy conference in Houston, come a few days after U.S. President George W. Bush declared America was addicted to Middle Eastern oil and promised to help the country kick the habit.
Many in the United States believe America should wean itself off oil imports from the Middle East, fearing it makes the country dangerously dependent on an unstable region.
The world’s largest publicly traded oil company, however, says hoping to end foreign oil imports is not only a bad idea, but also impossible.
“Americans depend upon imports to fill the gap,” McGill said. “No combination of conservation measures, alternative energy sources and technological advances could realistically and economically provide a way to completely replace those imports in the short or medium term.”
Instead of trying to achieve energy independence, importing nations like the U.S. should be promoting energy interdependence, McGill said.
“Because we are all contributing to and drawing from the same pool of oil, all nations — exporting and importing — are inextricably bound to one another in the energy marketplace,” he said.

This certainly isn’t helping what was already a changing view of these oil companies. This attitude is not helpful to our situations. What this Exxon exec is supporting should be viewed by any rational American as nothing less than a form a tyranny.
It has been an increasing view of mine that the cozy relationship with the oil companies would end up biting the GOP. These remarks do nothing but give ammo to the Leftists that seek to destroy these companies.
And frankly, with an oil company exec trying to torpedo the Bush agenda, which is a very idealistic agenda albeit not very practical, maybe there is some truth in what the they have said about the oil companies.