July 28 2008 show notes
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- Is right wing hate radio encouraging murder?
- How do powerful economic intererests make themselves richer and bankrupt nations?
- Guest: Carrie Lukas, Independent Women's Forum. Who is causing the energy crisis - Democrats or Republicans?
- Guest: T. Boone Pickens. He is building a massive wind farm in Texas. His plan for renewable energy. What does he need from Congress?
Topics, guests, upcoming events, quotes, links to articles, audio clips, books & bumper music.
Monday 28 July '08 show
- Article: Police: Man shot churchgoers over liberal views. Knoxville, Tennessee.
- Clip:
"This is what liberalism is. Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."
Savage: "Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus", Tue, Jul 11, 2006.
- Clip:
"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'." Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson's Interview with Jerry Falwell, 15 September 2001 edition of The 700 Club.
- Clip:
"Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system." Pat Robertson, Pat Robertson's Interview with Jerry Falwell, 15 September 2001 edition of The 700 Club.
- Clip:
"What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'Liberal?' If by 'Liberal' they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of 'Liberal.' But if by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'." John F. Kennedy, September 14, 1960, Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination.
- Article: Chinese anti-trust laws pose threat to cross-border M&A deals. Mergers and acquisitions.
- Article: Food industry bitten by its lobbying success.
- Bumper Music: Trying to Matter, Gary Allan.
- Quote:
"Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth."
Friedrich List, "The National System of Political Economy", 1841, translated by Sampson S. Lloyd M.P., 1885 edition, Fourth Book, "The Politics," Chapter 33.
- Article: Thinking Big For Oregon, David Sarasohn.
"...So Fox and the other folks represented in this regional council of governments -- nonprofits, chambers of commerce, education groups -- came up with an idea:
Two years' free tuition at any Oregon public university or community college for any Oregon high school graduate. The state would issue bonds to cover the costs and get its money back when income tax revenues rise because better-educated Oregonians make more money.
In other words, when a young Oregonian becomes a nurse or a welder, or goes on to university instead of setting on a career in fast food, the state will be taking higher income tax revenues from him or her for the next four decades. The idea is something like urban renewal, except instead of investing in a piece of geography to produce future tax returns, this play would invest in a generation."
- Thom:
What is the real source of this? What is the real, what's at the bottom of why things are so bad? Here's this guy who goes to this Church, and, because he's going to shoot some liberals. And he kills a guy. And he shoots a bunch of people with shotgun pellets and, you know, they've they've arrested him now. But he's out to kill some liberals because he believes that liberals are responsible for his not having a job and for the world, you know, not going the way he wants it to go. He feels like a victim.
When you look at the history of how countries become prosperous, and how they maintain that prosperity, there is something that absolutely jumps out at you and and it is that there's this very, very simple history. I'm going to condense 400 years of economic history into about a paragraph here.
Countries start out agricultural, in, you know, using modern society metaphors. They start out growing things. England in the fifteen hundreds had nothing but sheep. Their only industry was wool; that was it. Countries start out agricultural. They then build infrastructure. This started, Henry the seventh actually began this. He erected tariffs and began building industry in the United Kingdom. They, he built roads, he built bridges, he was transporting power to the extent that they have power, it was principally coal, and he was investing in human infrastructure and schools and hospitals and housing. And this all the infrastructure that's necessary for business.
And then you've got the economic infrastructure, you've got basically saying, building around the country, putting a barrier around the country called tariffs, saying, 'we will, if manufactured goods from another country are coming into our country, we're gonna charge a tax on them'. Why? So that if they are made domestically they'll be cheaper. Why? To encourage people to make them domestically so that we will end up with industry within our own country. The British did this in the seventeenth century, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and they did it so effectively that they became a major industrial power.
The United States did this in the eighteenth century; in the seventeen hundreds, in the very late seventeen hundreds, in fact it was Alexander Hamilton who laid out the idea for it in an address to Congress in 1791. And these policies were put into place in the late 1790s, during the Adams administration, and then also during the Jefferson administration. And we had tariffs that averaged from 20% to 50% in the United States steadily from the founding this country right up until 1980s.
This is, Frederick List, Friedrich List the German philosophy, German economist in 1844 wrote a book about this in which he attacked the idea of free trade -- that was the the word he used -- he said the cut, the people who were supporting free trade were trying to kick the ladder out from underneath developing countries. What his point was is that when a country reaches the point where they're making everything, see they go from being a country that's basically growing stuff or shipping minerals out, the Third World country status. You know, like England making, having nothing but wool in the fifteen hundreds or Saudi Arabia today just exporting oil. They're basically, you know, they're just, that's it.
And then they start, and then they go to the point where they're actually manufacturing things and they need to import raw materials and they need to export the finished goods. They need people to give them their stuff, their raw materials, their iron ore, their oil their coal, whatever, and they need people to buy their finished goods. And so they have a vested interest in keeping a large part of the world in Third World status. This is how countries have historically done this. We're talking about economic empire here.
And the way that they, and the way that developed countries keep undeveloped countries in Third World status is with so-called free trade. Frederick List called it kicking out the ladder; kicking away the ladder. It's basically saying, you cannot, if you're gonna take a loan from the World Bank, if you're gonna get money from the International Monetary Fund. if you're gonna take money from the United States, you cannot, Chile, you cannot have Social Security for your people, you can't have social infrastructure, you can't have public education, free public education, you can't have, to create the intellectual infrastructure.
Here in Oregon, oddly enough, one of our very conservative columnists writing of, a piece in the Sunday paper, David Sarasohn, about how, "Two years' free tuition at any Oregon public university... The state would issue bonds to cover the costs and get its money back when income tax revenues rise because better-educated Oregonians make more money". Well, David's absolutely right, but that's the liberal position.
So anyhow, what countries do is they say to developing countries, 'you have to embrace free trade so that our fully developed large manufacturing companies can eat your lunch', basically.
The problem is that in the United States when we embraced this theology in the 1980s with Reaganism and Thatcherism, it's called neo liberalism, and we dropped our barriers, we weren't so developed that we could effectively compete against all these people because China was coming up the road and they were doing exactly what England did and exactly what we did, what List talked about in 1844. They were, they've got, you know, the average import tariff into China right now is in the neighborhood of 30%. The average import tariff into the United States right now is around 2%. So China's protecting their industries while they're eating everybody else's lunch and we're the victims of this right wing theology.
- Bumper Music: Till we get it right, Richard Aberdeen.
- Is right wing hate radio encouraging murder?
- Clip:
"And this Obama thing is a pure unadulterated sideshow. Obama is not a great thinker; he's a believer. He has been inoculated -- indoctrinated at his schools, and he's believed what he has been told there. And among those beliefs is that the United States is fundamentally a force for provocation in the world, and that the United States is at root responsible for the way we are treated and seen by those who hate us. This is what he believes. He's not a thinker.
It's a form of self-loathing, ladies and gentlemen -- not of himself, of course, 'cause he's the messiah -- but in the aggregate self-loathing of nation, the kind of self-loathing of America that the left here and in Europe embraces. And that's why they love Obama -- because he loathes America. He blames America. America's responsible for all that's wrong in the world. If we just did somebody in touch who has compassion, sensitivity, the rest of the world will miraculously love us. There will be no more evil."
Limbaugh on Obama: "[H]e loathes America. He blames America. America's responsible for all that's wrong in the world".
- politico.com is a right wing site.
- The word 'liberal' is used in the bible 6 times, all positive. Jesus was a liberal. Matthew 5, 6, 7, 8, 25, the sermon on the mount, the sheep and the goats. Other religions are liberal too.
- Bumper Music: Ain't Talkin', Bob Dylan.
- Book: Ultimate Sacrifice.
- Article: Trial Centers on Role of Press During Rwanda Massacre, March 3, 2002.
"To make their case, prosecutors have armed themselves with some 50,000 documents, more than 600 audiotapes of what they say are inflammatory broadcasts from Radio Mille Collines and stacks of copies from the pictorial newspaper Kangura, peppered with vicious cartoons and nasty texts.
The radio, nicknamed Radio Hate, was the mouthpiece of the extremist Hutu Power movement. At first, it addressed its Tutsi opponents with warnings like "You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh. We won't let you kill, we will kill you." But once the massacres had begun, the prosecution said, the broadcasts goaded Hutu militia groups to "go to work" and kept inciting people with messages like "the graves are not yet full.""
- Clip: "The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.
What I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important. Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation.
The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade -- a saving of over 4-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day."
Jimmy Carter televised "Crisis of Confidence" Speech on July 15, 1979.
- Guest: Carrie Lukas, Vice President for Policy and Economics, Independent Women's Forum. Author, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism". The energy crisis. Who is at fault, Democrats or Republicans? Al Gore 10 year solution. T Boone Pickens says we cannot drill our way out. Republicans have blocked, are filbustering in Senate legislation for tax incentives, breaks for non carbon energy. There's lots of blame to go around. She says we should stop subsidies. Thom says subsidize things that are good for us. Ethanol.
- Bumper Music: Not Every man Lives, Jason Aldean (video).
- Article: DOJ: Former aide broke law in hiring scandal. Monica Goodling.
- Mississippi oil spill, news blackout. McCain cancelled trip.
- Bumper Music: The High Road, Jojo.
- Rush Limbaugh saying that the Democrats poisoned the minds of teachers.
- Hopefully solar will double in power and halve in cost like computing, if we embrace it.
- A caller, an independent and a S-Corp business owner making over