Let me start by saying I am a 29 year + card carrying Republican the lost and defanged moderate "little r" republican but still it is my sad GOP you all are blogging about... and correctly so. I am saddened, ashamed and sorry for what my political party has become. For years I have been screaming about how my party was stolen from me by these out right bible thumping money whores. (Wow & I am a Roman Catholic conservative, and I can't believe I just wrote that, but I am not going to erase it because it is true). I went online tonight to find Rick Scott's email to send him a personal email to shame him for his lies on Health Care Reform, since I worked for his company back in the 90's and thought he was a once decent person. I did already have serious doubts about his true colors since I was around when the FBI was carting boxes of papers out the doors of our company (Columbia/HCA)and his guilt was sealed by the 1.7 billion dollar fine our company paid. Yet there were a ton of great people at Columbia/HCA, great people all of which he let down. NOW I find him fronting the CPR...OMG what is going on folks? Yet I read your comments and you give me confidence that these fanatical, evil doers are not going to get away with this campaign of lies and disinformation. I also refuse to leave my GOP and I remain fighting within the rank & file for real reform from within, even though I have been threatened and bullied beyond your imagination. These Ultra Conservative Folks are not Republicans, nor Americans or even Christians. They are as history has proven in the past "They are the party of Matthew Brady" FYI: the prosecutor in the movie "Inherit the Wind" 1960 directed by Stanley Kramer with Spencer Tracy, based on a real life infamous 1925 trial. Every American especially Republican needs to rent that movie and watch it. (not to mention Silkwood, Erin Brockovich etc...) My GOP plays dangerously with fire, rekindling the same institutional propaganda tatics of Himmler in the 1930s & 1940s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Remember the greatist human atrocities were committed by these folks and these tatics & although thier names change & the dates change but always the core beliefs remain. I thank you all deeply for your comments as you have made me feel safer in this battle for the hearts and minds of the average "Joe Six Pack" American". I urge you to stand up and fight. This is evil class warfare that intends on crushing all those that do not fit thier definition of what is Christian. I only wish my Pope would stand up against this unholy war as I know Jesus would do.

Sorry folks this is my very first blog post...I know it is supposed to be a short, brief statement or comment and I am not really doing very well with this lengthy post. (You know us older folks are long winded anyway..lol) Again my apologies for my Sad GOP.

The GOP left me when as a party they decided to be anti-choice. (back in the '80's)

I am much more anti-GOP than a happy dem.

Under both or either party there are many systemic and institutional problems that should be addressed by the citizens no matter which party they favor.

I really hope for a time when the corporations and mega-money interests have less, little or no clout.

(a guy can hope)

I bought and read Scahill's book, "Blackwater" and that scared the hell out of me. Now it looks like things might be even worse in the bowels of the organization. This sort of thing is nightmare material.

Unfortunately, it is the nazi parallel that comes to my mind first; perhaps due to the fact that I was born shortly after WW II ended -

we all grew up listening to stories about the atrocities and the importance of keeping power hungry and twisted demagogues out of positions of power.

Blackwater/Xe reminds me of the Third Reich's Waffen SS, which was essentially the armed wing of the Nazi party.

Blackwater/Xe is an armed wing of the Christianist/Republican party.
The torture, the casual killing for the sake of an ideology, the hubristic "Gott mit Uns" attitude...

As I approach the closing chapters of my life I find myself in some evil country which I do not recognize.

In some way I think myself fortunate to lack sufficient health care; perhaps I'll bite the big one before the Christianist/Republicans finish building their police/prison state.

"John Doe #2 was actually in Blackwater management and was privy to some of the inner workings of the company."

And here I always thought that privies were for relieving the inner workings.

His own "SS" out there doing his dirty work. The only way for America to get back there Honer is bring these assholes to court. To bad, I don't think this will ever happen. No one screws with the Good Old Boys.
Let me see, did prince give george about 4169,000 for his 2000 campanie. not a bad return on his money= a 1.4 billion dollar contract in Iraq. I don't get, christans are pro life, unless it comes to war. I know, they want your baby to grow up to join the military to kill. You don't think the rich will let there kids go to war.

....who could have possibly forseen problems with that?

It's probably that socialist government run Army that is making this up to make Capitalist Armies look bad.

Tongue-firmly-in-cheek

The Financial Services Regime: a vast criminal enterprise.

The CIA: a vast criminal enterprise.

The MIC: a vast criminal enterprise.

The American Empire: a vast criminal enterprise.

Blackwater: The American Republican Guard, a vast criminal enterprise.

Who could have known?!?!

These people don't care about anyone other than themselves!
They don't care who they kill as long as they can make a few bucks it is all fun and games for them.
republicanism is a mental illness!

I want arrests and convictions. This was MURDER!

Good. Don't be surprised then when the PAID, TRAINED ARMY OF MERCENARIES turn their TAXPAYER-FUNDED weapons, tanks and Blackhawk helicopters on taxpayers to protect their livelihood and profits.

Why would you give a corporation the power to overthrow the government and turn on the people?

It's absolutely idiotic.

The one word that does not appear in the notes on his life Abram prepared near the end of his life, when instead of sheepskin he wore silk and gabardine, when instead of miners and cowboys he preached to senators and presidents, is power. But in 1935, when Abram was just beginning to dream his real ministry, he wrote the word once, in the margin of a church program. It was at the bottom of a list of names of men he had recruited. Besides each was a responsibility: organization, finances. Beside his own name, he wrote power—and then crossed it out. If it must be said, it can't be had. Power, Abram realized as he moved through the high corner offices of businessmen and leaders, has nothing to do with forcing the devil behind you or making the company increase your wages. Power lies in things as they are. God had already chosen the powerful, his key men. There they are, Jesus whispered in Abram's ear; go and serve them.

Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle's division of Goodwill Industries. He didn't just open stores for used clothes; he organized 49,000 housewives into thirty-seven districts and set them to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York, invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system. Later he'd come to see Russian red running through out Roosevelt's New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by another man summoned to advise the governor, James Augustine Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tall, stern man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for de cades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enterprise in history, and he had a reputation as an industrial free thinker. The year before he'd rebuked a group of businessmen for treating workers like animals. Farrell looked on his employees more like children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother, and to that end he insisted that the age of competition had passed; captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that they might better council together for the good of the innocent and the poor.

Abram fixed his rapt attention on the "steel shogun," as the press of the time called the industrialist. "Mr. Farrell reviewed the history of America," he'd remember, "and pointed out that we have had nineteen depressions—five major ones—and that every one was caused by disobedience to divine laws." Farrell offered no evidence for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on hand. "Now," Abram recorded his words, "I am a Roman Catholic and we don't go in much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as I am sitting here that if we don't get a thorough revival of genuine religion ... with a return to prayer and the Bible"—an oddly Protestant aim—"we are headed for chaos." Farrell suggested that the time had come for the "leaders of industry" to take the reins not just of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a godly path.

Farrell, a former steelworker himself and thus living proof in his own mind that equal opportunity existed for all, was likely too modest to mention U.S. Steel's own efforts in this regard; most notably, its relief program for the Pennsylvania steeltown of Farrell, renamed just that year in honor of the great man himself. A desperate measure by a community of 30,000 utterly dependent on U.S. Steel and starving because of that fact. In Farrell, U.S. Steel fought the spiritual roots of its economic woes not through revival but by evicting from company housing those who were not part of the nation's godly heritage: foreign-born workers, black workers, and even the old white men who had built Farrell and now approached retirement and pensions. U.S. Steel replaced them all with young peons paid low wages. It was not a matter of getting the job done, since the mills were shuttered and there was no work to be done. U.S. Steel simply saw an opportunity for a correction.

But then, so did the men and women whom companies such as U.S. Steel were liquidating. It's hard now, in the present United States, to imagine the fear that attended the Depression years, and harder still to remember the anger. Most forgotten of all is the optimism of ordinary people pushed to an edge over which they peered and saw not the abyss they had been told by their employers and their politicians awaited them, but—maybe, if they built it themselves—a future dramatically different from the past.
–JEFF SHARLET (chap.4 → p.95-97)

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