Buzzflash

What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors, yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.

Two weeks before the presidential election of 2004, The Washington Post ran an article titled"Some Fear Ohio Will Be Florida." "Florida" has become shorthand for the illegal purging of tens of thousands of largely Democratic African American voters by Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and that state's Republican machine just before the election of 2000.

Some people think that FDR invented the progressive income tax when he raised income tax rates on the super-rich to 90 percent. Some believe that LBJ invented anti-poverty programs when he more than cut in half severe poverty in the US by introducing Medicare, housing assistance, and food-stamp programs in the 1960s.

In 1976 -- long before American conservatives would claim that Ronald Reagan's 1980s debt-driven massive military spending "bankrupted" the Soviet Union -- French demographer and author Emmanuel Todd wrote a best-selling book titled La Chute finale (The Final Fall), predicting the imminent fall of the USSR. He based his projection, in large part, on a careful study of the increase in infant mortality in that empire, one of the leading indicators of the health of a nation.

I was ten years old when Dag Hammarskjöld died in 1961, and I still remember that week. Having grown up with monthly "duck and cover" drills in our elementary school, many of the kids of my generation saw the UN as the great moral force that would prevent the Soviet Union and war hawks in America from plunging the planet into a nuclear holocaust.

Who killed the goddess?And why is it that there are so many men who are frantic about seizing political and economic power, subjugating women, and forcing on others their particular male-god-dominated religion?

If you want to understand what transformed the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence, and that into the United States of America - and where we've done well and erred from there - you must first read robert wolff (he prefers the lowercase usage).

This marvelous book is ostensibly presented as an argument for keeping the Estate Tax (aka the Inheritance Tax and now renamed by wealthy conservatives as the Death Tax). And if that's all it were about and all it had in it, I'd put it on a list of "good to know about" books and leave it at that.

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican partisans began employing an unusually skillful use of language and advertising technique. The Willie Horton ads, for example, used an old NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) technique of "Anchoring via Submodalities," linking Dukakis, at an unconscious level in the viewer's mind, to Willie Horton by the use of color versus black-and-white footage, and background sound. After a few exposures to these psy-ops ads, people would "feel" Willie Horton when they "saw" Dukakis.

"Triumph of the Will," a movie made in 1934 by the legendary Leni Riefenstahl (who died in September 2003 at the age of 101), documents the 1934 Nuremberg rallies organized by Hitler's Nazis, and won gold medals for filmmaking in Venice in 1935 and in Paris in 1937. The Nazis required that the full or a truncated version of it be played before every other movie in theatres all across Germany, a requirement that stood until the Third Reich fell.