In Part I of "In Broad Daylight," ( see http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/rate/4032).
the gigantic "political Ponzi Scheme" known
variously as the "neoconservative movement," "Contract with America,"
"Renewing America," etc. was unmasked for what it is: a fraud perpetrated
on America for the net gain of a very few greedy corporazis.
But the story behind today's GOP goes back further than Newt Gingrich
and pals and is, incredibly, even uglier and rottener than they.

Although the most sophisticated rightwing propaganda campaigns really
got under way in the 1980s with (appropriately ) ex-actor Ronald Reagan
at the helm (one hand on the "wheel," the other passing out America's
resources to corporate "sponsors"), the liaison between the corporations and the
Republican Party dates back roughly seven decades. The unholy alliance was
first forged during the FDR years. Appalled by a president
that supported the average American working man and woman over the bosses,
the bosses swung into action. Using all the resources available to them,
they backed Alf Landon in the 1935 election campaign.

This campaign was described by contemporary political observer Ralph D. Casey
as “an intensive, subtle, highly-organized salesmanship drive to ‘unsell’ President Roosevelt
and to ‘sell’ Governor Landon and his highly-advertised common sense.”
In short, the first GOP “political Ponzi scheme” is developed. Casey describes
the GOP approach as having several key "hammer on" points, which are still
the same points used by the GOP today, with very little change: Accuse the Democrats of
overspending and supporting "big government; pick a bogeyman, usually communists or liberals
(it has now expanded to include Muslims), condemn the New Deal (today the GOP calls it
the "welfare state"), manipulate statistics, accuse Democrats of waging a class war. It was
in this campaign that the corporations and GOP together created what they called "radio spots,"
which have, since the 1980s, been revived and expanded, becoming the rightwing
radio talk shows of Limbaugh, et al. These radio spots were created for one reason
and one reason only: the dissemination of party propaganda.
“No political party has ever excelled the businesslike effectiveness of the Republicans
in the distribution of their party propaganda,” Casey observed.

Just as they do today, in the 1936 election, the GOP courted farmers
and ranchers, flattering them with references to their "All
Americanism" and "rugged individualism." Of course, then as now, the GOP
was, in fact, the greatest enemy of the farmers and ranchers. In the 1930s, the GOP
supported the right of bankers to foreclose on family farms while opposing all Democratic
efforts to provide farm relief. Today, the GOP supports the right of corporate "farmers"
such as Archer Daniels Midland(Supermarket to the World) to create market conditions that have all but wiped out
the family farm in America.

Although the GOP is now opposing campaign finance reform and trying to make
accepting money from corporations a “God given right of
all Americans,” back in 1936, corporate
collusion with political candidates viewed as a new and aberrant beast.
Even the usually non-politically-oriented “Variety” magazine condemned
the GOP’s ruthless commercial campaign machine. “Political parties are being
reduced to merchandize which can be exchanged for votes in accordance with a well-conceived
marketing plan, taking stock of income levels, race, local problems, exactly as
does a commercial sponsor. This differs not one whit from the tactics employed by any
corporation.” It did not differ because, in reality, they were one in the same. By the end
of the 1936 campaign, contemporary observers estimate that the GOP spit out over 170 million
press releases. Having just been guided safely through the Great Depression by FDR,
however, the American people proved they could not be
bought: FDR won by a landslide.

Since 1936, the Democratic Party, of course, has itself received far too many corporate
dollars. However, the dollars thrown to the Dems are usually considered "insurance" or
a "backup plan” by most corporations, with the GOP candidates always
receiving first preference. As a result, the GOP routinely
receives at least twice as many corporate dollars in campaign funding, overall
as the Democratic Party. And those are just the dollars received directly
as donations. The amount of corporate dollars spent behind the scenes on
the GOP – funneled through bogus foundations like Gingrich’s, or some other
sneaky avenue - is far, far higher than that. And of course, the corporate media now
offers its services to the GOP for FREE.

Even during World War II, the GOP/corporations continued to hammer the Democrats.
FDR was continuously and relentlessly under attack, even as he tried to guide
the nation through World War II. Meanwhile, the same corporations that supported
this sort of harassment, including IBM and the Union Banking Corporation,
of which G.W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush was a director, continued
to trade flagrantly with Hitler, even when to do so was considered
not just illegal, but treasonous under the Enemy trading act. (should it surprise
anyone that Prescott’s son, George H., continues to trade with the Bin Ladens?)
http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/afn_articles/bushsecrets.htm

There is compelling historical evidence that the Nazi Party
did not die with Hitler, but, like the evil shape changer from X-men, merely
adopted a new form: the American Republican Party. “ Investigative reporter Christopher Simpson
says in his book "Blowback" that after World War II, Nazi émigrés
were given CIA subsidies to build a far-right-wing power base in the U. S. ,” Carla Binion
reports in Online Journal. ”These Nazis assumed prominent positions in the
Republican Party's "ethnic outreach committees." Simpson documents the fact that these Nazis
did not come to America as individuals but as part of organized groups with
fascist political agendas. The Nazi agenda did not die along with Adolf Hitler. It
moved to America (or a part of it did) and joined the far right of the Republican Party.

“Simpson shows how the State Department and the CIA put high-ranking
Nazis on the intelligence payroll "for their expertise in propaganda
and psychological warfare," among other purposes. The most important Nazi employed by the
U.S. was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's most senior eastern front military intelligence officer. “

There can be no doubt about it – then or today – the corporazis, just like the Nazis,
have no allegiance to anything or anybody but self interest.
If war is good for business, then what war does to human lives is secondary. If regulations
cost money but save lives, then the corporations will always opt for saving
money – to hell with lives. With allies like these, how can the GOP be viewed as having any
fundamental concern for the American people. In short: They CANNOT. The Democrats, true Libertarians,
and Greens may be flawed in their own ways, but none comes even close to the cold and calculated self-interest,
deceit, and greed that lies at the rotten, Third Reich-incubated core of the corporazi party.

As soon as Dwight Eisenhower won the White House in 1952, aided by their Nazi
emigree “advisors,” the GOP set about trying to trash all of the social progress made by
during the FDR years. The Communist witch hunt led by Joe McCarthy went into high gear.
Labor unions were branded as “commies,” while the concept of socialism (which of course
implies things corporazis hate, like universal healthcare, free education, and limits
on capitalism) was lumped in with communism, which, of course, was hysterically condemned as
evil (even though World War II could not have been won without communist Russia). The
McCarthy witch hunts conveniently never managed to unfairly target big corporations or political
allies – it’s targets were always liberals and business entities that either competed with
the largest corporations or those considered potentially undermining such as
journalists (the corporazis didn’t want to have another Sinclair Lewis exposing corporate dirty
linen) or Hollywood (which in the 1930s was beginning to have some hardhitting films with
some sociopolitical content). In fact, anyone viewed as having widespread public influence not controlled
by the corporazis, was considered a potential “enemy.” Even Lucille “I Love Lucy” Ball,
at the height of her phenomenal popularity with the American people, was dragged before the “tribunal.”
The same sort of witch hunt is now underway once more…though couched in different terms.
Instead of being on a commie hunt, the Bush Reich is on a “terrorist hunt.” But the
exact same types are being targeted along with a new and expanded list of “potential
enemies,” including environmentalists, anti-war protestors, and Muslims.

It was in the early and mid-1960s that the corporations began to work extremely closely
with the government to initiate an era of corporate imperialism. A major target of that imperialism was southeast Asia,
which was rich in oil, natural gas, gold, copper, rubber, and wood – all of which,
when seized by force, were practically free, compared to the cost of obtaining
them honestly and fairly back in the U.S. The war in Vietnam was, at its heart,
a war to secure the northern boundaries of the new corporate pork barrel of southeast Asia.
If it was against communism it was against the communist Chinese companies who were competing for
control of the oil/gas pie of Indonesia - ideology had very little to do with it.
The details of this campaign of political exploitation and bloodshed can be found in
“Bloody Hands Full of Gold” and “ExxonMobil’s Dirty Little War.” (see below for links)

The American social revolution of the 1960s through the 1970s proved to be a domestic setback
for the corporations and their friends in the government. Jimmy Carter,
who appeared at the end of this era, was their worst nightmare come true –
a conservation president determined to reduce reliance on fossil fuel. He had to go.
So, just as Clinton was attacked and hamstrung by relentless GOP-driven investigations,
Carter was handed what many believe was an engineered crisis in Iran, brought to its greatest
boil a few weeks before election day 1980. In came Ronald Reagan, a corporate creation
who had been groomed for the role for years during his governship in California.

Having Reagan in office was as if the corporations had been taken on a shopping spree
by an overindulgent godparent, who says “Name anything you want – it’s yours!”
Deregulation, changed regulations, tax loopholes, weakened labor protections,
all flooded America, fattening corporations to an unprecedented degree, while ultimately
leading to one of the biggest economic busts of the century
for the average American, from which it took the first half of the 1990s to recover.

But being the greedy bastards that they are, enough is never enough for the corporazis. They
wanted it ALL. And they could not achieve that as long as the Democrats
remained in control or near-control of Congress and old-style Republicans of conscience
like Jim Jeffords or Olympia Snowe (well, at least she was once – even Olympia
is slipping toward the dark side of late) – remained on board. So, since the 1980s, the corporazis
have had one single-minded goal: a takeover of the U.S. government and the media
and the transformation of the GOP into an ultrarightwing liberal-attack machine.
This process has been broken down into a series of secondary objectives, which have
been effected by enlisting the aid of citizens through a campaign of calculated
deceit: hence the Ponzi scheme analogy.

Among these objectives:

**Remove regulations on corporations (this goal surged ahead under Reagan,
as we all know, and is now in the process of a new, super-aggressive surge under Bush).

**Remove dissenting views from the media and replace them with a “controlled message.”
Even as I write this, the FCC, stacked with corporazis and headed by Michael Powell, the son
of Bush Sec. of State Colin Powell, is working to remove any regulations that insure that
the media monopolies cannot devour what remains of independent media outlets and local
input into media content. The control over media content appears
to now be extending to search engines – google in particular. Although
google does not directly sell listing placement prioritization, it definitely seems to
fulfill a clear rightwing political agenda for key topics of interest to the
corporazi. For example, 9 out of 10 mayors of American cities will tell you that their
cities are in deep trouble – they are underfunded, cutting back crucial services,
education systems are crumbling, and crime is up – the worst of it developing since Bush
was elected. But into google.com to find links to articles
about this situation, and “everything comes up roses,” regardless of your key words!
Although hundreds of articles in the past year or two have been written in city newspapers
on the plight of cities, you’d never know it to read google’s results.
They appear to have some sort of “filtering” system that screens out negative stories
from major publications (which of course reflects badly and revealingly on the Bush/Contract
with America scheme) whilst filtering in negative stories from obscure blogs and glowing propaganda spiels
from corporazi front groups. Example: “The Myth of America’s Underfunded Cities”
from the Cato Institute comes up at the top of the list when you put in “underfunded cities.”

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-188es.html (for an excerpt from a real report, see notes at end of this article).

**Remove dissenting views from the government. The corporations have not only put their people
in Congress, they have channeled money into “spoiler campaigns” against noncorporazi opponents.
For example, it was revealed last year how the GOP offered to fund the campaign
of a Green running against a Democrat in a state election in Washington State, while
here in Maryland (the political landscape I know best) an honest Democrat admitted to a Howard County
reporter she had been approached by GOP operatives offering to give her substantial
help if she would run against the charsimatic Democrat Martin O’Malley in a future governor’s
race as a spoiler. Club for Growth-backed GOP Governor of Maryland Bob Ehrlich (a protege of Bush
and a pampered house guest at the White House and Camp David) is currently conducting a
Club-funded smear campaign against O’Malley, disseminating false information
to inner city blacks – for example, spreading the rumor that O’Malley
lives in posh Baltimore County and rarely comes to the city (O’Malley lives in the city and
rarely leaves it). Does the media – even the local network affiliates – do ANYTHING
to counter this? Hardly. In fact, as a resident of Baltimore, I was amazed to
discover during a search of the U.S. Conference of Mayors homepage that O’Malley had been named
to head the Homeland Security Task Force for the conference, representing all US cities”
Google yields just two relevant results. Here’s an excerpt from short bit by NBC affiliate WBAL:
“Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is the new chairman of the U.S. Conference on Mayors' Homeland Security Task Force. O'Malley was appointed to the post Wednesday [March 19]…
Boston Mayor and Conference President Thomas Menino said O'Malley is widely recognized as a national leader
on the issue of homeland security.” How convenient that such praise of any liberal leader
is invariably suppressed by the corporazi.

But the corporazi have not just media strings, but corporate purse strings,
to pull to “fix” public relations campaigns. Ehrlich has also hired
two blacks to campaign against O’Malley (Erhlich himself hired his own black running mate
Michael Steele as a “diversity front” for a $3,000 per month”consulting fee”).
Ehrlich’s tactics are hardly unique to the Maryland GOP, however. The party is using the same deceive, bribe, and bully
tactics across the nation. Meanwhile, a campaign of firing and harassment-into-resignation against noncorporazis
has been reported in government agencies ranging from NASA to the EPA to the Pentagaon.

** Remove all dissent in the education system and replace it with a pro-corporate message.
This effort is well under way. Teachers now report being swamped in “educational material”
supplied by corporations for free, or having to weed through “educational websites” to find
the real thing among the corporate-planted sites. In addition, teachers who present
views seen as corporate unfriendly (anything pro-environmental, for example),
are subjected to organized attacks by local corporazis.

**Stack the judicial system with rightwing judges. Ronald Reagan
made great inroads in this area. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was blocked
at every turn from trying to appoint any judges at all through various ploys by the
rightwing-dominated Congress. Bush is now trying to shove one rightwing judge after the
other down America’s throat. To their credit, this is one area where
the Democrats have held the line firmly.

** Make dissent of any kind all but impossible. The most chilling
example of this was the legislation proposed by a corporazi in
Washington State, who wanted to make protests in the streets
punishable by life in prison as an act of terrorism. In the meantime,
even the most massive protests are “marginalized” by the statements of
corporazis in Congress and in the media, who, of course, have control of the “microphone.”
If these people had been in control in the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam war protests
would have been dismissed as “fringe,” and the war would have dragged on another 10 years,
with another 50,000 Americans killed or crippled. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks
would have ended up in prison as “terrorists,” while the NAACP would have been
placed high on a list of “terrorism organizations.”

While people like Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay are in the media eye as architects of
the “contract for America” movement (the phony title given the Ponzi Scheme),
the most cold-blooded and most powerful of the corporazis
and their organizations remain behind the scenes and unfamiliar. Take the
Federalist Society (see link below) or Grover Norquist.
Ever hear of him? If you have, I doubt if you are sure just what exactly it is he
does, unless you are into heavy political research. Here’s an excerpt from an
article by Richard Dreyfuss in “The Nation”: “Norquist has also built
a solid working alliance with the Fortune 500 corporate elite and its K Street
lobbyists. "What he's managed to do is to chain the ideological conservatives
together with the business guys, who have money, and to put that money to work in the
service of the conservative movement," says Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's
Future, who's repeatedly clashed with Norquist. "And he picks big issues." Besides
taxes, Norquist is also the go-to guy on virtually all of the right's favorite agenda
items, from privatization of Social Security and Medicare to
school vouchers and deregulation.

Norquist gained notoriety as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's
right hand in the mid-1990s--helping to design the 1994 Contract With America
and rallying the right's grassroots to go to the polls that year, a drive he chronicled
in his book "Rock the House." When Newt crashed and burned, Norquist survived
to become an ally of Gingrich successors, including Tom DeLay, the House majority whip,
and Dick Armey, the majority leader. And since late 1998 Norquist has been George W.
Bush's unofficial liaison to so-called movement conservatives. “ Norquist’s professed
goal, as a both a phony and a corporate dictator? To dismantle the US government, piece
by piece until the enfeebled remains “can be drowned in a bathtub” (a quote) and, once
his rightwing manuvering has served his purpose,
“I want to retire as a squishy middle-of-the-roader.”

While all of this cold-blooded, self-serving dismantling of America
is going on, at the same time, a constant phony image is being
perpetrated and polished on a daily basis of the corporazis as the “true patriots,” the “moral majority,”
the “proud Americans.” Bush himself is a total PR creation, from his ranch
(finished in November of 2000), to his stunt aboard the Abraham Lincoln carrier a few
weeks back. In reality, he is a failed washout who never honestly succeeded at anything he ever
undertook (all successes being due to someone else's money and connections)
who has at best an average intelligence and no real education.
But just look what packaging can do!

And, just what packaging has and is doing and how it’s done is the subject of
In Broad Daylight #3.

Additional and supporting links and references

IN BROAD DAYLIGHT PART ONE:
How the Corporazi GOP Is Pulling Off the Biggest Ponzi Scam in History

http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/rate/4032

Bush Family Financing of Hitler
http://www.rememberjohn.com/Nazis.html

Nightmare in Indonesia: The Bloody Roots of the Bush-Cheney Oil Empire
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/bush-cheney.htm

Bloody Hands Full of Gold: Henry Kissinger and the Corporate Takeover of Indonesia
http://www.newsinsider.org/editorials/bloody_hands_full_of_gold.html

“Chilling Déjà vu: Hitler and Bush: Is History Repeating Itself?”
http://members.tripod.com/~reno4governor/index-8.html

Articles revealing early development of the GOP propaganda machine
and its striking similarities to Nazi and Stalinist technqies:

“The 1936 Republican Campaign,” Ralph D. Casey; 1937, “Public Opinion Quarterly”

Essay by Charles W. Smith, Jr. “Journal of Politics,” August 1939

“Public Opinion Inside the USSR,” by anonymous U.S. government official,
spring 1947 issue of “Public Opinion Quarterly”

“Future of Psychological Warfare,” Hans Spiel, spring 1948 issue, “Public Opinion Quarterly”

“The Ideology of Death,” John Weiss 1996

“Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, 1996

“Hitler” by Joachim C. Fest, 1972

Rightwingers villify environmentalists as "commies."

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0207-05.htm

”Flow Chart” of the rightwing movement
http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/producerism-08.html

Federalist Society
http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=1506

Archived summaries and links to dozens of articles on the rightwing movement
http://www.democrats.com/preview.cfm?term=Right%20Wing

Excerpt from :”Tulsa Reflects the Plight of Struggling Cities”

(From the Virginia-Pilot, a feisty, refreshingly and consistently outspoken
and independent regional newspaper. This article is just one example of hundreds
of similar articles appearing in papers across the country in the past two years.)

“So bad is the economy in Tulsa that the former Oklahoma boom town is now
recruiting parents and grandparents to serve as volunteer substitute
teachers for the rest of the year. The orchestra is all but bankrupt.
Social services spending is expected to decrease 14 percent over the next two years. And private
foundations once counted on to bridge the bad times are struggling themselves.

“Tulsa may be a worst-case scenario. But across the nation, local and state governments
are swimming upstream trying to provide services many view as essential. Virginia's $2.1 billion
budget deficit is larger than some, smaller than others. But the vicious downward
economic cycle perpetuated when state and local tax collections dry up and services dwindle
is evident here and throughout the country.”
(no wonder the “missing Texas Democrats” were cheered on in Oklahoma!)

http://www.hamptonroads.com/pilotonline/opinion/op0101eda.html

Contrast the above article to the Cato Institute’s propaganda piece:
"The Myth of America’s Underfunded Cities”:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-188es.html

Re: suspicious google.com listing system

These keywords were entered into both google.com and teoma.com:
O’Malley Chair Homeland Security Task Force U.S. Mayor’s Conference

Google search results: 2 relevant results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=O%
27Malley+Chair+Homeland+Security+Task+Force+U.S.+Mayor%27s+Conference
&btnG=Google+Search

Compare to:

Teoma.com search result: 19 relevant results:
http://s.teoma.com/search?q=O'Malley+Chair+Homeland+Security+Task+Force+U.S.+Mayor's+Conference
&p=0&page=1&i=0&y=0&qcat=1&l=&qid=
AAEB451DDEB00F4C8FD75ECE02D76E43&b=2&u=10&qsrc=0

Ehrlich’s running mate received $3,000/month “consulting fee”
http://www.blackcommentator.com/12_trojan_horse_watch.html

For stories on Ehrlich election flimflam, Go to Baltimore sunspot archives –
it will cost a few bucks per article, though.