Talking Tea-Party Paranoid Blues( With Apologies to Bob Dylan)

I was driving in my Jag                         

When I thought I spied a crank            

He was holding a 'merican flag            

Because he just got out of the tank       

I pulled over to the curb                       

And asked him what he'd done             

he pulled out the constitution    

demanding his rightful gun              

"I don't mean to be prying"                       

I had to loudly proclaim                

Revving my loud engine when parting    

I asked him for his government name

He said his name was "T"

And he liked to drive trucks

Looking over my shoulder              

I yelled back to him, "Good-luck."

Cruising the southern canyon

I came upon an odd group

Dressed up in sheets like KK klansmen  

I thought they were a Hollywood troupe

"Do you need an extra?"        

I ask with baited breath        

"You can join our small Party

If you hate the President"

I thought about their offer

Only once and never twice

I said, 'thanks a lot for your proffer

But for y'all I have some advice

Lose the pointy white sheets

Get some three cornered hats

March around like patriots

And help out the plutocrats"

Back on the highway I spied

On the right side of the road

Was my congressman personified

Speaking some bull crap in overload

Slamming down on my brakes

Running to his left side

I demanded my fair take

He was very mortified

"Out of here you useless pain

I'm not your congressman

You people won't find a gravy train

In my American master plan"

Returning to my Jag

I knew I was not spoiled

I flipped off the congressman

And drove away paranoid

I went to my car dealer 

Wanting to trade in my Jag

I wanted to buy a blue Prius

I ain't gonna be no Braxton Bragg 

Talking to the salesman

I said without remorse,

"This Jag I have been driving

Is really a Trojan Horse "

'A Trojan Horse!" he cried out

'And what do you mean pray tell'

I said 'it looks good on the outside

But it is really a car from hell

It takes me to places

I really hate to go

It's like the New York Times

Or a radio talk show'

Sitting in my new blue Prius

I finally drove back home

In my chair unceremonious

I vowed never to go out and roam

Watching the TV news

With my third beer in hand

The newscaster informed me

My world was coming to an end

Social Security's done

Medicare was wiped out too

Obama is a Republican

Harry Reid wears bright red shoes

John Boehner smokes a bong

With Rand Paul plotting wars

While Cantor sings torch songs

saluting the Stars and Bars

What Tea-baggers Want

When observing your surroundings, it is critical to pay attention to everything. Let’s suppose you do a good job making your observation noting every little detail. Now you’re ready to make your analysis, draw some conclusions, and say something smart about what you have observed. 

But let’s suppose you don’t fully understand your environment. You think you do but you really don’t. Consider this, you are living on a perfectly flat surface and you are a perfectly flat person. One day while observing your surroundings, you notice a circle suddenly appear nearby. The circle grows larger and larger then gradually the circle gets smaller and smaller and just as suddenly it disappears. You explain this phenomena by saying it is a fact of nature. It is what it is... unalterable. 

Recently Jim DeMint, former South Carolina Republican Senator and present leader of the Republican Heritage Foundation wrote, "Today, more people than ever before -- 69.5 million Americans, from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries -- depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions....The United States must reverse the direction of these trends or face economic and social collapse."

For DeMint the universe is divided up into good and evil, black and white, government and business. In DeMint's manichean world view capitalist business is good and government is bad. Over his entire public career DeMint repeats the tired message that the government must get out of the way of capitalist entrepreneurs because government regulations hold back economic progress and that, according to him, hurts everyone. 

What DeMint fails to fully comprehend is the free market he adores is nothing more than a two dimensional rump representation of a far more complex three dimensional economic phenomena.

DeMint parrots a false distinction between the government and business. It is generally agreed that the economy is the basis of all civil society, but DeMint fails to see that civil society includes government. Change the economy and you change the government. For example, reverting back to an agricultural economy would eliminate most industrial production wiping out the industrial working class, the middle class, factory owners, and the need for bankers, corporate lawyers, and stock markets. A government built on an agricultural economy would no longer need to manufacture consent but would rule by decree.

From DeMint’s flat-world point of view he therefore becomes blind to the fact that the American government and big business (the oligopolies) are fraternal twins. Every branch of the American economy, and every market within each branch is dominated to the tune of at least 40% by a few corporations. These oligopolies profit from on again-off again government regulation because that regulatory flexibility guarantees their profits. These oligopolies compete in advertising only, rarely competing over price. The remaining share of each market is fought over by many small and medium size businesses which must compete in the "free" market on price. Thus small business profit margins are slim because they do not benefit from the flexibility of government regulation. 

For DeMint’s free marketeers the wolf is always pacing back and forth before the front door. Government almost always bails out their oligopolistic brothers and, at the same time, disingenuously praises the virtues of free market competition where the small fry businessmen are forced to swim or sink. To put it another way, DeMint’s free marketeers (including Tea Party types) are drowning in the deep end of the swimming pool yelling for help while the government life guard is watching over the oligopolies sipping cocktails in the hot tub. 

Because flat-worlders, like Jim DeMint, have a two dimensional perception, that’s why they can’t see the appearing-disappearing circle is actually a sphere intersecting a plane in three dimensions. Moreover, DeMint’s two dimensional vision for the United States can never fully understand the problems facing small business in our nation. And if he can’t fully understand what he is seeing, then, at best, his proposed solutions might make sense on his flat-world planet but on our spherical planet his solutions can never be anything but muddled headed.  

Then there are political implications, ominous political implications spreading out from DeMint's flat world ideology. In a republic the government is supposed to mediate disputes between contending parties in civil society. Otherwise the more powerful in civil society will exploit and dominate the weak and powerless. Instead of strengthening our republican government's mediation power, DeMint from his flat-world view wants to strengthen those civil institutions which are selfish and authoritarian ultimately destroying the republic. This is what DeMint and the right-wing Tea-baggers want. 

Burying the Truth Along with the Dead

It has been ten years since the President George W. Bush and his Neo-Con colleagues lied to the American people dragging us into fighting yet another war in the middle-east. The so-called evidence that Bush et.al. ginned up, manipulated, manufactured, and sexed up and then sold to the American people in order to start the invasion of Iraq was breathtaking in its arrogance. But the lies Bush told had accomplices, he had fellow travelers. The corporate news reported without suspicion and in many cases with aggrandizement every Bush deceit. Recently Phil Donahue explained how Chris Matthews pushed him out of liberal MSNBC because Donahue saw through the Bush lies and Matthews was pro-Iraq war. 

But Bush's lies and the complicity of the corporate news in the selling of the Iraq War is no longer the issue. The issue is the continued lying about the aftermath of the Iraq War which still goes on today. Nowhere do you see acknowledge the devastating high birth defect rates in Fallujah and Basra being reported elsewhere. No one in the corporate media talks about the American military's use of depleted uranium weapons and neutron bombs throughout southern Iraq. 

Nowhere do you see the corporate news talk about the actual number of deaths the Iraqi people suffered. The corporate news either repeats Bush's lies that 35,000 Iraqi died or the corporate news throws out a whole slew of random numbers, anywhere from 50,000 deaths to 150,000 deaths, coming from compromised sources. 

On the other hand, the British scientific medical journal Lancet reported 700,000 dead in Iraq by 2006. Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method used by the Lancet from which it gathered it's data, "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." Scientific American positively confirmed the Lancet methodology. On September 14, 2007, ORB (Opinion Research Business), an independent UK based polling agency, published an estimate of the total casualties of the Iraq war. The figure suggested by ORB stands at 1,220,580 deaths. This estimate, although conducted independently, and using a different polling methodology, is consistent with the Lancet findings if accounting for the additional 14 months covered by the ORB poll. The fact that the American corporate press continues to play down Iraqi deaths tells us that American government lies about Iraq roll on and on.

If you were to give an enema to George W Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the leadership of the corporate news in America......give each one an enema.....you can bury each one in a matchbox!

Wither America

After the successful subversion in 1978 of California’s democracy and California’s budget process known as the Prop 13 Trojan Horse, the California Republican Party set their sights on the Presidency of the United States. 

Conservative Republicans, who constituted a small minority within the National Republican Party, never came to terms with the social legislation enacted during the 1930s and 1960s. Unlike their allies among the eastern establishment Republicans, western and mid-western conservatives stewed in anger being forced to the national policy sidelines. 

After the Goldwater election wipeout in 1964, Republican rightists bided their time, quietly organized, and when the time was right, they pounced. Their time arrived  in 1980 when these rightists  managed to get their leader, Ronald Reagan, elected President of the United States. Immediately under Reagan a concealed stratagem was crafted to destroy Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society social legislation. The national debt would become Reagan’s and the rightist’s new Trojan Horse. 

In 1981 an inflation-stagnation crisis known as stagflation gripped the nation because both Republicans and Democrats paid for the Vietnam War by printing money. The national debt on the day Republican Ronald Reagan became president was 900 billion dollars. When Reagan left office inflation had been brought under control but the national debt rose to 2.4 trillion dollars. At the end of Reagan’s second term, the country owed more to foreigners than it was owed, and the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to the world's largest debtor nation. Four years later George H.W. Bush pushed the national debt up to 4.5 trillion dollars. Eight years later at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, the national debt stood at 5 trillion dollars but Clinton left a 1.2 trillion dollar surplus to his successor, George W. Bush. 

During the eight years of George W. Bush's administration, Bush started two wars and paid for them by selling United States Treasury Bonds world wide. Meanwhile Bush passed the largest tax cut for the top 1 percent in U.S. history. Then the Bush administration passed legislation that created Medicare part D and paid for it by, you guessed it, selling U.S. Treasury Bonds. When the economy returned to crisis mode in September 2008, the Bush Administration created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which, again, used Treasury Bonds to buy up the debt of private banks. When Bush left office the national debt stood at 13 trillion dollars! 

By 2010 the rightist Republicans had morphed into the Republican-Tea Party. Consider this: From 2001 to 2010 Generation Xers lost 55 percent of their wealth. Between 2007 and 2010 all Americans lost 38.8 percent of their total wealth. Meanwhile the top 1 percent shockingly took in a full 93 percent of all the income gains in 2010, leaving the other 7 percent of gains to be sprinkled among the vast majority of society.

In violation of the key Keynesian economic principle of paying down debt during economic upswings, the rightist Republicans had constructed the Trojan Horse of borrowing and spending never paying back that which was borrowed. And to add economic insult to economic injury the monies borrowed had to be paid back with interest insidiously increasing the sum total of the borrowed monies to foreign governments, foreign banks, and private U.S. banks. If you don’t believe me then take a close look at the Ryan Budget plan or take a second look at Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. Both plans are brand spanking new Trojan Horses designed to demolish Keynesian Economics, smash Social Security and Medicare, and lord over an even bigger transfer of wealth upward. 

Because Republican-Tea Party consciously and deliberately threw the United States into massive debt they now have the tools to turn America into a nation of one percent dreams and ninety-nine percent nightmares. Wither America?

Prop 13 In California Then and Now

Until the mid 1960s California, particularly Southern California, practiced widespread housing discrimination against blacks and Latinos.

 “In the years following World War II, African Americans found themselves confronted with increasing patterns of housing segregation. They were excluded from the suburbs and the real estate industry, which severely restricted educational and economic opportunities. In 1963, the California Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which outlawed restrictive covenants and the refusal to rent or sell property on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, marital status or physical disability."

 “In reaction to the law, a well-funded coalition of realtors and landlords was determined to protect white neighborhoods and property values. They immediately began to campaign for a referendum that would amend the state Constitution to protect property owners' ability to deny minorities equal access to housing. Known as Proposition 14, it was passed by 65 percent of the voters.” After the passage of Prop 14 it was possible to again allow landlords to do anything they wanted, including tearing up contracts and raising rents or evicting tenets whenever they felt like it.

In 1967, in Reitman v. Mulkey, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the decision of the California Supreme Court in 1966 and ruled that Proposition 14 had violated the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Prop 14 was dead. Or was it?

The rural areas of California in the 1960s, particularly in the Central Valley, the Salinas Valley and the Imperial Valley had become ripe for a new Civil Rights movement. Farm workers were being paid subsistence wages, forced to live in shacks without running water, and were being poisoned by pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. On August 22, 1966, Cesar Chavez announced the formation of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

Over the next ten years, and confronting the violent opposition of big land owners, the United Farm Workers led by Chavez was able to organize and win contracts for agricultural workers all over California.

By 1976 two powerful Civil Rights groups were in place, one in the countryside and the other in the urban areas. Also in 1976, one of the youngest governors ever elected and only the third Democrat in the 20th Century was ensconced in Sacramento. The stage was now set to push forward a progressive agenda for California, and the California Republican Party was watching carefully and they were not pleased.

Until the mid 1970s there were two reactionary political forces operating in California, neither of which had much in common. By the mid 1970s the big corporate farmers in rural California who had lost their fight against the United Farmer Workers Union and the big real estate interests in California urban centers who had fought against the Rumford Fair Housing Act merged around Prop 13. The progessive forces that had defeated them in the 60s were now being retargeted.

The Republican Party’s answer to the progressive threat was Prop 13. By 1978 California homeowners were seeing their property taxes sky-rocket. Many believed, particulary the World War II generation, that higher and higher property taxes were going to drive them out of their home at a time when many were nearing retirement. Both the Democrats and the Republicans at the federal and state level swept under the carpet the fact that the failure to pay for the Vietnam War was driving inflation, which in turn drove up property taxes which were, inturn, indexed to home valuation.

Prop 13 was a perfect example of something profoundly thought through. Prop 13 was a marvel for its sophistication at a deeper political level and its simplicity at the shallow public level. Prop 13 concealed it's reaction to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s by appealing to the fears of middle class home owners because that's where the votes were.

The Republican Party front men leading the charge to pass Prop 13 were Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann. Jarvis, for years, had been a lobbiest for the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association in Sacramento. The L.A. Apartment owners were some of the loudest opponents of the Rumsford Fair Housing Act. Gann was rabidly anti-tax. Both men portrayed themselves as small government conservatives fighting for the little guys who were being steamrolled by big government. Jarvis and Gann were telling the California middle class one thing, but they were quietly fighting for an entirely different class of people.

Jarvis and Gann were able to sell Prop 13 to the vast majority of angry and frightened middle class voters by engaging in a campaign designed to obfuscate the furtive loop holes contained within Prop 13.

Prop 13 had two historically devastating effects on public policy in California. The first was political and the second was economic. Politically, Prop 13 mandated that to pass a tax increase in California a two-thirds super majority was required. In addition Prop 13 also required a two-thirds super majority to pass the yearly California state budget. In practice that meant 26 Republicans from mostly rural and inland districts in a California Assembly numbering 80 members, and/or 13 mostly rural and inland Republican Senators in a 40-member Senate could veto all fiscal policy in the state. And that is precisely what California Republicans did, causing massive gridlock in the California legislature for the next 35 years.

Economically, Prop 13 reduced property taxes by more than 50 percent and froze property taxes at that level, only allowing small increases overtime. But there was a mega loop hole in Prop 13, which said if a family or individual sold their property and bought a more expensive property the sellers would lose their Prop 13 tax reduction. Jarvis and Gann were well aware that most Californians sold their homes and bought up every five to seven years. In other words, it was inevitable that home owner property taxes would raise to their pre-Prop 13 levels.

On the other hand, the big corporate famers in the Central Valley, the Salinas Valley and the Imperial Valley alongside big corporate property, mining and industrial interests who tended to hang onto their income property saw their property taxes drop.

Another big loop hole in Proposition 13 stated that as long as the property stayed technically deeded to the corporation, ownership of the property could effectively change without triggering Prop 13's provisions. Corporations could sell their property to other corprations, but unlike home owners they got to hang onto their Prop 13 tax break--a great deal according to the Prop 13 law.

There can be no doubt that Prop 13 was a colossal Trojan Horse. Hidden within Prop 13 were provisions designed to give disproportionate political power to a California Republican Party in decline. In one fell swoop the politically progessive advances of the 1960s and 70s were rolled back by an obstructionist and reactionary Republican Party minority in Sacramento. At the same time Prop 13 allowed big corporate land and real estate interests to increase their profits by reducing substantially their tax responsibilities. Before Prop 13 corporations paid about 45 percent of California taxes. After Prop 13 corporate taxes fell to 8 percent.

Prop 13’s wreckage did not end there. Before Prop 13 California schools were some of the best in the United States. After Prop 13 they became some of the worst. And ominously, the Trojan Horse that was Prop 13 would become the strategy by which nearly all Republican Party initiatives at the state and national level would embrace including immigration, the national debt, war, and public sector labor unions.    

Student Rebellion At Cal-State Fullerton; A Hidden History

The year was 1964 and the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. White students from nearly every major university in the nation were streaming into the south and witnessing first hand the repression of black people by the Southern Establishment. One of those white students who had just returned from the South was a kid named Mario Savio from the University of California Berkeley. Mario wanted to advocate for the Civil Rights Movement and protest against the Vietnam War on the Berkeley campus. Clark Kerr, the Berkeley Chancellor, at first refused to allow any political activities on the Berkeley campus. In response Mario and more than 800 students staged a peaceful sit in on the steps of Sproul Hall. Chancellor Kerr responded with police wielding batons and mass student arrests.

On the sidelines was a washed up movie actor and McCarthy Era “witness” named Ronald Reagan. By the mid 1960s Reagan had surrounded himself with some of the wealthiest and most reactionary businessmen in California. Among Reagan's advisors were the notorious department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, beer baron Joseph Coors, and auto huckster Holmes Tuttle. Reagan and his kitchen cabinet openly criticized Kerr for being too lenient on student protesters. Together they decided to run Reagan for California Governor. In 1966 the California Republican Party nominated Reagan for Governor. Reagan's campaign emphasized two main themes: "to send the welfare bums back to work," and, in reference to burgeoning anti-war and anti-establishment student protests at the University of California at Berkeley, "to clean up the mess at Berkeley."

After defeating two-term Democratic Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Reagan insisted on two things upon taking office. One was the scalp of Clark Kerr, president of the University of California. The second was the imposition of tuition on UC and Cal-State students. Kerr was soon gone and, in violation of the university's long history of tuition-free public education, the Regents of the University of California agreed to impose for the first time a tuition on the university's students.

By 1970, the year Reagan would run for a second term as California Governor, Reagan’s attempts to squash dissent on the campuses of the University of California and the California State Colleges was in utter shambles. Tuition at the University of California had reached $600.00 per year or 364 minimum wage hours. Tuition at the California State Colleges was $140.00 per year or 85 minimum wage hours. Reagan’s pro Vietnam War stance and his tuition hikes made the Governor so unpopular on every UC and State College campus that it became impossible for him to visit any campus with one exception: Cal-State Fullerton (CSF), “...the closest college in the world to Disneyland” in the heart of Reagan Country and, with icing on the cake, the CSF mascot was the Republican Party Elephant!

During the Spring of 1969 Reagan rammed through the legislature Penal Code 415.5. Penal Code 415.5 made it a crime to disrupt any “Academic Convection” and assured the prosecution of hecklers. With Penal Code 415.5 in hand Governor Reagan went to California State College Fullerton on February 9, 1970 to make a blatant political speech in his campaign for re-election. Reagan had Cal-State President William B. Langsdorf advertise the Governor’s speech as an Academic Convection. Reagan would make his speech in the gym.

In his introductory remarks President Langsdorf warned the students, “...not to interfere with or disrupt the meeting, and promised immediate expulsion to anyone who attempted to do so.” Then Reagan stepped before the microphone to begin his speech. Within moments a shouted “Fuck you!” was heard throughout the gym. Caught in mid-vowel, Reagan composed himself and started all over. Again more boos and fuck yous and get fucked coming from different parts of the gym. Finally calm was restored and the Governor finished his speech. As Reagan was about to leave, he surveyed all the students then he leaned into the microphone and bellowed, “Shut up!” Reagan immediately left the gym followed by his retinue of hanger-on's.

On February 16, 1970 Reagan hecklers David Mackowiac and Bruce Church were charged by CSF administrators with “...disrupting an academic assembly and using abusive language to a member of the college community.” The following day Fullerton police arrested MacKowiac and Church charging them under Penal Code 415.5.

On February 25th students occupy President Langsdorf ‘s office. Langsdorf called in the shotgun armed Fullerton Tactical Squad to clear out the students. The next day students occupied the entire administration building. Langsdorf then obtained a restraining order against seven named students and 500 John Does. The Tac Squad was again called in to clear the building.

On March 3rd student angered by what they consider the closed “Kangaroo Court” trial of MacKowiac and Church demand the trial be opened to the public. The trial was quickly canceled. The Fullerton Tac Squad along with Tac Squads from nearby cities were then brought onto the CSF campus. Several thousand students assembled in the Quad confronting the 90 member reinforced Tac Squad. The Tac Squad then began it’s advance into the Quad clubbing students, videotaping students, and eventually arresting 19 students. Video types were used to later identify and arrest ten more students over the next few days. Meanwhile to prevent further bloodshed Anthropology Professor Dr. Hans Leder declares the Quad an open air classroom and named it Anthro 069.

Throughout March and April student unrest at CSF ebbed and flowed following events around the country. At the end of March activist students published a photo history of the previous two months. The book was named “The People vs. Ronald Reagan.” The inside of the book’s dust cover was a photo of the 29 students who had be arrested. All the students were standing in front of gargantuan American flag and all the students were buck naked. In the corner of the dust cover it said Fuck You!! Ronald Reagan!

In April Governor Reagan displayed his militancy describing his thoughts on higher education by saying loudly, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” That was like turning up the heat on the simmering pot of student activism at CSF. Again the campus erupted with renewed student demonstrations.

At the end of April 1970 President Nixon decided to widen the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. In response students at Kent State University in Ohio protested the invasion. On May 4, 1970 Ohio National Guard troops open fire on student protesters. Nine unarmed students were wounded and four students killed. Fearing the invasion and shootings would provoke further student demonstration, Governor Reagan ordered all the UCs and Cal-States temporarily closed. Five hundred student activist at CSF responded to Reagan’s closure order by occupying and barricading the Music Speech and Drama Building.

By the end of May 1970 all protests and student activism had come to end on the CSF campus. More than 7,000 students had participated in the protests. Because of the demonstrations, sit-down strikes, building occupations, and classroom boycotts, President Langsdorf ordered all students to be given passing grades for the semester ending the academic year early. President Langsdorf later that same year was promoted by Governor Reagan becoming Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the California State University.

Today it cost more than $14,000 in tuition and fees to attend a UC or about 1795 minimum wage hours per year. That is a 500 percent increase over 1966. In 1966 The University of California was regarded as the number one public university in the United States. Today the UC is ranked #21.



T.C. Borelli

Abe Lincoln and Karl Marx

The Republican Party started out in 1854 as an anti-slavery coalition of folks living in the Northeast and upper Midwest who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The first meeting of the new Republican Party was held in a school house in Ripon, Wisconsin. Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed slavery to spread outward from the south, northern activists organized themselves around the slogan, “Free Labor, Free Land, Free men!”

Elaborating on the idea of Free Labor, Abraham Lincoln, who became the first President elected by Republican Party in 1860, gave the following annual address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859:

“
...But another class of reasoners hold the opinion... that there is no such thing as a free man being fatally fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer.... They hold that labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior and greatly the superior of capital.”

After Lincoln was reelected to the Presidency in 1864, Karl Marx on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association centered in London, England, wrote Lincoln the following letter:


“Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority...From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class....the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes (in Europe) for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slave holders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic....The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world”

Karl Marx received the following reply via the American Ambassador to Great Britain Charles Francis Adam:

“I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him. So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.”

Abraham Lincoln as a leading champion of the rights of the working class? My-oh-my has the Republican Party changed its spots.