Conspirators, Confederates, and Cronies was written as a blog in 2006 following the release of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips. It was a difficult work to write. It was a task to address the excesses of the Religious Right Minority without condemning the Majority of Christians in the world.
Some eight years later, it still walks the fine line between criticism of a small minority using religion as a political tool, and abject rejection of religion and those who adhere to Christianity.
This work is dedicated to all those souls who have suffered for the cause of truth and liberty under the subjugation of the tyrants, and to the future generations who will inherit whatever comes from the decisions we make today.
Cliff Potts -- May 7, 2014
Some eight years later, it still walks the fine line between criticism of a small minority using religion as a political tool, and abject rejection of religion and those who adhere to Christianity.
This work is dedicated to all those souls who have suffered for the cause of truth and liberty under the subjugation of the tyrants, and to the future generations who will inherit whatever comes from the decisions we make today.
Cliff Potts -- May 7, 2014
A Call to Alms
We are falling under powers that promise a new dark age. This is, in part, the thesis behind Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy. He is not in error. Liberty is under attack. Science is under attack. Religious expression is under attack. Free speech is under attack. Reason is under attack.
For too long, working people have suffered neglect. We have been pressed aside and marginalized. The members of the neo-conservative Right, with their Calvinist leanings, have inflicted misery on working people. They feel no pity for us because they believe what they are doing is the will of God. It is at this point that we begin this discussion of the neo-conservative Right.
Theocon Rising
There is a new word surfacing in the political lexicon of the nation – Theocon. Theocons are people who are deemed theologically correct neo-conservatives. Such people are similar to the supporters of Chairman Mao Zedong during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. That “revolution” was a disaster in China. Starting in 1966, China purged people who were not in ideological alignment with Mao.
We have already seen shades of ideological alignment in this country. Newt Gingrich stepped aside as Speaker of the House in 1998 under allegations of an extra-marital affair dating back to 1995 (Gingrich: Do as I Say, Not as I Do, By Robert Scheer, Published
In Pop Culture
The Dallas singing sensation, the Dixie Chicks, has also fallen from grace. Group member Natalie Maines publicly criticized President George W. Bush in 2003 (Wikipedia: Dixie Chicks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks#Political_controversy). The group has since lost audience, lost air play on the radio (KERA editorial, Dawn McMullan, May 19, 2006), and has received very specific death threats (Dixie Chicks Reveal Death Threats, ETonline, May 12, 2006, http://et.tv.yahoo.com/newslink/14731/).
This is just the tip of the iceberg. A woman with a Kerry sticker on her car was fired from her job. Her employer said that if she wanted to support Kerry, she could work for the presidential candidate. Kerry was also called the Anti-Christ by fundamentalists during the 2004 election campaign (Kerry tied to ‘666’, WorldNetDaily, October 27, 2004).
Toxic Politics
At no point in the past 48 years has the political language been so toxic. My memory and my resources may be limited, but I have not seen politics this twisted in my lifetime, not even during the Vietnam War. Political alignment is not the only consideration now. People must also be religiously aligned. In other words, we have become a nation where creed matters in politics. This has led U.S. Representative Christopher Shays (R-CT) to express in anguish, “This Republican party of
Reflecting Jesus?
I don’t think the majority of Christians in the U.S. want a theocracy or share the extremist views of the neo-conservative Right. However, the neo-conservative Right is powerful, wealthy, radical, and will stop at nothing to seize and hold the power of this nation. That is proven within these pages.
The neo-conservative Right is using the Christian faith as a political tool to divide and polarize the nation. They mouth the words of Jesus while engaging in corruption for their own gain. They want us to think this is a division between Christian and Non-Christian. It is not. It is a fallacious dog-and-pony show to allow themselves the advantage of obtaining unquestioning followers.
In the original release of this blog on May 29, 2006, I attempted to make the nation aware of the blend of radical religious views and ultra- conservative politics that are crippling the nation. I was hoping that it would serve as a wake-up call. Now, less than a month later, having been virtually ignored by the mainstream media and press, I can see this work has taken on another dimension.
Conspirators, Confederates, and Cronies is not for the waning Silent Generation, or the empowered Baby Boomers, or the cynical Generation X; it is for the emerging Millennium Generation. It is written for those who were born between 1983 and 2001. If there is any hope for this nation whatsoever, it resides in their hands.
For reasons we will explore in brief in this tome, we have decided that we are going to be a de facto theocratic nation. History shows that we Americans see ourselves as superior to the rest of humanity in the world. That form of pride gives us a blind spot to our basic humanity. We are gifted with a great geographic location. We have developed into a superpower because that geography made it difficult for the enemies of democracy, pluralism, and diversity to lay waste to our cities during World War II. This in turn left us in a position to rise to power while the rest of the world was recovering from the wounds of that conflict.
Which God is it?
If there is any god involved in this, it is not the god of antiquity. It is the more common god of the collective will of the masses, expressed in a cultural identification that knew we could succeed in throwing off tyranny. Today, however, that same tyranny we avoided is in the pulpits, the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House of the United States of America. It is a tyranny of thoughts dictated by propagandists, of free expression squelched by radical right political correctness, of commercial gain at the expense of fellow citizens. It is the tyranny of winner-take-all social Darwinism.
The Rise of the 1%
I am concerned about the near-term effect of what we see in the nation today. I am uneasy that the Democrats seem to have lost their way. I worry that the Republicans are the only viable political expression left to the nation. I worry that reason and decency are being destroyed by the economic punishment of the new neo-feudalism movement.
Neo-feudalism is an economic model that controls people by controlling who has the economic resources to live a comfortable and secure life. When people are forced to scratch the ground in search of crumbs from the rich man’s table, they are reluctant to raise a cry of protest. That is what that model relies on. Those who are given meager resources are kept in utter ignorance through amusement and infotainment. Mesmerized by flash and dazzle, they won’t look behind the curtain to see the little man pulling the strings of the great Wizard of Media Manipulation.
However, neo-feudalists know that money doesn’t buy loyalty for long. Loyalty and goodness towards others are the only things that can buy loyalty. The Neo-Feudalist is incapable of breeding loyalty. He only knows how to feed the greed of the privileged few.
China and The "B - School" Trust Children
The Neo-Feudalists, with their crisp clean MBAs, can’t think more than ten years in advance. Today we have B Schools (Business Schools) around the nation teaching classes that focus on China. The grand foolishness of this is that China is in a very precarious sociological situation. It has gone from an agriculturally based collective economy to a pseudo-capitalistic economy in a very short time. This has been punctuated by the recent acquisition of advanced military equipment (armored personal carriers, helicopter gun ships, etc.) by the Chinese riot police. The reason given for these military acquisitions is that agitators are disrupting the peaceful transition of the economy.
According to a story that aired on NPR over the past two years, a defector from China’s business community (remember, China is still a Communist nation no matter how we strive to forget that) has warned that China is unstable. Reports from within China tell of entire villages being evicted in order to make room for commercial development. The uprooted villagers, made up of generations of families who farmed on the same plot of land, are rioting with primitive scythes and pitch forks against corrupt officials. The officials, in turn, are calling for police back-up to restore order and to send the leadership to prison where they can work for Wal-Mart. That is not unlike what we see here in the United States of America. Opportunity has decreased, and the prison population is swelling.
The rise of the economy of China is not unlike the rise of the Japanese economy in the 1980s. The “Japan which could say No,” as one popular Japanese book put it, became the Japan of a bust economy by the end of the decade. China’s boom in the 00s, fueled by Wal-Mart’s massive marketing of cheap goods to the U.S., will just as soon come to an end. China is plagued by corruption and internal instability. It is only a matter of time until that becomes apparent. By the time the current batch of B-school grads receive their diplomas, China will have already begun to burn. However, be wary of the disgruntled Chinese peasant, for his view may not only be an internal view.
The Neo-Feudalists, with their crisp clean MBAs, can’t think more than ten years in advance. Today we have B Schools (Business Schools) around the nation teaching classes that focus on China. The grand foolishness of this is that China is in a very precarious sociological situation. It has gone from an agriculturally based collective economy to a pseudo-capitalistic economy in a very short time. This has been punctuated by the recent acquisition of advanced military equipment (armored personal carriers, helicopter gun ships, etc.) by the Chinese riot police. The reason given for these military acquisitions is that agitators are disrupting the peaceful transition of the economy.
According to a story that aired on NPR over the past two years, a defector from China’s business community (remember, China is still a Communist nation no matter how we strive to forget that) has warned that China is unstable. Reports from within China tell of entire villages being evicted in order to make room for commercial development. The uprooted villagers, made up of generations of families who farmed on the same plot of land, are rioting with primitive scythes and pitch forks against corrupt officials. The officials, in turn, are calling for police back-up to restore order and to send the leadership to prison where they can work for Wal-Mart. That is not unlike what we see here in the United States of America. Opportunity has decreased, and the prison population is swelling.
The rise of the economy of China is not unlike the rise of the Japanese economy in the 1980s. The “Japan which could say No,” as one popular Japanese book put it, became the Japan of a bust economy by the end of the decade. China’s boom in the 00s, fueled by Wal-Mart’s massive marketing of cheap goods to the U.S., will just as soon come to an end. China is plagued by corruption and internal instability. It is only a matter of time until that becomes apparent. By the time the current batch of B-school grads receive their diplomas, China will have already begun to burn. However, be wary of the disgruntled Chinese peasant, for his view may not only be an internal view.
Thomas Jefferson and the Beginnings Class War
Make no mistake about this - Neo-Feudalism is nothing more than the caste system of lords and ladies and serfdom of the medieval ages. This is a system where people know their place because their socio-economic class has been ordained by God.
The rising Theocons are empowered to make sure that the Neo-Feudalists have a subservient class to fulfill their will within this nation. The question is: what is that will? Neo-Feudalism seeks nothing but the utter domination of all they survey because in their subjective view of their collective will, they are the chosen of God. This is the basic tenant of Calvinist Theosophy.
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