I’m not a fan of Ralph Nader, but he’s just published a new book, Unstoppable, which argues that a powerful new political alliance could emerge between those on the left and those on the right who oppose the crony-capitalist state, another word for plutocracy or oligarchy.

So far the Crony-Capitalist Democratic Party and the Crony-Capitalist Republican Party have implemented an ingenious strategy for preventing such an alliance.  It involves getting the left and right to argue about hot-button issues to divert attention from the plutocratic agenda of both parties.  Corporate America, which owns the government, doesn’t care what label politicians wear as long as they do its bidding.

The Crony-Capitalist Democratic Party has supplemented this strategy in Presidential politics by trading on the glamor of electing the first African-American President, and will soon substitute for this the glamor of electing the first female President.  Obama and Clinton are both spokesmodels for the plutocracy — something the plutocracy hopes Americans won’t notice.

The big hot-button issues at the moment are gun control, gay rights and abortion.  Americans are deeply divided on these issues, which can arouse passions that drive rational thought, and even practical self-interest, from the mind.  Is there any way around this?  Can anti-oligarchic citizens on both sides of these issues find enough common ground to form an alliance against the oligarchy?  Could they even decide to put these issues on hold for a few years in order to take the country back from the corporations?

Well, liberals might face the simple fact that a comprehensive reform of gun regulation has no practical hope of being enacted any time soon.  We might be able to close the gun-show loophole — something a large majority of Americans across the political spectrum support.  Could anti-corporate folks on the right brave the wrath of the NRA and join with liberals to support this?  Maybe.

Abortion rights are under grave assault at the state level in certain places, but there’s very little that can be done about this on the Federal level.  Abortion rights will be preserved in principle as long as Roe v. Wade holds, and it will probably hold for a long time to come.  National leaders are not going to have much effect in this area, one way or the other.  Could those on opposite sides of this issue face up to those facts and agree to disagree on the underlying values involved?  Maybe.

Gay rights is a movement that is now irreversible, largely due to the rulings of courts.  Gay marriage is becoming legal in one state after another and will inevitably be legal or at least recognized everywhere.  That battle has already been won, or lost, depending on your point of view.  Could conservatives accept that fact in the interest of an alliance with those on the other side of the issue?  Maybe.

And maybe an agreement to sidestep the hot-button issues is the only hope we have of creating a movement to take the government back from the corporations.  It’s worth a try.

I suggest a summit meeting between Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren in Belle Fourche, South Dakota — the geographic center of the fifty United States.  Surely they both must realize that they have more in common with each other, in terms of what a Federal official might accomplish, than either of them have with Hillary Clinton or whatever corporate stooge the Crony-Capitalist Republican Party puts forward to try and stop Paul.

Slaveholders and abolitionists once made common cause to support the Constitution — an excruciatingly painful compromise, but one worth it in the long run.  What men and women have done, men and women can do.

Barack Obama has become the voice of Big Brother, trying to make it sound reasonable to strike a balance between gutting the Fourth Amendment and destroying it altogether. This is an image of “moderation” in a totalitarian state.

There has never been an American President as vile as Barack Obama. If you don’t understand why, you’re living in a dream world.

This has been a public service announcement.

I’ve always thought that Chris Christie was a mean-spirited sort of jerk, but I’ve never hated him the way many progressives seem to hate him — until now.

There’s something about the George Washington Bridge scandal that nauseates me. It’s just so shabby, so arrogant, so petty, so ugly. I realize it doesn’t rise to the level of misconduct of a Barack Obama, but there is something magnificently, grandly evil about Obama’s attempt to gut the U. S. Constitution during the course of his two terms in office.

Even the Tea Party’s willingness to wreck the U. S. economy rather than accept political impotence has a kind of expansive lunatic folly to it that is impressive. But the GW Bridge scandal is just sad, pathetic, the work of people who have the souls of insects.  The whole thing sickens me.

Testimony before the Warren Commission of Alan Belmont, assistant to the director of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), in charge of all investigative work:

Mr. BELMONT: Our activities are directed to meet the terrific responsibility we have for the internal security of the country, but to meet it under the law. We feel that to place security as such above the rights of the individual or to increase these controls beyond what is absolutely essential is the first step toward the destruction of this free society that we enjoy. We have been asked many times why we don’t pick up and jail all Communists. The very people who ask those questions don’t realize that if action, unrestrained action, is taken against a particular group of people, a precedent is set which can be seized on in the future by power-hungry or unscrupulous authorities as a precedent, and which inevitably will gnaw away at this free society we have, and sooner or later will be applied to the very individuals who are seeking this action.

[This is somewhat hypocritical, given what Hoover was willing to do outside the law when it suited him, but still . . . things have changed since 1964.]

J. Edgar Hoover, before the Warren Commission, in 1964:

Mr. HOOVER: There is argument, of course, that by passing firearms legislation you are going to take the privilege of hunting away from the sportsmen of the country. I don’t share that view with any great degree of sympathy because you have to get a license to drive an automobile and you have to get a license to have a dog, and I see no reason why a man shouldn’t be willing, if he is a law-abiding citizen, to have a license to get a firearm whether it be a rifle or revolver or other firearm. It is not going to curtail his exercise of shooting for sport because the police make a check of his background. If he is a man who is entitled to a gun, a law-abiding citizen, a permit will be granted.

[Fifty years later you can still buy a firearm at a gun show without a background check.]

In Warren Commission testimony about Oswald’s time in Russia, there are some condescending and sarcastic asides about the Soviet government’s practice of routinely intercepting private communications within its borders — the attitude being, well, that’s what you’ve got to expect from a totalitarian system.

Yep.

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The image of Barack Obama eavesdropping on the private cell phone conversations of Angela Merkel is so disgusting, so craven, so masturbatory, so shameful, so nauseating that I’m amazed the man can wake up in the morning and present himself to the world as the President of the United States of America, an office once held by George Washington, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt — men who would have allowed their fingernails to be pulled out with pliers before engaging in such behavior. Obama has dragged the American Presidency into depths of moral depravity that the Founders could not have imagined, much less created Constitutional mechanisms to punish and prevent.

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The darkness that’s about to descend on America is almost unimaginable. It will mark the end of The Republican Party forever — Republicans will take their place in the dustbin of history alongside the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists, but this will be cold comfort in the midst of the misery they will will have inflicted on America and the world. For centuries mankind will puzzle over this question — “How could the American people have allowed this to happen?”

The Republican Party is is the process of staging a coup against representative democracy in America. It may or may not succeed, but it is at the very least the most momentous event in American history since South Carolina voted to secede from the Union in 1860. People who see it as a “spat” between the two major parties are living in a dream world, as most people were in 1860 — until they heard the sound of the guns.

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If you drive a car off a 300-foot cliff, it won’t kill you. Only the car hitting the rocks at the bottom of the cliff will kill you.

We’re just advocating driving the car off the cliff. We’re not advocating the crash at the bottom of the cliff. I mean, come on — we’re not crazy.

. . . until the Republicans crash the world economy. 25% unemployment is on the horizon, probably within a year, which means that once they exhaust their savings, about half of the American people will not know where their next meal is coming from. Thus it was in the last Great Depression. Once the markets crash, it will be impossible to reverse this — say, oops, we were just kidding. When America defaults on its debts, its place as the world’s biggest and most stable economy will be finished for generations to come. The century of China is about to begin.

Save your tears for that, Mr. Speaker.

. . . from this pit of vipers?