Republican budget plan crooked, a 'farce'
This administration's budget resolution is a farce. It paves the crooked way for tax cuts for the rich. Adding trillions to our debt is not fiscally conservative. Defunding safety nets so you can give your donors and yourselves a tax cut is wrong.
When the GOP-led House can't even do the normal process with Democrats, it speaks volumes on how corrupt the process has become because of GOP bully tactics. Arkansans are watching. We are not dumb. We will not stand for it. We will not go backward. We've suffered enough. I lost my entire retirement in 2008 thanks to this kind of stuff. I almost lost my home, but thanks to Obama it was saved. I still haven't recovered financially and Arkansas' GOP keeps trying to make me poor again or keep me poor, and it isn't right.
Do the right thing for Arkansans or quit and come home. We are sick of it.
Kerry Crawford
Fayetteville
Other opinion leaders worse than Alinsky
Mike Masterson seems determined to make Saul Alinsky, the 1970s community organizer, activist and author of the book, "Rules for Radicals," the next Arkansas villain du-jour. That doesn't surprise me.
The corporate elite in companies like Tyson, Walmart, Jones, etc., don't want the underpaid masses who can barely make ends meet to organize for better wages.
Machiavelli's book, "The Prince," was written to help the rich retain power. Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" was written to help the poor gain power. You decide whose was the more just cause.
Of course, Masterson fails to mention that the principles and tactics espoused in Alinsky's book were used by the Tea Party to gain power.
And while we're on the subject of villains, no one at this newspaper dares mention the name of Lewis F. Powell Jr., the right-wing Supreme Court associate justice and the author of the Powell Memorandum, which was the 1971 blueprint outlining the eradication of U.S. democracy and its replacement by our now omnipotent corporate state.
No one mentions the corporate high priest of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman and his Chicago school, who masterminded the exploitation of labor and resources in Third World countries to exhaustion with polices of shock-doctrine economic warfare, destroying whole cultures and countries in the name of pure corporate greed. These policies now threaten the very biosphere that supports life on this planet.
No one mentions Doug Coe and the far-right Christian Fellowship in Washington, D.C., and their bloody history of supporting dictators and regimes that committed genocide with U.S. support, killing millions of innocents in the name of containing communism.
These men were motivated either by pure corporate greed or a perverted, self-serving interpretation of the Christian faith.
Saul Alinsky was motivated by a moral sense of social justice. He was a saint compared to these monsters and the evil they have wrought.
Brad Bailey
Fayetteville
Commentary on 11/01/2017