Open Letter to Americans
March 4, 2002
By fed2dneck

You have been taken in by a campaign of lies from right-wing con artists out only for total domination of the people. It's long overdue we show up conservatives as the liars they are.

America, we understand the reason you are suspicious of liberals and their motives: you have been lied to by conservatives, or more appropriately, fascists, who do not have your best interest in mind. You have been force-fed an endless stream of misinformation, deliberate anti-truths, half-truths, and untruths, by a tiny minority of powerful, anti-democratic (small d), un-American and anti-American forces whose sole purpose is to trick you into surrendering your rights and personal freedoms, all in the name of preserving and protecting freedom and democracy for future generations.

Conservatives have taken for themselves all that is good and right about liberalism, namely, patriotism, religion, siding with the underdog, and free enterprise within reason, and have projected their moral bankruptcy of treachery, selfishness, greed, belligerence, murderous hatred, and dictatorial repression onto liberals, making the left a convenient scapegoat and perverting the meaning of "liberal" from the badge of honor it once was, making it sound like a dirty word. You have been sucker-punched by a right-wing scam that manipulates your minds by manipulating the English language; you have been lied to-no wonder you're confused. Those lies have been peppered with half-truths not only to attack liberals, but also to attack ordinary patriotic, freedom-loving Americans like you. Today's right wing of the Republican Party, like the Fascists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany during the 1930's and early '40's, are as patriotic as was Benedict Arnold; as faithful to God as was Judas; as protective of life as was Theodore Bundy; as freedom-loving as was King George III; as tolerant of differences as the KKK. In short, the right is judging the left by itself; the conservative pot is calling the liberal kettle black.

Conservatives have hijacked patriotism, twisting our love of America to mean a mindless, superficial display of flag-waving, designed to mask their un-American hatred for our Constitutional rights and basic liberties. They demand blind allegiance and unquestioning obedience to Republican presidents as proof; the further right they are, the more they insist that we the people surrender our right to question government. Yet they don't extend this demand for allegience to a Democratic President; in fact, they demonize liberals, defined as anyone to the left of Mussolini, Hitler, or Attila the Hun, as the traitors to the Constitution they are.

They have perverted religion and morality, especially Christian morality, for their own selfish gain, and took advantage of your faith in God to acquire power. You have been hoodwinked into thinking G.O.D. means G.O.P., when in fact nothing is further from the truth. You have been turned against your neighbor because he happens to be of a different ethnic group, race, religion, political party, sexual orientation, disability, or income level. Even your clergyman doesn't urge you to love him or her. You have been told you'd go to Hell if you espoused women's equality with men (so what if God made the sexes equal yet with differences), you believed racism was a sin, you were to show compassion to the poor "losers", down on their luck by no fault of their own. You have been told that God hates sinners, when in reality He hates the sin, but loves the sinner. You have been lied to.

They have taken free enterprise and capitalism and distorted these noble ideals, so that the very words-free enterprise, free trade-have come to mean unbridled corporate monopolism. In other words, they're the only ones free to trade, to buy, sell, employ (or refuse to employ), to manipulate prices and wages. You were told that deregulation of cable and utilities would provide competition in areas where local, regulated monopolies existed. You were promised lower guaranteed rates, more choice in providers, and better service; the truth is, you got none of the above. When cable deregulation became law, your cable bills went up from under $10 to $30 or more, and keep going up every year; service outages became more frequent; the big company swallowed up the smaller ones. The same holds true for electric deregulation: electric bills go up with little or no notice, and more often; those "low rates" came with hidden fees that no average American can understand. Promises, promises..

They're the ones who complain about being overtaxed, when many of these multibillion-dollar, multinational corps don't pay one red cent in taxes; some of them get refunds on taxes they never paid! Yet they whine for more tax cuts, still more tax loopholes, and fleece you into going along with their rob-the-middle-class schemes by suggesting that overstuffing the wallets of the already superrich will benefit you by saving you a few dollars a year in taxes (they don't bother to mention that billionaires will save millions of dollars in taxes). This is the Big Lie of trickle-down economics: feed the rich and hope they'll dole out to the peons beneath them - only the money never reaches your pockets. The truth about trickle-down: the rich get a golden parachute, while they give you a golden shower. Meanwhile, you struggle to make ends meet; your tax bill goes up while that of the richest goes down; conservatives simply want to shift the tax burden from those who can afford it to you who can't. Don't let a slick-talking conservative tell you any different-tax cuts, Republican style, are parasitic; the millionaires benefit while you are harmed.

Conservatives claim to be tough on crime To prove it, they have enacted laws that call for the death penalty for crimes that don't even come close to serial murder, genocide, or crimes against humanity. Presumption of innocence is not in their vocabulary-you're accused, you're guilty, and it's up to you to prove yourself innocent-and even then, you're guilty! Prosecutors often have withheld evidence that would have shown the accused to be innocent; they have stacked juries against (poor) defendants by excluding prospective jurors who don't readily apply the death penalty, resulting in conviction-prone juries; defendants are often assigned incompetent attorneys. You are expected to go along with this outrageous injustice or else you'll be branded as "soft on crime." Meanwhile, the tough-on-crime conservatives are the same people who turn their heads the other way when criminal corporations kill hundreds, steal millions from investors and/or employees, sicken thousands of children at a time because of their crimes. You may have been one of those victimized by not only the crimes of megacorporations, but also of their impunity, and the double standard that benefits them at your expense. All this coming from the party that claims to be pro-life and pro-family.