America's choice in the coming election

On November 3, 2020, Americans will elect our next president. Our choice seems to be to retain traditional capitalism with the Republicans, or turn the country over to a collection of old-line Democrats, worn-out socialists and modern Marxists.

The Marxists, with good reason, demand that we ignore history. Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany should be clear warnings to every American of what follows once a totalitarian takes powers.

In his monumental work, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," William L. Shirer tells us that in the days before Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, who would become Hitler's most loyal henchman and his propaganda chief, wrote in his diary, 

"I think it's terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing each other's heads ... Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists?"

Goebbels then wrote an open letter to the Communists: 

"You and I are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies." 

Goebbels understood that Communism and Fascism were two sides of the same statist coin.


In the coming election, America will have a choice. It can remain a country that continues to work to ensure that all men are created equal, and which subscribes to the belief that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuant of happiness. We can remain a country where the rights of the individual are protected by Constitution and law against encroachments by the government. Or we can eschew the value of individual liberty and accept the Marxist-fascist proposition that the individual exists to serve the state.


This Marxist-fascist view is most ably stated by Saul Alinsky:

"One does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience ... doesn't care enough for people to be corrupted for them.'"

The Marxist-fascist world of Alinsky is not a world governed by moral principles. 

"It is a world ... where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles."

"[The Have Nots] hate the establishment of the Haves with its arrogant opulence, its police, its courts, and its churches. Justice, morality, law, and order, are mere words when used by the Haves, which justify and secure their status quo."

For Hitler, Stalin and Alinsky, 

"Life and how you live it is the story of 'means' and 'ends.' The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. ... The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work."

For Alinsky, the Communists and the Fascists, the state must be supreme. The rights of the people must be effaced. Opposition political parties are suppressed. Unions are abolished. Churches become organs of the state. Political opponents are murdered or sent to concentration camps, gulags or prisons. Schools become indoctrination centers. The opposition press is suppressed. In politics, when the ends justify the means, the result is always the same: dictatorship, tyranny and totalitarianism.

Storm troopers and Marxists have no use for democracy. The pattern has been unalterably followed in Stalin's USSR, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Honecker's East Germany, Ceaușescu's Romania, Kim's North Korea, Castro's Cuba, and Maduro's Venezuela.

The Marxist storm troopers running amok in American cities, destroying monuments, burning buildings and looting stores are giving an honest preview of their agenda to all Americans — just as Hitler did in Mein Kampf. German nationalists and the German army thought they could control and use Hitler and his Nazi storm troopers. In less than four months, they understood their folly.


Today's Democrats believe they can control and use Marxist BLM and Antifa. They also are delusional. When Marxists take power the result is always the same: democracy ends, totalitarianism ensues and personal freedoms are forever lost. That includes the right to hold a free election to remove them from power. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro held power at gun point until they died. And now Maduro, Kim, et al., are doing likewise. Only an historical illiterate would expect a different result.

Originally published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock island Argus on Septermber 18, 2020

Copyright 2020

John Donald O'Shea

Pritzker's little shop of horrors

Whenever Illinois Democrats give their proposed legislation a pure and noble name, protect your wallet.

In 2018, they passed the "Bail Reform Act." Who could be against "Reform?" Now with more criminals back on the street, and crime rates soaring, the gullible Illinois citizenry is slowly waking to the price of the so-called bail "reform."

And now our "good ole" thimblerigging Democratic legislators, with the connivance of Gov. J.B.Pritzker, want to dupe us into amending the Illinois Constitution to allow our "good friends" in the legislature to pass a "graduated income tax." This license to plunder Illinois taxpayers, they have christened "The Fair Tax."

Democrats know that if they give their proposed new "Income Tax Law" an honest name, that they'd risk being tarred and feathered. Or even worse, being voted out of office.

Imagine if our Illinois Democrats actually called their "Audrey II"* by its true name and described what they have already done, and why:

"An Amendment to the Illinois Constitution to Allow the Legislature to Create a Graduated Illinois Income Tax. The Illinois Legislature has already passed legislation creating initial 'sucker rates,' so as to gull the gullible into voting for this deceptively named 'Fair Tax.' Once this Amendment is approved, the legislature, at any time thereafter, can increase the tax rates on disfavored classes of individuals, even to the point of confiscation, by a simple majority vote. This "Fair Tax" is really a shell game."

To repeat,, the Democrats in the Illinois Legislature are asking for a license to plunder. They want to emulate, in Springfield, the looting and plundering that Antifa, Black Lives Matter and their fellow-travelers are already wreaking on the shops and business along Chicago's "Magnificent Mile."

Advocates of graduated income taxes always argue that it is "unfair" for a rich man to pay the same rate of tax as a poor man. To make it "fair" the rich man must pay a higher rate.

Really? What exactly is unfair about a man with 10 times the income of his neighbor paying 10 times as much in taxes?


Graduated income taxes are always ushered in with promises of low rates. But that quickly changes. In 1913, Congress levied a 1% tax on net personal incomes above $3,000, with a 6% surtax on incomes above $500,000. A mere five years later, the top rate on income over $1 million was increased, as a war measure, to 77%.

Today, federal rates range from 10% to 37%.


This "Fair Tax" proposal of Pritzker and the Illinois Democrats is "bait and switch."

Presently - unless you vote "yes" in the November referendum - the Democrats in the Illinois Legislature cannot impose any "graduated" or "progressive" income tax. To get power to impose their "Fair ("graduated") Tax," they first need you to approve their referendum. (Approval requires either the approval of 60% of voters voting on the question, or greater than 50% approval from all voters who cast ballots in the election).

Once you hand Democrats the constitutional power to impose a "graduated" or "progressive" income tax, they can change the rate at their will.

Pritzker promises that unless you are "rich," your rates will remain the same or be slightly less. However, if you file single and have an income over $250,000 up to $350,000; or if you file jointly, and your income is over $250,000 and up to $500,000, you are "rich" and will pay 7.75%.

If you are "richer," you will pay up to 7.99%.


That doesn't sound so bad, does it? But that's where the "bait and switch" comes in:

The day after you approve the constitutional amendment authorizing a "Graduated Income Tax," the Democrats can go back into session and double, triple or quadruple the rates. You are giving them a "blank check" to insert whatever rates they want.

Under Illinois' present "Flat Tax," a person with no income pays nothing. Everybody else pays 4.95% of their income. That's "fair." Presently, if Mr. Democrat wants to raise your tax rate, he must raise his own and everybody else's in the same percentage.

There is nothing whatever "fair" about a "Fair Tax" that allows a majority to vote to exempt itself from income taxation while at the same time voting to raise taxes on their "rich" neighbors. That's not "fairness;" it's plunder.

Similarly, the majority's use of its voting power to elect legislators committed to "making the rich or any other minority pay their 'fair share'," while exempting or minimizing the tax obligation of the majority, is plunder. It is morally indistinguishable from the looter plundering shops along Michigan Avenue.

To place unlimited taxing power in the hands of a Democrat-controlled legislature generally perceived as being incompetent, corrupt and self-dealing is utter insanity. Is 7.99% "fair" today? How about tomorrow? 100 voters will give 100 different answers.


* Audrey II is from "The Little Shop of Horrors" and was a plant that thrived on a diet of blood.

Originally published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on September 4, 2020.

Copyright 2020,  John Donald O'Shea