This isn’t a crisis of one man. It’s the collapse of trust built by decades of bipartisan lies, media complicity, and a democracy that stopped working long ago.
Keep telling it! “moderate Democrats” (WTF is that), want us to believe the country just wants to get back to “normal.” Normal ( in your awesomely honest post) and the status quo democrats are what gave us Trump. The scale tippers said, “I won’t hold my nose again. If Trump destroys everything in his path. . . maybe that’s what the country needs.”
If a Bernie disciple doesn’t run, we’re screwed (again).
This post is actually trash, though. Why does he talk about 9/11 - what is the "truth" about it? Was the mainstream and corporate media correct and it was all CrAzY Arabic jihadis who just hate American freedom so much? That sounds like typical Republican rhetoric. We killed how many people in Iran to satisfy you war hawks and racists?
Just like so many… complain but bring no real solutions to the table. Tell us how exactly how to rebuild real democracy in this country. Not hopeful nonstarters like get rid of the filibuster… tell us how you do that. Tell us how you would get rid of big money and dark money in politics. Come to the table with real solutions.
Solutions or not, I think the article supplies a necessary perspective. It’s difficult to solve problems without an accurate understanding of its nature and causes. And far too many people in the Left/Progressive camp still seem invested in the attempt to recover what was. Yet as the writer points out, “what was“ had Trumpism as it’s end result.
I know it may seem an insurmountable challenge at this stage of culture, but we really need a fundamentally new social paradigm. (And no, it’s not Communism.) The 20th Century ethic of individualism, competition, wealth accumulation, and the “self-made man” worked well enough for a few, and OK for many more , yet left so many others behind. At broadest level, we need a paradigm that values living things over non-living systems, institutions, symbols, abstractions.
Yet we are so invested in the current model that I’m doubtful we can make such a shift — at least not without significant collapse. But I hope to be proved wrong.
With you. We don’t need this let’s just slash our wrists because we all fucked up shit. Let’s do something about it. Yes, use these points you’ve (the author) laid out with immediate follow up; include it in the article right here behind every issue.
Historically, political change, of our needed magnitude, usually involves hunger and revolution—except for Ghandi, but Britain was busy with a war. (Should I have misspelled a word to show that I'm human? La vida loca!)
Because we have to offer the solutions and we have to be more engaged. It’s going to require work that we have not been willing to do let alone fully aware that it needed doing. Mass media and spectacle are a seductive pill a la Brave New World.
1. A living wage (forget about minumum wage). 40hr week. Employer/employee pension.
2. Universal health care. (I get care at the VA. Pretty good, not perfect.) All physicians become officers in Public Health Service (like research doctors now at NIH).
3. Universal public service requirement. (a draft, but not only military. 2 years after high school. Both boys and girls. with some occupational specialty training.
4. Universal education. HS mandatory. Public support for advanced occupational training and college.
5. Immigration reform. Offer a path to citizenship for hardworking, ambitious newcomers.
6. Affordable housing. (Japan has been in a slump for 35 years, but life there is good. Why? Housing costs are affordable, not a huge chunk of income.)
7. Draconian taxes (90%) on incomes over $5million. (Nobody needs more than $13, 698/day. Corporate resources will be reallocated to more investment in R&D.)
8. Social commitment requirement for corporate charters. (No corporation gets a charter without committing to public interest. No more abandoning communities to seek cheap labor overseas.)
9. Congressional districting along existing county lines. (No more gerrymander.)
[Could go on, but running out of napkin.]
#s 1-8 require congressional votes. #9 requires state action, I think.
You make it sound like nobody should discuss our national problems unless they can identify specific steps in order to fix them. Personally I think that's nuts, but let's say you got your way. How would you make sure nobody mentioned any problem without simultaneously proffering a solution? That sounds like a mighty big problem itself. Better "stop complaining if you can't bring real solutions to the table."
So you're admitting the person who is writing these emails is nothing more than a commentator and spectator, not interested in change? Maybe that's why the emails come off tone deaf and disconnected. Thank you for your insight.
This is a brilliant analysis and I applaud you for it. Please permit me to add that the global banking collapse of 2008 was made possible by Bill Clinton's agreement to repeal Glass-Steagall in the name of "financial innovation." After the shit hit the fan and both Long-term Capital Management and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt Obama bailed out Wall Street and the big banks but failed to address the catastrophic mortgage foreclosures that threw thousands of families into the streets. America's political leaders privatize gains when capitalism works. But they socialize the losses when the capitalists screw up. No corporate executive faced legal charges. But homelessness subsequently skyrocketed and artificially low interest rates due to the Fed's 14-year accommodative policy stance pushed the cost of buying a home out of reach.
Right. Find a single post from Corben Trent criticizing any Clinton. Funny how they glaze over the corporate brand that's torn this country apart and lost elections. Really fuckn funny.
Can we create a RAMA (whatever the name may be) a manifesto of specific numbered issues we should work to fix and put that to a vote to the American People indifferent of Political Views? Until we create a new blueprint identical as the right did with project 2025 - there should be a decent alternative where people could read and vote their support - perhaps different than the usual way people get suckered into say something or donate a few dollars and they get political emails and beggars asking for donations adding insult to injury. After I am poor and these politicians dont do anything to help me - now I am being asked to support them!!! It is such an insult! Yes I want my vote to count - I want my voice to matter but I don't want to be begged infinitely to throw money into a black whole and or to me made feel more insignificant or suckered!
It could be a 30 items list, and upon popular voice they can be prioritized and sought political support. Medicare, Vision and Dental FOR ALL, Women rights, Pollution and Climate Change, Border Security, Immigration Reform, Money out of politics and ban lobbying reform, Eliminate Offshore Tax Heavens and loopholes, Repatriate all offshore funds owned by Corporations doing business in USA and tax it.. Make a list with top 500 US companies and their yearly full tax contributions to see how they compared to all of us little people, invest in affordable housing. The list can include 20 or 30 or 50 top priority items for America and can be a blueprint for tomorrow and something we can hope and fight for, and find politicians who are willing to fight with us and eliminate those like Chuck Shumer, Pelosi or other Dinosaurs (like Ginsburg who for the love of God did not want to vacate her post until she died in it and gifted her position and stack the court to the right) when we know they don't represent human rights and decency as they should... And so on. I/WE are so tired of rhetoric.. We know what is wrong - HOW DO WE FIX IT!! and without a MODERN BLUEPRINT or MANIFESTO for what we fight or support - all we do is create smoke which now exists, and in the next moment is gone.....
This. And we're working on it. We're bringing a project-based platform to market. We are executing projects in 9 categories: Economy, Education, Environment, Government, Health, Infrastructure, Justice, Health, & Other (catchall bucket). We're looking for people with an interest in participating in projects in any of these areas. Subject Matter Experts are paid by the hour for helping teams execute successfully. You determine your rate.
Your analysis is extremely accurate. You might want to also add that every one is pushed to having their personal files stored in "the Cloud" for safety and security. The actual law states that anything stored in "the Cloud" is no longer your property. It can be legally accessed by anyone or any institution who gets court approval and it's not required for you to even be notified. Thank you for your voice but how do we educate, influence the masses, and what is the new system structure to advocate?
"I want to deal with another myth briefly which concerns me and I want to talk about it very honestly and that is over-reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. Now certainly it's very important for people to engage in self-help programs and do all they can to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Now I'm not talking against that at all. I think there is a great deal that the black people of this country must do for themselves and that nobody else can do for them. And we must see the other side of this question. I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I'm sympathetic toward what you're trying to do, but I just feel that you people don't do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that negroes can't do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago. I said it doesn't help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognize that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realize that America made the black man's color a stigma. Something that he couldn't change. Not only was the color a stigma, but even linguistic then stigmatic conspired against the black man so that his color was thought of as something very evil. If you open Roget's Thesaurus and notice the synonym for black you'll find about a hundred and twenty and most of them represent something dirty, smut, degrading, low, and when you turn to the synonym for white, about one hundred and thirty, all of them represent something high, pure, chaste. You go right down that list. And so in the language a white life is a little better than a black life. Just follow. If somebody goes wrong in the family, we don't call him a white sheep we call him a black sheep. And then if you block somebody from getting somewhere you don't say they've been whiteballed, you say they've been blackballed. And just go down the line. It's not whitemail it's blackmail. I tell you this to seriously say that the nation made the black man's color a stigma and then I had to say to my friend on the plane another thing that is often forgotten in this country. That nobody, no ethnic group has completely lifted itself by it own bootstraps. I can never forget that the black man was free from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863. He wasn't given any land to make that freedom meaningful after being held in slavery 244 years. And it was like keeping a man in prison for many many years and then coming to see that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Alright good night and God bless you.
And I was about to say that to free, to have freed the negro from slavery without doing anything to get him started in life on a sound economic footing, it was almost like freeing a man who had been in prison many years and you had discovered that he was unjustly convicted of, that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and you go up to him and say now you're free, but you don't give him any bus fare to get to town or you don't give him any money to buy some clothes to put on his back or to get started in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against it. This is the very thing that happened to the black man in America. And then when we look at it even deeper than this, it becomes more ironic. We're reaping the harvest of this failure today. While America refused to do anything for the black man at that point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west, which meant that it was willing to under gird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. I can never think ... Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor."
Martin King, less than a month before your government killed him.
Excellent post. The Times literally helped create this mess, by propagating bullshit and treating obviously fascist views as if they were worthy of serious consideration. Now they’re “concerned?” What a fucking joke.
Glad to see you finally got here. You are and have been a faithful patriot who believes in the system, and have come to the realization that the system itself is broken beyond repair. Build Back Better will never cut it. The marriage of disaster capitalism and representative democracy inside a republic leads to collapse for both. The Constitution and the CFR have more holes than a mountain of Swiss cheese.
This was the design since the get go. Remember, 'they' offered to make Washington a king. The only mountain higher than the original is the volcano of lipstick that constantly gets smeared on this intentional beauty-pageant pig. Without an immense amount of good will and effort from many citizens across 240 years, constantly slapping band aids of honest belief on the 'system,' it would have morphed into the monster it now is long ago.
Any road back to the beginning cannot go through the same river of quicksand. This presents a very massive problem, because the maze of dead ends, road blocks and off-ramps that have been built in to the floor plan all lead to the same corporatocracy. All that TFG has done is to bulldoze through many of the walls in that maze on its way to its own personal kleptocracy. TFG has to do it this way due to his outlaw behaviors being the target of the fairly broken justice system inside it.
Right now only a handful of judges and officers of the court with some integrity stand in its way. If it can stymie the military before the rabid dog Hegemonyseth self-destructs, the maga roto-rooter will hollow out the treasury and extort/intimidate/disappear every MacDuff in Scotland.
As you point out vividly, the last battle is just waiting for dawn at Birnam Wood. The only questions that remain are what will the citizen sovereigns do to stop this, how will they do it, and where will the dangers within the republic come from?
So wonderful to read a YOUNG writer almost get it right. But you got enough correct to give hope an old Hippie. I disagree on some points but will not nit pick. The system is corrupt and haas begetting worse with each succeeding new President since Reagan? Or is it Kennedy?
It matters not. We are headed into a period of great disruption. And it matters not if you are liberal or conservative or old enough to realise that the political definitions are irrelevant. (Libs used to oppose wars and support the 1st Amendment. Thanks to the Deep State, or is it the financialisation crowd , or the Neocons that have directed us since Clinton, or perhaps the tech bros billionaires- the plan has cascaded into a nonproductive society where for the vast majority of people it's a struggle to survive, forget about effectively gathering the Truth to make a reasoned decision about politics).
Here's a simple rule-FOLLOW THE BENJAMINS.
( thank god for Mammon as there should never be a full sale nuclear war-there's no money in it if half the population and the cities they live in are annihilated. Who would the ultra-rich scare into buying useless material goods that meet half the production value that existed in the '90s). Remember the '90s , if you will. If you were alive in 1998 a gallon of gasoline cost less than a gallon of water-an absolute mark of a booming economy. All while Slick Willie rid us of Glass-Steagle, assuring us a decade later of a crashing economy. All while Bill visited Epstein Island a number of times according to signed affidavits of percipient witnesses. But he was a hell of a guy as we hadn't reached the point where abuse of women was condemned.
And I've no other alternative- Bush stole the election by all measures and led us into a 20 year war in the Mideast that has resulted in a genocidal plan to achieve peace, which was motivated by a bunch of Hamas lunatics who thought killing innocent Israelis would be ignored by one of the most ferocious fighting forces in the world who is supported by a hegemonic United States.
Obama continued a plan initiated by Clinton and his neocon backers to push NATO into Ukraine while promising each successive Russian leader that no such plan was intended. And today we have a NATO free EU planning to take on Russia as they watch the Ukrainians get chewed up on the battlefield while the EU faces a likely depression as their energy costs, minus the NordStream oil supply, skyrocket.
And the NY Times and WaPo are known collaborators with the Intelligence Community that pushes neocon wars and blatantly lied about Trump's alleged connection to Russia. Both papers received Pulitzers pushing that pack of now proven lies. But retain the Pulitzers because - it
wasn't their fault, it was Trump's fault for their pushing lies because he's a Red headed Hitler, and any way he stinks- so there.
I marched in opposition to the Viet Nam War, Clinton's admitted quasi-genocide of the Iraqi people( mostly Shias) to the acknowledged amount of 600,000 and The Idiot Bush's abortive attack for no provable reason upon the Iraqis ( except for the control of oil, of course)...and on and on and on. Until at 71 I wish you all luck as you attack Teslas in opportunistic performative acts of nonsense against what you 3 years ago viewed as the partial solution to the environment's degradation. Hoping that a deballed Bernie and a joke of a candidate in AOC, who is only slightly more electable than Harris, who was a joke of a candidate, will somehow convince the average worker to support a Dem party that supports billionaires over the working man( mind you Trump is a billionaire, but makes people believe that he cares-desperation is a great blinder of reason) is not a feasible strategy.( look to Gov Shapiro of Pa. Mind you, short of an economic crash under Trump the Dems won't sniff the White House until 2036. I also did politics for 40 yearend haven't missed a Presidential election prediction since 1984- It's always
the economy, stupid.
the solution is community and family and networking to protect your family and community while the world falls apart . That's a hopeful prescription. That's because the monied interests value money over sense, over belief in hope and compassion. And values that are basic to all humans.
It's actually a simple choice when you think of it.
Obama continued a plan initiated by Clinton and his neocon backers to push NATO into Ukraine while promising each successive Russian leader that no such plan was intended. And today we have a NATO free EU planning to take on Russia as they watch the Ukrainians get chewed up on the battlefield while the EU faces a likely depression as their energy costs, minus the NordStream oil supply, skyrocket.
And the NY Times and WaPo are known collaborators with the Intelligence Community that pushes neocon wars and blatantly lied about Trump's alleged connection to Russia. Both papers received Pulitzers pushing that pack of now proven lies. But retain the Pulitzers because - it
wasn't their fault, it was Trump's fault for their pushing lies because he's a Red headed Hitler, and any way he stinks- so there.
I marched in opposition to the Viet Nam War, Clinton's admitted quasi-genocide of the Iraqi people( mostly Shias) to the acknowledged amount of 600,000 and The Idiot Bush's abortive attack for no provable reason upon the Iraqis ( except for the control of oil, of course)...and on and on and on. Until at 71 I wish you all luck as you attack Teslas in opportunistic performative acts of nonsense against what you 3 years ago viewed as the partial solution to the environment's degradation. Hoping that a deballed Bernie and a joke of a candidate in AOC, who is only slightly more electable than Harris, who was a joke of a candidate, will somehow convince the average worker to support a Dem party that supports billionaires over the working man( mind you Trump is a billionaire, but makes people believe that he cares-desperation is a great blinder of reason) is not a feasible strategy.( look to Gov Shapiro of Pa. Mind you, short of an economic crash under Trump the Dems won't sniff the White House until 2036. I also did politics for 40 yearend haven't missed a Presidential election prediction since 1984- It's always
the economy, stupid.
the solution is community and family and networking to protect your family and community while the world falls apart . That's a hopeful prescription. That's because the monied interests value money over sense, over belief in hope and compassion. And values that are basic to all humans.
It's actually a simple choice when you think of it.
"The fault, dear Brutus is in ourselves, not in our (politicians) that we are underlings." After reading the case of Richard Medhurst and seeing the Theroux film on Settlers of the West Bank we can probably relieve ourselves of our Western exceptionalist delusion. What a relief!
We'll never fix a problem until we admit it's existence, a major flaw in AmeriCANism.
All my life there have been Trumps for politicians to rag on, essentially saying if only we get him out of the system we will become that thing we were always supposed to become but never really did, because he was always in the way. It might be a good idea to ensure that America, where I live, is made a safe and enjoyable place to function for as many of it's citizens as possible. I think it's a good idea but most of us don't or we would have done it by now. Change it from an uneven playing field of inane competition which we seem to like or we'd have changed that too, long ago.
It seems to me the Shakespeare might have said it's "in our aspirations we are underlings." Wealth and status seem to be the main Western aspirations, preoccupations. I'd say we might replace them with enough and dignity and we'd be off in a different, much more fruitful direction.
9/11 brought us the security state, or more accurately brought it to white people, for the first time perhaps since they left Europe where it has thrived for centuries. It needn't have. With a little courage and imagination some bright thing might have called a world wide peace symposium in Alexandria, a cultural fusion if ever there was, but no. Gotta keep our enemies out there or we'd cease to exist.
Truth is truth. He is a symptom, not the cause. We, The People, are the cause. Always have been and always will be, unless and until we smarten up and educate the idiocy and complacency out of ourselves.
Or maybe you're one of those entitled Millenial losers who thinks it's funny to joke about 9/11 so that's why you're bringing it up. Either way you're wrong. We're allied with Saudi Arabia whether the hell you want to admit it or not. You're not promoting change, you're just whining.
Keep telling it! “moderate Democrats” (WTF is that), want us to believe the country just wants to get back to “normal.” Normal ( in your awesomely honest post) and the status quo democrats are what gave us Trump. The scale tippers said, “I won’t hold my nose again. If Trump destroys everything in his path. . . maybe that’s what the country needs.”
If a Bernie disciple doesn’t run, we’re screwed (again).
And one elected person can’t turn it around and restructure alone……..
This post is actually trash, though. Why does he talk about 9/11 - what is the "truth" about it? Was the mainstream and corporate media correct and it was all CrAzY Arabic jihadis who just hate American freedom so much? That sounds like typical Republican rhetoric. We killed how many people in Iran to satisfy you war hawks and racists?
Just like so many… complain but bring no real solutions to the table. Tell us how exactly how to rebuild real democracy in this country. Not hopeful nonstarters like get rid of the filibuster… tell us how you do that. Tell us how you would get rid of big money and dark money in politics. Come to the table with real solutions.
Solutions or not, I think the article supplies a necessary perspective. It’s difficult to solve problems without an accurate understanding of its nature and causes. And far too many people in the Left/Progressive camp still seem invested in the attempt to recover what was. Yet as the writer points out, “what was“ had Trumpism as it’s end result.
I know it may seem an insurmountable challenge at this stage of culture, but we really need a fundamentally new social paradigm. (And no, it’s not Communism.) The 20th Century ethic of individualism, competition, wealth accumulation, and the “self-made man” worked well enough for a few, and OK for many more , yet left so many others behind. At broadest level, we need a paradigm that values living things over non-living systems, institutions, symbols, abstractions.
Yet we are so invested in the current model that I’m doubtful we can make such a shift — at least not without significant collapse. But I hope to be proved wrong.
With you. We don’t need this let’s just slash our wrists because we all fucked up shit. Let’s do something about it. Yes, use these points you’ve (the author) laid out with immediate follow up; include it in the article right here behind every issue.
Historically, political change, of our needed magnitude, usually involves hunger and revolution—except for Ghandi, but Britain was busy with a war. (Should I have misspelled a word to show that I'm human? La vida loca!)
You are so right. All we ever get is a litany of all the problems but no one offers workable solutions that we can all get behind and support.
Because we have to offer the solutions and we have to be more engaged. It’s going to require work that we have not been willing to do let alone fully aware that it needed doing. Mass media and spectacle are a seductive pill a la Brave New World.
Yet this post promotes mass media's corporate lie about 9/11. Funny how war promoters find a way to distract from Israeli lobbying.
Back of the napkin agenda for change:
1. A living wage (forget about minumum wage). 40hr week. Employer/employee pension.
2. Universal health care. (I get care at the VA. Pretty good, not perfect.) All physicians become officers in Public Health Service (like research doctors now at NIH).
3. Universal public service requirement. (a draft, but not only military. 2 years after high school. Both boys and girls. with some occupational specialty training.
4. Universal education. HS mandatory. Public support for advanced occupational training and college.
5. Immigration reform. Offer a path to citizenship for hardworking, ambitious newcomers.
6. Affordable housing. (Japan has been in a slump for 35 years, but life there is good. Why? Housing costs are affordable, not a huge chunk of income.)
7. Draconian taxes (90%) on incomes over $5million. (Nobody needs more than $13, 698/day. Corporate resources will be reallocated to more investment in R&D.)
8. Social commitment requirement for corporate charters. (No corporation gets a charter without committing to public interest. No more abandoning communities to seek cheap labor overseas.)
9. Congressional districting along existing county lines. (No more gerrymander.)
[Could go on, but running out of napkin.]
#s 1-8 require congressional votes. #9 requires state action, I think.
You make it sound like nobody should discuss our national problems unless they can identify specific steps in order to fix them. Personally I think that's nuts, but let's say you got your way. How would you make sure nobody mentioned any problem without simultaneously proffering a solution? That sounds like a mighty big problem itself. Better "stop complaining if you can't bring real solutions to the table."
So you're admitting the person who is writing these emails is nothing more than a commentator and spectator, not interested in change? Maybe that's why the emails come off tone deaf and disconnected. Thank you for your insight.
This is a brilliant analysis and I applaud you for it. Please permit me to add that the global banking collapse of 2008 was made possible by Bill Clinton's agreement to repeal Glass-Steagall in the name of "financial innovation." After the shit hit the fan and both Long-term Capital Management and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt Obama bailed out Wall Street and the big banks but failed to address the catastrophic mortgage foreclosures that threw thousands of families into the streets. America's political leaders privatize gains when capitalism works. But they socialize the losses when the capitalists screw up. No corporate executive faced legal charges. But homelessness subsequently skyrocketed and artificially low interest rates due to the Fed's 14-year accommodative policy stance pushed the cost of buying a home out of reach.
Right. Find a single post from Corben Trent criticizing any Clinton. Funny how they glaze over the corporate brand that's torn this country apart and lost elections. Really fuckn funny.
Can we create a RAMA (whatever the name may be) a manifesto of specific numbered issues we should work to fix and put that to a vote to the American People indifferent of Political Views? Until we create a new blueprint identical as the right did with project 2025 - there should be a decent alternative where people could read and vote their support - perhaps different than the usual way people get suckered into say something or donate a few dollars and they get political emails and beggars asking for donations adding insult to injury. After I am poor and these politicians dont do anything to help me - now I am being asked to support them!!! It is such an insult! Yes I want my vote to count - I want my voice to matter but I don't want to be begged infinitely to throw money into a black whole and or to me made feel more insignificant or suckered!
It could be a 30 items list, and upon popular voice they can be prioritized and sought political support. Medicare, Vision and Dental FOR ALL, Women rights, Pollution and Climate Change, Border Security, Immigration Reform, Money out of politics and ban lobbying reform, Eliminate Offshore Tax Heavens and loopholes, Repatriate all offshore funds owned by Corporations doing business in USA and tax it.. Make a list with top 500 US companies and their yearly full tax contributions to see how they compared to all of us little people, invest in affordable housing. The list can include 20 or 30 or 50 top priority items for America and can be a blueprint for tomorrow and something we can hope and fight for, and find politicians who are willing to fight with us and eliminate those like Chuck Shumer, Pelosi or other Dinosaurs (like Ginsburg who for the love of God did not want to vacate her post until she died in it and gifted her position and stack the court to the right) when we know they don't represent human rights and decency as they should... And so on. I/WE are so tired of rhetoric.. We know what is wrong - HOW DO WE FIX IT!! and without a MODERN BLUEPRINT or MANIFESTO for what we fight or support - all we do is create smoke which now exists, and in the next moment is gone.....
And we need to break things down into manageable sections. So we can all help.
This. And we're working on it. We're bringing a project-based platform to market. We are executing projects in 9 categories: Economy, Education, Environment, Government, Health, Infrastructure, Justice, Health, & Other (catchall bucket). We're looking for people with an interest in participating in projects in any of these areas. Subject Matter Experts are paid by the hour for helping teams execute successfully. You determine your rate.
RAMA - RESTART AMERICA - or call it what you want.
Your analysis is extremely accurate. You might want to also add that every one is pushed to having their personal files stored in "the Cloud" for safety and security. The actual law states that anything stored in "the Cloud" is no longer your property. It can be legally accessed by anyone or any institution who gets court approval and it's not required for you to even be notified. Thank you for your voice but how do we educate, influence the masses, and what is the new system structure to advocate?
Fighting symptoms never stops the disease. Thank you.
"I want to deal with another myth briefly which concerns me and I want to talk about it very honestly and that is over-reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. Now certainly it's very important for people to engage in self-help programs and do all they can to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Now I'm not talking against that at all. I think there is a great deal that the black people of this country must do for themselves and that nobody else can do for them. And we must see the other side of this question. I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I'm sympathetic toward what you're trying to do, but I just feel that you people don't do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that negroes can't do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago. I said it doesn't help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognize that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realize that America made the black man's color a stigma. Something that he couldn't change. Not only was the color a stigma, but even linguistic then stigmatic conspired against the black man so that his color was thought of as something very evil. If you open Roget's Thesaurus and notice the synonym for black you'll find about a hundred and twenty and most of them represent something dirty, smut, degrading, low, and when you turn to the synonym for white, about one hundred and thirty, all of them represent something high, pure, chaste. You go right down that list. And so in the language a white life is a little better than a black life. Just follow. If somebody goes wrong in the family, we don't call him a white sheep we call him a black sheep. And then if you block somebody from getting somewhere you don't say they've been whiteballed, you say they've been blackballed. And just go down the line. It's not whitemail it's blackmail. I tell you this to seriously say that the nation made the black man's color a stigma and then I had to say to my friend on the plane another thing that is often forgotten in this country. That nobody, no ethnic group has completely lifted itself by it own bootstraps. I can never forget that the black man was free from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863. He wasn't given any land to make that freedom meaningful after being held in slavery 244 years. And it was like keeping a man in prison for many many years and then coming to see that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Alright good night and God bless you.
And I was about to say that to free, to have freed the negro from slavery without doing anything to get him started in life on a sound economic footing, it was almost like freeing a man who had been in prison many years and you had discovered that he was unjustly convicted of, that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and you go up to him and say now you're free, but you don't give him any bus fare to get to town or you don't give him any money to buy some clothes to put on his back or to get started in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against it. This is the very thing that happened to the black man in America. And then when we look at it even deeper than this, it becomes more ironic. We're reaping the harvest of this failure today. While America refused to do anything for the black man at that point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west, which meant that it was willing to under gird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. I can never think ... Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor."
Martin King, less than a month before your government killed him.
Excellent post. The Times literally helped create this mess, by propagating bullshit and treating obviously fascist views as if they were worthy of serious consideration. Now they’re “concerned?” What a fucking joke.
Glad to see you finally got here. You are and have been a faithful patriot who believes in the system, and have come to the realization that the system itself is broken beyond repair. Build Back Better will never cut it. The marriage of disaster capitalism and representative democracy inside a republic leads to collapse for both. The Constitution and the CFR have more holes than a mountain of Swiss cheese.
This was the design since the get go. Remember, 'they' offered to make Washington a king. The only mountain higher than the original is the volcano of lipstick that constantly gets smeared on this intentional beauty-pageant pig. Without an immense amount of good will and effort from many citizens across 240 years, constantly slapping band aids of honest belief on the 'system,' it would have morphed into the monster it now is long ago.
Any road back to the beginning cannot go through the same river of quicksand. This presents a very massive problem, because the maze of dead ends, road blocks and off-ramps that have been built in to the floor plan all lead to the same corporatocracy. All that TFG has done is to bulldoze through many of the walls in that maze on its way to its own personal kleptocracy. TFG has to do it this way due to his outlaw behaviors being the target of the fairly broken justice system inside it.
Right now only a handful of judges and officers of the court with some integrity stand in its way. If it can stymie the military before the rabid dog Hegemonyseth self-destructs, the maga roto-rooter will hollow out the treasury and extort/intimidate/disappear every MacDuff in Scotland.
As you point out vividly, the last battle is just waiting for dawn at Birnam Wood. The only questions that remain are what will the citizen sovereigns do to stop this, how will they do it, and where will the dangers within the republic come from?
Completely agree. Thanks for writing this post.
Wow. Finally.
Wow. Finally.
So wonderful to read a YOUNG writer almost get it right. But you got enough correct to give hope an old Hippie. I disagree on some points but will not nit pick. The system is corrupt and haas begetting worse with each succeeding new President since Reagan? Or is it Kennedy?
It matters not. We are headed into a period of great disruption. And it matters not if you are liberal or conservative or old enough to realise that the political definitions are irrelevant. (Libs used to oppose wars and support the 1st Amendment. Thanks to the Deep State, or is it the financialisation crowd , or the Neocons that have directed us since Clinton, or perhaps the tech bros billionaires- the plan has cascaded into a nonproductive society where for the vast majority of people it's a struggle to survive, forget about effectively gathering the Truth to make a reasoned decision about politics).
Here's a simple rule-FOLLOW THE BENJAMINS.
( thank god for Mammon as there should never be a full sale nuclear war-there's no money in it if half the population and the cities they live in are annihilated. Who would the ultra-rich scare into buying useless material goods that meet half the production value that existed in the '90s). Remember the '90s , if you will. If you were alive in 1998 a gallon of gasoline cost less than a gallon of water-an absolute mark of a booming economy. All while Slick Willie rid us of Glass-Steagle, assuring us a decade later of a crashing economy. All while Bill visited Epstein Island a number of times according to signed affidavits of percipient witnesses. But he was a hell of a guy as we hadn't reached the point where abuse of women was condemned.
And I've no other alternative- Bush stole the election by all measures and led us into a 20 year war in the Mideast that has resulted in a genocidal plan to achieve peace, which was motivated by a bunch of Hamas lunatics who thought killing innocent Israelis would be ignored by one of the most ferocious fighting forces in the world who is supported by a hegemonic United States.
Obama continued a plan initiated by Clinton and his neocon backers to push NATO into Ukraine while promising each successive Russian leader that no such plan was intended. And today we have a NATO free EU planning to take on Russia as they watch the Ukrainians get chewed up on the battlefield while the EU faces a likely depression as their energy costs, minus the NordStream oil supply, skyrocket.
And the NY Times and WaPo are known collaborators with the Intelligence Community that pushes neocon wars and blatantly lied about Trump's alleged connection to Russia. Both papers received Pulitzers pushing that pack of now proven lies. But retain the Pulitzers because - it
wasn't their fault, it was Trump's fault for their pushing lies because he's a Red headed Hitler, and any way he stinks- so there.
I marched in opposition to the Viet Nam War, Clinton's admitted quasi-genocide of the Iraqi people( mostly Shias) to the acknowledged amount of 600,000 and The Idiot Bush's abortive attack for no provable reason upon the Iraqis ( except for the control of oil, of course)...and on and on and on. Until at 71 I wish you all luck as you attack Teslas in opportunistic performative acts of nonsense against what you 3 years ago viewed as the partial solution to the environment's degradation. Hoping that a deballed Bernie and a joke of a candidate in AOC, who is only slightly more electable than Harris, who was a joke of a candidate, will somehow convince the average worker to support a Dem party that supports billionaires over the working man( mind you Trump is a billionaire, but makes people believe that he cares-desperation is a great blinder of reason) is not a feasible strategy.( look to Gov Shapiro of Pa. Mind you, short of an economic crash under Trump the Dems won't sniff the White House until 2036. I also did politics for 40 yearend haven't missed a Presidential election prediction since 1984- It's always
the economy, stupid.
the solution is community and family and networking to protect your family and community while the world falls apart . That's a hopeful prescription. That's because the monied interests value money over sense, over belief in hope and compassion. And values that are basic to all humans.
It's actually a simple choice when you think of it.
Obama continued a plan initiated by Clinton and his neocon backers to push NATO into Ukraine while promising each successive Russian leader that no such plan was intended. And today we have a NATO free EU planning to take on Russia as they watch the Ukrainians get chewed up on the battlefield while the EU faces a likely depression as their energy costs, minus the NordStream oil supply, skyrocket.
And the NY Times and WaPo are known collaborators with the Intelligence Community that pushes neocon wars and blatantly lied about Trump's alleged connection to Russia. Both papers received Pulitzers pushing that pack of now proven lies. But retain the Pulitzers because - it
wasn't their fault, it was Trump's fault for their pushing lies because he's a Red headed Hitler, and any way he stinks- so there.
I marched in opposition to the Viet Nam War, Clinton's admitted quasi-genocide of the Iraqi people( mostly Shias) to the acknowledged amount of 600,000 and The Idiot Bush's abortive attack for no provable reason upon the Iraqis ( except for the control of oil, of course)...and on and on and on. Until at 71 I wish you all luck as you attack Teslas in opportunistic performative acts of nonsense against what you 3 years ago viewed as the partial solution to the environment's degradation. Hoping that a deballed Bernie and a joke of a candidate in AOC, who is only slightly more electable than Harris, who was a joke of a candidate, will somehow convince the average worker to support a Dem party that supports billionaires over the working man( mind you Trump is a billionaire, but makes people believe that he cares-desperation is a great blinder of reason) is not a feasible strategy.( look to Gov Shapiro of Pa. Mind you, short of an economic crash under Trump the Dems won't sniff the White House until 2036. I also did politics for 40 yearend haven't missed a Presidential election prediction since 1984- It's always
the economy, stupid.
the solution is community and family and networking to protect your family and community while the world falls apart . That's a hopeful prescription. That's because the monied interests value money over sense, over belief in hope and compassion. And values that are basic to all humans.
It's actually a simple choice when you think of it.
"The fault, dear Brutus is in ourselves, not in our (politicians) that we are underlings." After reading the case of Richard Medhurst and seeing the Theroux film on Settlers of the West Bank we can probably relieve ourselves of our Western exceptionalist delusion. What a relief!
We'll never fix a problem until we admit it's existence, a major flaw in AmeriCANism.
All my life there have been Trumps for politicians to rag on, essentially saying if only we get him out of the system we will become that thing we were always supposed to become but never really did, because he was always in the way. It might be a good idea to ensure that America, where I live, is made a safe and enjoyable place to function for as many of it's citizens as possible. I think it's a good idea but most of us don't or we would have done it by now. Change it from an uneven playing field of inane competition which we seem to like or we'd have changed that too, long ago.
It seems to me the Shakespeare might have said it's "in our aspirations we are underlings." Wealth and status seem to be the main Western aspirations, preoccupations. I'd say we might replace them with enough and dignity and we'd be off in a different, much more fruitful direction.
9/11 brought us the security state, or more accurately brought it to white people, for the first time perhaps since they left Europe where it has thrived for centuries. It needn't have. With a little courage and imagination some bright thing might have called a world wide peace symposium in Alexandria, a cultural fusion if ever there was, but no. Gotta keep our enemies out there or we'd cease to exist.
Truth is truth. He is a symptom, not the cause. We, The People, are the cause. Always have been and always will be, unless and until we smarten up and educate the idiocy and complacency out of ourselves.
Or maybe you're one of those entitled Millenial losers who thinks it's funny to joke about 9/11 so that's why you're bringing it up. Either way you're wrong. We're allied with Saudi Arabia whether the hell you want to admit it or not. You're not promoting change, you're just whining.