Showing posts with label Thomas Jefferson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Jefferson. Show all posts

Thursday, September 24, 2009

To the "spoilers" crowd: I was right, you're always wrong

WWW--Face the facts: you lost the election for Ralph Nader by voting for an unknown quantity, Barack Obama, a kiss-ass corporate lawyer. He was never going to do the right thing, unless you mean right-wing, meaning in the service of money and power. Ten year olds saw this shit coming, it wasn't hard to miss. No, you fucked up, all of you, because you go for the name brand first rather than looking at someone for what they really are. He's like Lincoln alright, not FDR.

But none of this really matters. The system is going to keep crashing, again and again, dragging your asses firmly down to earth, grounding you whether you like it or not. I'm the kind of person who's going to get a lot of entertainment value out of this, watching smarmy, spoiled assholes suffer for a change. God knows it's going to have been earned.

To my delight, you're going to learn the hard way: what the the social contract means; what a society is for; why we must work civilly through the legal system; that the free market system was always a tottering mess that was poised for eventual extinction; what "dumbshow" means; how "conventional wisdom" tends to be utter bullshit; why civic duty is supposed to be non-negotiable; how greedy and empty you are; how stupid you are; why you suck; how conceited you are; how you have almost no intellect whatsoever; why Johnny can't read; how you don't even know the very short history of your own country; what it takes to get you off your lazy asses.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of so-called conservatives fit this bill, but so do most mainstream Democratic voters. So you hated George W. Bush? Welcome to the club, but that doesn't mean you're not the same kind of slob, the same kind of drooling asshole. Nope, you are the same kind of asshole, quit fooling yourself.

Nader voters didn't spoil anything, it was assholes like you who think you can just pull a switch and everything's fine, fixed. History never, ever works that way, it's an endless struggle between the majority and concentrated power. There are no breaks in this, no respite, it's eternal, hence the term "eternal vigilance" coming from people like Thomas Jefferson and Paine, but not James Madison. Democracy isn't a microwaveable pizza. You spoiled the elections, not us. You should have voted for Ralph Nader, the best deal on-offer in the realm of third parties, since voting for Ron Paul is completely batshit crazy.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

The health care "debate"


Washington D.C.--There isn't one. As a friend recently said to me (I'm paraphrasing him), "It's all political theater in Washington. This is a plutocracy. It's just fighting over who gets money from the lobbyists, the perks." I'd agree. With a solid 70% of the American public behind a single-payer health care system, the rest is just a game, show.

Some half-assed version of reform will make it through, the whole "blue dog democrats" issue is just another smokescreen, a diversion from the real power in the party in people like Rahm Emanuel (a creep and a corporate gangster if ever there was one), and while they're going to keep costs down for a time, it's not going to help fix the economy anytime soon. These morons are going to keep wrecking the system as their kind did in the 19th century when there was a depression ever few years. Then what? The economy--as we have come to think of it--is going to have that final crash where we really-and-truly do need another F.D.R. and there won't be one.

That's likely to come sooner, rather than later. This is a matter of Madisonian democracy versus Jeffersonian. Rule by a plutocratic elite, or actual democracy by the public. The new president is with the Madisonians.

While we keep watching the news turn into puerile entertainment at our expense, and we watch America becoming something unrecognizable, there is always another way: We the People. It's up to us to stop all the yammering over garbage issues like abortion, "9/11 was an inside job,""they're gonna take my guns away," and to recognize that no strong man is going to fix things and save (it never worked that way, not even with F.D.R.), look at what we all generally agree on that actually affects us directly, and push these idiots in Washington into a corner on health care, defense spending, the wars in the Middle East, global warming, and a host of pressing issues that can no longer wait for our attention. In other words, it's time to hit the streets, it's time to organize now and to demand very loudly that business-as-usual isn't going to cut it and that the party's over for the nihilistic clowns running our country into the ground.

A groundswell and widespread striking can do this.

The choice is ours and the time is now. To fail in these endeavors is to fail ourselves--and without putting America on some kind of pedestal--to fail humanity and to take the path towards doom and oblivion. That's it, there is no more left to say after that. The majority don't want the policies they're getting from Washington. To do nothing about this knowing you're hardly alone is completely irresponsible. If you want to convince yourself that because a few yammering morons are shouting down their fellow citizens at town hall meetings as evidence that you're isolated and alone on the issue(s), fine, you didn't need very much reason to cop-out. Your problem after that will be having to live with yourself, and rest assured, that problem will be your own. The time has come for America to grow-up as a nation.

The rest is just window-dressing to confuse and overwhelm you with a bunch of empty statistics and rhetorical flourishes that were skewed before the polling was ever conducted. The debate is a false one. There is no health care debate, it's one of the big lies.