December 23, 2015

A seasonsal song for all of you: Me, me, me, me, me . . .

Here comes Debbie Wasserman, who says she's never wrong
Here she comes a-singing our Queen's campaign song
Love and joy come to you, and put mistletoe above all doors
Kiss your children before they go to fight her wars.
Kiss your children before they go to fight her wars.

Here comes Debbie Wasserman, Bernie;s clock she shall clean
Bernie's such a traitor to so defy our Queen
All hail to the Queen, on winning we're all Hell bent
Who needs the people when you've got the one percent?
Who needs the people when you've got the one percent?

Here comes Debbie Wasserman. dressed up like a doll
All the world belongs you when you're a bankster's moll
All hail to the Queen, she's the best we've ever seen
She'll shower riches and favors on Mr. Lloyd Blankstein
She'll shower riches and favors on Mr. Lloyd Blankstein.

December 10, 2015

If this holds up, it will be excellent news in February

Don't think that New Hampshire won't have an impact. Although President Johnson technically won the New Hampshire Primary in 1968, the impressive performance of underdog Gene McCarthy set in motion political events that drove LBJ from the race. The primary was held following the Tet offensive, which US combat forces also technically won, but that paled against the fact that it happened at all. If the government had been telling the truth about the situation in Vietnam, it wouldn't have happened.

There is a reason why Bernie should wiin. Anyone who reads between the lines of this piece can see it. It was posted by a Hillary supporter on DU yesterday. The piece, ironically titled Sanders: Why he can't win, was written by notorious neoliberals supporting Mrs. Clinton and her corporate agenda: William Daley, former White Hous Chief od Staff and former executive committeeman at JPMorgan Chase; founder of the neoliberal think tank Third Way and professional wishful thinker Jon Cowan; and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, Vice President of Third Way. The authors of the piece reiterate Cowan's nonsense about the revolution isn't happening, and this after acknowledging that voters are angry and even conceding that voters believe "the system is rigged against them." However, the authors assure their readers that what the voters aren't angry, just anxious. Without mentioning the worldwide economic collapse of 2008 that was caused by the risky behavior of Wall Street banks gambling with their depositors' money, the authors simply explain away job losses and the dwindling numbers of the American middle class by talking about new technology replacing old, and that's a good thing and people accept it because that's the way the world works. It isn't caused by rich guys pulling the strings, like the unmentioned Wall Street Bankers who gambled away your money on mine on risky investments without telling us.

I suppose one should expect an article written by three establishmentarians who would like nothing better than to wish away voters' anxiety and anger to come up with such a heaping pile of steer manure. First of all, they don't seem to realize that anxiety and anger often go together rather then being an exclusive either/or matter. Second, they wouldn't dare suggest that voters are anxious and angry because the system is rigged, would they?

Of course, they would never try to deflect voters' anxiety and anger about the economic situation in America or the world at large away from the candidate of the establishment, Hillary Clinton, would they?

It is all too obvious that voters think the system is rigged because the system is rigged.

It's not far cry from the "voters are angry at the politicians" to "voters are angry at the politicians and the corrupt corporatists who who own them," Mr. Cowan's think tank is the middle man in commerce between corrupt politicians who sell themselves and the corrupt corporations who buy them.

December 1, 2015

Being of the older persuasion, I'll probably vote for Mrs. Clinton

Giving her any time or money is out of the question, but I don't see anything wrong with voting for the lesser of two evils if there's a Plan B.

If the Sanders campaign is the start of a mass movement on left, then there is a Plan B. We can and should merge with other elements of the left with the purpose of undermining the [i\status quo of free trade, an unregulated and crooked financial industry, the curtailing of civil liberties militarized police and resource wars in the Middle East. The goal will be to castrate the oligarchy and establish stronger democracy than ever before. We will have no patience for the democracy is dysfunctional, that's why American is a republic meme. That may have made sense in 1787, when many of the founding fathers owned slaves and most of the others didn't challenge their right to own slaves, but today it is nothing more than an hollow slogan for a decaying aristocracy that is now fooling itself into think they can codify their right to own the planet and ride roughshod over the rest of us with a few free trade deals. To paraphrase one of their own criminal masterminds, a free trade deal is just a piece of paper. There is no reason for us to abide by laws passed by bought congressmen or signed into law by a bought president or reviewed by bought judges. These people have no moral right to govern us.

The very word aristocracy means rule by the best, but throughout history no class that ever claimed that mantle has anything more than a gaggle of corrupt, decadent sonsofbitches looking out for their own self interest at the expense of the common people. No aristocracy ever ended well for the aristocrats. The aristocracy of industrialists and financiers at the end of the age of fossil fuels will fare no better.

Rule by the best? Isn't that a hoot? The best who crashed the world economy, not just in 2008 but multiple times, started one war after another and polluted the entire planet making money on carbon emissions? If they're the best, then I'm a retired kamikaze pilot. I, for one, am convinced that workers on the factory floor in Detroit could design, build and market a better car than the dummies in the penthouse suites at Ford (Found On Road Dead) or GM (Gallons per Mile.

The only legitimate government is democracy. The safety, health and welfare the people as a whole are a government's only legitimate concern. We don't need to complicate the equation any longer by mistaking artificial persons, who are made out of legal documents, with real people who are made out of flesh and blood. The resources of the world belong to all of us. The bounty of the earth belong to all of us. The Earth itself belongs to all of us, every grain of land and drop in the seas and all that is on it and all that is under it and all that flies or blows or shines over it.

This is the new world order by our decree.

November 29, 2015

That's also a Venusian feature

Life evolved a little differently on Venus. Due to the heat of the planet's surface (approx 450° C), the most complex life that evolved is reptilian. A reptile's cold blood takes less time to warm up and but enough energy into the animal to get it mobile at the start of the day, and because of the density of Venus' atmosphere the night aren't too cool, either, warm blooded animals never evolved on that planet.

Venusians also have copper-based hemoglobin. You may be familiar with this from American pop culture in that Vulcanians such as Mr. Spock have green blood because the hemogobin is copper based. As we all know, the planet Vulcan doesn't really exist. The creators of Star Trek simply borrowed the idea from what they knew Venusian biology.

What isn't known to most of us Earthlings is that Venusians have a very unusual color spectrum which causes them to see green as blue, and therefore they think their blood is blue. Venusians raised in what we think of as a right wing ideology think that having blue blood is something special and superior to all other intelligent beings in the solar system. Of course, that's just delusional thinking, but it does explain a of European history, as the royal families of Europe are actually Venusians who see their green blood as blue and think we red-blooded people of Earth should bow down to them. Some witnesses to the execution of Marie Antoinette claimed the guillotine was stained green when her head fell into the basket, but Habsburg relatives in Austria as well as her Bourbon brothers-in-laws, who later ruled as Louis XVIII and Charles X, insisted her blood was blue.

There is also evidence that the Bolshevik executioners of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 were shocked to see the splattering of green blood as the family lay dying. Also executed with the Romanovs were the family doctor and some servants, but their blood was red. Once again, surviving members of the Russian nobility insisted that the spilled blood was blue.

As it turns out. by the end of the nineteenth century, many of the royal families of Europe did not have pure green blood. This is because all English monarchs since 1066 are the descendants of William the Conqueror, who was the illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Herleva of Falaise, the daughter of a common red-blooded tanner. During the nineteenth century, the children of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, a descendant of William, and Prince Albert, who was of more purely Venusian stock, maried into other European royal families, including the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the Romanovs of Russia. Consequently, the proud "blue blooded" ruling monarchs of three of the ruling parties in World War I were the descendants of a French tanner born in the late tenth century, a time when Europe was the mud pit of the world.

Europe's sorry state from the Roman Empire was due largely to the influence of the Venusian nobility. The Roman emperors themselves were Venusians, which explains why the Roman empire was and continues to be overrated as in its governing institutions. Since Venusians are cold blooded and Earth isn't anywhere near as warm as a cold day on Venus, Venusian over generations tend to lose their intellectual capacity. The Roman Empire was built and kept together not by its rulers, who were as inept as they were bloody, but by well trained red-blooded soldiers and by brilliaint engineers, also culled from the common people. The Venusian rulers of Rome, mentally diseased from the lack of heat in their new planetary environment, could only provide the idea of expansion of power through bloody wars; the common people of Rome went along because the Venusians went easier on them as the Venusians got a fresh supply of newly-conquered people to beat, torture and tax. Starting as early as the first century AD, Rome began experiencing the effects of the degeneration of Venusian intellect due to living on a planet to which they were not adapted in the person of such bloody emperors as Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. The empire fell in the West after a string of emperors who were so inept that they couldn't defend the empire from invasions by uncivilized but red-blooded and quick barbarians and adopt a debauched lifestyle at the same time.

November 25, 2015

Dr King died when I was 16 and was already a hero to me

It wasn't unusual for young people in their mid-teens growing up during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement to be more politically aware than they are now. In those days, watching Walter Cronkite every evening for half an hour left one more informed about national and international events than watching CNN all day does now.

Martin Luther King did, in fact, make white people uncomfortable. He had no use for white supremacy and said so. However, he was a man whose life's work was to unite people of good will together to work for justice. Justice is simply not compatible with any system of rigid hierarchy, including white supremacy. White supremacy was the idea underpinning not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but European imperialism through the mid-twentieth century and the neocolonialism of US foreign policy as manifested by the Vietnam War and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq; it goes a long ways to explain why invading Afghanistan morphed from a quest to apprehend Osama bin Laden into America's longest war.

Dr. King had a deceptively calm and comforting manner that didn't scare some white people as much as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver.

I recommend this thread, but please clink on the link in Bravenak's OP and read the entire article, which is quite good and gives a much better understanding of Dr. King in the context of his time and why the author of the article feels Dr. King would take the stands on today's issues that he ascribes to him.

November 24, 2015

A Small Quibble with Killer Mike

Killer Mike, the rapper, introduced Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders by saying "I have no time . . . to relive the Reagan years; I have no desire to elect our own Margaret Thatcher."

The comment comparing Hillary Clinton to Margaret Thatcher can be dismissed as campaign hyperbole, and that's all I'll say about that for now. As for reliving the Reagan years, I have just one small quibble with that.

We should recognize Reagan as a consequential president, but by no means a great one. Even though his predicessor spent four years just trying to get a handle on what he was doing, Jimmy Carter left America in much better shape than Reagan left it. It has gotten steadily worse ever since.

It's not a point of reliving the Reagan years, it's continuing to live them. We've been living the Reagan years since the election of 1980 and it's long past time to put an end to them.

Every president since Reagan has been a Reaganite to a considerable degree. Reagan may have been a wiser Reaganite in the sense that after his first big tax cut in his first year as president he adjusted taxes upward several times, but the economy was structurally weaker as a result of supply-side policies. Income inequality didn't begin with Reagan, but it was badly exacerbated under him and Bush the Preppy, who also had to eat his words and raise taxes. Under Bill Clinton, tax cuts were more judiciously targeted at the middle class, but the foolishness of cutting taxes for the rich was not rolled back. Income inequality slowed, but did not reverse. For that reason, Clinton's tenure in the White House should not be regarding as either a ringing success or an abject failure. Nevertheless, there were several bad marks against Clinton and the Republican Congress with which he was saddled after his first two years in office. The worst of these were welfare reform, financial industry reform and NAFTA. The first of these made the plight of the poor in American even more dire and the second was a means to corrupt both the banking industry and politicians, allowing bankers and politicians to get richer at the expense of the public. The third put a big hit on American manufacturing and cost middle-class Americans well paying jobs which still haven't returned, and probably won't ever without a major change in US trade policy.

What might have seemed like a major event during Clinton's presidency was his impeachment in 1999, but this was merely a distracting side show of no real consequence other than the time and money wasted. Essentially, President Clinton was impeached for getting a blow job in the oval office from a White House intern. Tacky, yes; impeachable, no. The two articles of impeachment were so weak that neither received a simple majority vote in the Senate, let alone the two-thirds vote required to remove him from office.

After Clinton came Bush the Frat Boy. What can be said about him other than he was the worst president ever? Caught napping on September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, Bush invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to bring criminal mastermind Osama bin Laden to justice, but his real intention was to invade Iraq, overthrow the Iraqi government on the pretense that it was complicit in the September 11 attacks, had illegally stockpiled a biochemical arsenal and was building a nuclear weapons. Although there was talk about democratizing Iraq after the invasion, the real purpose was to secure Iraq's oil fields for western oil companies. A Reaganite ideologue with no grounding in reality, Bush would not raise taxes to pay for the war, thus blowing a big hole in future budgets. The initial debts obligated for the war were about $2 trillion. It is estimated that when the last check goes to pay the last benefit to a veteran's surviving spouse, the war will have cost Americans $6 trillion. These expenses, combined with tax cuts for the rich who didn't need them that still haven't been repealed and the cost of a second war in Afghanistan that still hasn't ended, will make it very difficult to recover from from what is now 35 long, long years of Reaganomics. In addition, Bush eroded civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism and instituted a program of torture supported with legal opinions from White House lawyers basically saying that as long the administration refuses to call torture torture then it's perfectly legal. Finally, the Bush administration's laissez-faire approach to Wall Street crime resulted in the crash of the World Economy in the final months of Bush's tenure. Naturally, income inequality grew by leaps and bounds under Bush and in the last year of his term the American economy was hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate.

Many of us, including your most humble hare, thought that wen we voted for Barack Obama we were voting for a new, post-Reagan era of American politics, but were sadly disappointed after President Obama took office. Obama has several feathers in his cap: the Affordable Care Act is an excellent start toward real health care reform, the goal being a single payer system and the elimination of private insurance companies as an unnecessary and inefficient middle man; the end of the Iraq war has stopped a great deal of fiscal bleeding; and President Obama's preference for a diplomatic solution to an international crisis over sending in the Marines with no exit strategy have prevented wars before they start, much to the chagrin of his Republican opposition, saving American taxpayers untold money and saving the lives of an unknown number of combat troops. He also gets kudos for ending the Bush torture program, although with demerits for failing to prosecute Bush war crimes. More seriously, the administration's failure to prosecute crooked Wall Street bankers is without excuse and even worse than the failure to prosecute war criminals, as Wall Street's criminals still continue to commit crimes and acts that should be crimes no different than what they did to crash the world economy in 2008. Obama has put before a Congress a horrible trade deal that not only will further erode what's left of the American middle class through job losses and even provide a strong ISDS that oligarchs can run to any time they think the mean ol' government is regulating them and depriving them of expected profits. Do corporations now have a right to profits? What would Adam Smith say? The other two deals not yet ready to be presented to Congress are apparently worse. TISA, the last of the terrible trio, would deprive formerly sovereign nations of the right to nationalize industries that grow too troublesome in regards to public health or worker safety.

Income inequality continues to plague the American economy at an an unacceptable level. Some of this is the result of the unprecedented and frankly racist opposition from the Republicans toward President Obama, but not all of it. No Republican made Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, pursue Wall Street criminal armed with only kid gloves. There is no escaping the conclusion that such favorable treatment is in return for generous campaign support for some of Wall Street's worst actors, especially Goldman Sachs. No Republican made President Obama negotiate TPP, TTIP or TISA. No Republican made President Obama appoint a Wall Street hack like Tim Geithner Treasury Secretary nor, when Geithner announced he was leaving office, made President Obama think out loud about appointing Larry Summers, Wall Street hack emeritus, as his successor. When Summers asked the President to withdraw his name from consideration for Treasury Secretary, Obama settled on Jack Lew, who isn't really much of an improvement over Summers or Geithner.

The next president will be Hillary Clinton. My disdain for Mrs. Clinton is no secret here. She is beholden to Wall Street and it is naive to think she's going to do what needs to be done, if anything at all, to rein in the excesses of Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. She has received large donations from Wall Street banks on behalf of her campaign organization and the Clinton Foundation; she has received exorbitant six-figure speaking fees from them, and she and some of her supporters expect us to believe that there's no cozy relationship between Mrs. Clinton and Wall Street. I'll believe that there isn't when she nationalizes JPMorganChase or Goldman Sachs.

Meanwhile, I will vote for and give support to Bernie Sanders. He says we need a revolution. And we do. That's what it will take to end the Reagan years.

No matter who wins the election, it will be up to us, the common American people, to put an end to the Reagan years. If the system is so corrupt that we can't end it at the ballot box, then we'll do in the streets. The politicians who beg for our vote but take money from Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance or Big Oil and, once safely elected, change their allegiance from the People to artificial persons. These crooked politicians should not be so naive to think that we will give deference to them, the laws they pass, the judges they appoint, the trade deals they negotiate or the wars they start and tell us it's for our own good because they are smarter than we we are, even if it doesn't always look that way. They have more money. Doesn't that prove that they are smarter?

No. It just proves that they're better at stealing our money, buying our politicians and destroying our democracy.

November 11, 2015

I don't want a way for artificial persons to make an end run around democatic governments

and cry to an unelected panel of corporate shysters when they don't realize expected profits (a benefit it could reasonably have expected to accrue to it . . . is being nullified or impaired as a result of the application of a measure of another Party that is not inconsistent with this Agreement). That is the gist of Chapter 28.

The other matters can be addressed without this horsepucky. What would Adam Smith say about a corporation suing for "expected" profits? There must be an earthquake in the vicinity of his resting place.

A corporation is not a human being. It has a charter from the state, not a birth certificate. It has what rights we give them. It is not entitled to human rights.

If a corporation wants a profit, it has every right to manufacture a safe product and put it on the market at a reasonable price in competition with other similar manufactured goods made in the market or even some that are as radically different as a solar panel is to a barrel of oil that accomplish the same thing.

By a safe product, I mean one that that doesn't harm the end user if used as directed, either as an individual or as a member of society or the biosphere. Yes, that means the state has the right to ban the use of tobacco products or even petroleum products, and that the poisoners at Philip Morris or the polluters at ExxonMobil should not be able to have a a private system of justice at its disposal in order to seek a more favorable judgment than one it might get in a real court.

I also don't think it proper for politicians who are guilty of taking bribes generous campaign contributions from corporate officers and high ranking corporate employees, even acting in the fictitious name of the corporation itself, to pass judgment on a radical document that upsets the world's political and legal order by granting artificial persons the right to realize expected profits, something that no reasonable person would expect to find in a state of nature. The majority of our congressmen, who punitively represent us, are bought and paid for by the very legal entities who stand to benefit from a document which they negotiated among themselves. If that sounds corrupt, there's a good reason for it.

Yes, I am calling for mass civil disobedience in response to the passage of the TPP and its sinister sister trade deals, TTIP and TISA. I think that would be the just and proper response. Moreover, I call for civil disobedience worldwide and maintain that very few will benefit from these deals and most of us will just be fucked over.

Having said that, there is a little matter I need some help me with. I have read parts of the TPP and perused over others, so I may have missed something that you seem to think is there. So persuade me that I'm all wet. Here's your assignment:

Thank you in advance.

November 5, 2015

!!

Up to now I haven't said that I won't vote for Mrs. Clinton; nor have I said that I will. I'll keep my final decision to myself.

Who wins this elections is less important than what we do afterwards. America has become an oligarchy, and oligarchies never end well for either the oligarchs or those they oppress. We will have to take matters into our own hands to wrest power from the oligarchs and restore democratic government. Who is elected will make no difference in that respect.

The word aristocracy means government by the best. Isn't that a hoot? Slave owners and serf drivers were never the best humanity had to offer and, by definition, were unfit to rule other men. I expect no more of industrialists and financiers who have rigged the system in there favor. We've seen what they have to offer us: a capitalist system without a middle class; a polluted world that never gets cleaned up. Nothing can make that a vision of a sustainable society. If the oligarchs who run a corporation want to do the right thing, they are helpless. To do so would put their corporation at a competitive disadvantage. That is the one thing they cannot do, that they can never do.

What is the one thing we cannot do? We cannot allow them to destroy life on this planet. We know that the many oligarchs have known for decades that climate change is not a hoax. For them to continue to drill for oil and mine for coal without taking into consideration what they doing to not just to our way of life but to life itself is an unimaginable, unspeakable crime against humanity.

It doesn't matter if the name for this system is neoliberalism, supply-side economics, trickle-down or Reaganomics. It must be put out of its misery before it fosters more misery to working people of the world, to all that live on the earth, drink its water and breath its air.

You and I, not the candidates of our choice, are the man on the white horse.

Power to the people.

October 30, 2015

To those who call Hillary a progressive

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[/center][font size="1"]from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.
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I started describing myself as a progressive toward the end of the Bill Clinton administration when it was clear that he favored trickle-down economics and supported trade agreements that hurt most Americans, in addition to signing Republican laws like welfare deform, and the deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industry. It seemed to me that it was a wholesale embrace of Reaganomics, yet Clinton and his minions continued to call themselves liberals. OK, if liberals were such wimps, then I must be something else.

When, after acquiescing to Generalissimo Bush's and Vice Premier Cheney's coup d'etat of 2000, congressmen and senators who once described themselves as liberals, including Senator Hillary Clinton, began supporting his imperialist designs on Iraq, my view that liberals were wimps was reinforced. The Frat Boy's program for war included an assault on the due process of law and other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms as well as the explicit use of torture, the liberals went right along and voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, every special appropriation to fund the war the Bush Junta requested and, in 2006, more restrictions on civil liberties. Liberals, who I had long thought of as wimps, hardly seemed to be liberals any more; and I continued to call myself a progressive.

When Barack Obama ran for President, I thought this was a kindred spirit I could get behind. He opposed the war in Iraq and favored diplomacy over just sending in the Marines any time some dictator, or even an elected leader, became troublesome; he favored a more transparent government that would return to a guarantee of civil liberties for its common citizens, perhaps even protecting the powerless from the powerful. In the wake of the crash of 2008, he criticized the role of bankers and banking deregulation. And health insurance reform of some kind? I was in.

It would be wrong to say that he didn't mean a word of it. He did get us out of Iraq and now seems to be in the process of getting us back in to Iraq (and Syria and Jordan and Lebanon) without a clear plan of what to do there. He did prod congress into passing a watered down health insurance reform package that was less than a full-blown European style socialized medical program and still left unscrupulous health insurance companies in place to continue to prove why we really need full-blown European style socialized medicine. He has a personal dislike of war as a policy and would rather negotiate an agreement with a hostile state rather than go to war with it has paid dividends, such as the agreement with Iran. Beyond that, there's little good to say about the last six and a half years. That's not all President Obama's fault. The racist and misogynist Republican party has marched lock step against anything he proposes, except bad trade deals. They saw a successful black man and responded as racists have since emancipation: they tried to kill his mule and pour manure down his well. However, no Republican held a gun to President Obama's or Attorney General Eric Holder's head to get them to treat Wall Street criminals with kid gloves. Obama needed no encouragement from Republicans to negotiate the TPP, TTIP or TISA. No progressive would have entered such negotiations. The unprecedented secrecy in negotiating the the deals and the ridiculous procedures that members of Congress were made to go through just to read the damned thing indicates that there's something willfully opaque about the process and that there's something political/financial establishment doesn't want the common people to know. A progressive, of course, believes in transparency.

It used to be that Americans simply did not do as well under Republican administrations as under Democratic administrations. Nowadays. wages fall under Republicans and remain stagnant under Democrats. That may make Democrats better than Republicans, but it's nothing to write home about.

A progressive would not have negotiated free trade agreements; a progressive would not have been so nice to Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd; a progressive would fight to undo banking deregulation; a progressive would not but boots on the ground in the Middle East or anywhere else with a clear idea of what military force is supposed to accomplish. Mrs. Clinton's present opposition to the TPP is unconvincing. She give no specific reason for opposing it. Mrs. Clinton takes a lot of money from Wall Street and cannot be expected to roll back banking deregulation. Reinstating Glass-Steagal is a progressive position; Alan Blinder, an aid to Mrs. Clinton, said that is something she would not do and Mrs. Clinton has said nothing to set the record straight. Mrs. Clinton, in word and deed, has supported a disastrous and unnecessary war in what can only be described as an anti-progressive political decision.

While Mrs. Clinton has a laudable record on civil rights for women, racial minorities and, perhaps belatedly, the LGBT community, her spotty record on issues of economic justice makes these bright spots on her career ring hollow. Social justice for traditionally persecuted minorities works hand-in-hand with economic justice for American workers. To support one and not the other leaves at best a watered down version of both. The two cannot be separated. So even here, Mrs. Clinton is not a progressive.

Please don't call Mrs. Clinton a progressive. It cheapens the word. It is an abuse of the English language.


Don't call Hillary Clinton a progressive.

October 22, 2015

I'm signing no loyalty oaths, even one proffered in jest

I will not vote Republican, I can assure you of that.

I will vote only very reluctantly for a corporatist. Hillary Clinton, like DLC/Third Way/New Democrats in general, is a corporatist. So is Barack Obama. So is Bill Clinton. This is a program that follows an economic theory called variously neoliberalism, Reaganomics, supply side economics or trickle-down economics. It is a fundamentally an unsustainable system and the results have been the transfer of wealth upwards. You may ask why almost all the income created since the crash of 2008 goes to a small class of people who own at least as much wealth than the bottom 50%. Yes, the fact that every president or either party we've had since 1980 has been a corporatist has a lot to do with it. The Free Trade pacts they have pushed have a lot to do with it. The fact that the middle class has evaporated during this time has a lot to do with it.

Capitalism is impossible to maintain without a market full of buyers. Without a large and thriving middle class, that will not be the case. My parents, who would both be over 100 today, saw that movie when they were young. It was called the Great Depression. They told me that I wouldn't want to see it. They told me what it was like.

I understand your point, Ms Vee. In spite of being a corporatist, Mrs Clinton has laudable views on equality before the law. She would be better than Jeb Bush, who, pathetic as it sounds, is the best the Republicans have to offer. There is a great deal of injustice afoot these days. Some of it is social injustice and some of it is economic injustice. Some of it seems more aimed at you, some of might be more aimed at me and quite a bit of it is aimed at both of us at once.

I'll close by saying that although we may agree on much, I still resent your post suggesting that possess some luxury or privilege that I can think about not voting for for a corporatist Democrat over a corporatist Republican. I have no luxuries. I'm a sick old man living on disability in ratty mobile home. I will turn 65 a few days before the 2016 election. I go into a panic whenever Paul Ryan, apparently soon to be Speaker of the House, tells me the country can't afford social security and medicare and that I am in a national hammock or when President Obama speaks warmly of the recommendations of the bipartisan catfood commission he appointed during his first term.

Even if Bernie is elected president, then I will still be hitting the streets in protest of what this country has become under the regime of neoliberalism or Reaganomics or whatever you want to call it. It will feel better, though, if the President is somebody who tells me that is exactly what good citizens should do in these times, rather than some mealy-mouthed pean about the virtues of law and order. And if the police shoot, I'll stand in front and make a pathetic effort to shield all I can. That, I think, would beat starving to death so that the rich can have more and more.