Well, fuck me. I thought I was on a DEMOCRATIC forum.

[woo me with science]

139. Look who these people are.

Always the same Third Way group. They are deliberate scenery, and their purpose is to try to get you to believe that your values and principles are a relic, and in the minority now.

They have to do that, because the numbers by which we outnumber them are vast. Remember Chomsky telling us that they can't overpower us with force, so they will try to do it by shaping our perceptions and expectations.

The point we all need to grasp here is that we really have one party now, not two. Our electoral system has been purchased, and we are now being managed. Everybody has got to stop pretending to be shocked and surprised when one of the two corporate-selected candidates for President gets into office and immediately continues the process of selling us out...our lives and our children's lives...for corporate interests. We have been purchased. We have a problem.

We waste energy responding to Third Way propaganda that feeds us a constantly changing, ludicrous kaleidescope of justifications for what is happening:

The President seeks the same goals you do, but the Republicans are just too powerful right now.

or

Your views are out of step with the party. The country is more conservative now. You are fringe.

or

What you see as a betrayal is just a compromise *this time.* Adults have to compromise. Stop being a purist.

or

It's all part of a chess game on your behalf that you couldn't possibly understand...

Meanwhile, the corporate government picks up where it left off and continues its work of refashioning this nation and all of us into profit spigots for the ones who own us now, and we are moved steadily into serfdom and corporate fascism and endless war.

It is time to wake up and stop pretending, and instead figure out what we are going to do about it.

One acknowledgement we need to make is depressing as hell: The truth is that we cannot depend on the government we have to save us, or protect us, or represent us anymore. They are working for the other side. We have to save ourselves, because voting alone is not enough anymore.

The other acknowledgement we need to make is positive beyond measure. The propaganda we are fed about being in the minority is absolute bullshit. We saw it during the election, in the way the corporate candidates pivoted leftward in their rhetoric to gain our votes, and we see it every day in polls and in conversations with neighbors and friends. Americans don't hunger for a corporate state; we still hunger for the same values and principles and just society that we always have.

We are vastly greater in numbers than the corporate interests who have hijacked our country. They have power now only because we have allowed them to have it. We can take it back.