Perhaps a Ponder

We find ourselves in an increasingly disintegrating government due, in large measure, to the seeming absence of the Fourth Estate.  That, in turn, is due to the media now being in the effectively complete control of corporate interests.  If you have not noticed that ABC news, for example, cannot go a full broadcast without referencing a Disney product then you just are not paying attention.  If you think the spin put on nearly ever story by Fox News comes days or even weeks after an events airing by other networks then you are not paying attention.  It takes them awhile to think up creative lies that can be disseminated by the misrepresentations they promote.  If you have not noticed that many events have no coverage at all then you are not paying attention.  It can be cited that minimal attention was paid to the TPP, Keystone XL pipeline, DAPL protests or, unless it suited an anti-protest line due to this bias.  You may never have heard the phrase, “Net Neutrality” for the same set of reasons.

The press is slowly being denied access to the stories by Trump’s minions even before he takes office.  There is twitter storm every time Trump does not LIKE something.  It is a counter offensive that knocks the press out of reporting actual news.  We are dependent upon having a real and concerned press.  Trump has said that he wants to collar the press.  His minions (Steve Bannon comes to mind) are all for a dark out of the media.  They have already moved to silence the press and protest.  Freedom of speech encompasses both ideas in the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The press is essential to a democracy.  There is no easy way to turn back from the criminal direction the Trump election is pushing us.  Let us be truly clear here.  Trump himself is just part of the symptom.  He is not even the head of the snake.  He has only a monetary worth of 10% or less of the Koch brothers (if he has any worth at all).  Ponder that for a moment.  Trump said after Mitt Romney was defeated that Romney (purported net worth of around $200 million) just did not have the juice to win… in part because he did not have the net worth of Trump.  Trump then started to dig in for a run at the Presidency.  The real damage has been created by the octopus that is the Koch network of creative lying but even THAT is not the head of the snake.  We have a corporate domination that wants all the rules to disappear. 

Ponder some more and you will eventually come to see that real freedom is in as much danger as it has ever been.

What've You Been Smokin'?

Gads, this past week has been an intense rumble through political insanity.  On all sides people are urging “everyone” to chillax and give Trump an open mind.  Yet every single he moves to see that we all lose rights.  Every day his team does one more outrageous thing.  The folks that voted for him are saying we “all” need to give him a chance. 

He has been telling us what he will do.  Deport 3 to 4 million people by creating a deportation squad.  He is green lighting climate deniers to gut environmental safety net.  He is nodding when Paul Ryan says he will gut Medicare.  They will steal Social Security.  They will repeal (and perhaps some day replace) the Affordable Care Act knocking 20 million citizens off of medical coverage.  Yes, the list continues ad infinitum. 

Jobs?  That’s sidelined.  The TPP?  That’s a go ahead even though the campaign said it was a no go.  Net Neutrality?  Not a chance.  Barrow and run up the national debt to create infrastructure.  If a Dem is ever elected again the GOP will scream bloody murder that the debt is too large but will remain absolutely silent while they create it.  Jobs will continue to flee overseas.  Minimum wage increase… again it will disappear. 

What have we gained from this election?

Nothing but the whirlwind is gained.  If you think otherwise send me a sample of what you’ve been smoking.

We Are Sooo Screwed

So, post election we find ourselves in a very different world.  We find ourselves with a President Elect who resembles in almost every way the AntiChrist.  There were mass protests in major cities the day after with, apparently, some were wounded near a protest site in Seattle.  All of the deplorable behavior Trump displayed during an election season unlike anything I have ever seen is now seemingly normalized.

The ride will get very from here.  Unions will be under attack.  Protest will be ignored and further suppressed.  The Supreme Court is now going to be a battle ground.  The ACA is going to disappear.  The wall will go up between the U.S. and Mexico.  The list is nearly endless.  Every Progressive right now is concerned for everything won against the fascist’s agenda that is to come.  Trump with nuclear codes is a nightmare I cannot even begin to fathom.  There is likely nowhere to hide.

Slacking a Bit

In watching developments the past few weeks there have been memes galore!  Ohmy, but they just keep getting better.

That sort of sums it up for today.  Yet there is so much more going on.  The Bundy's, the death of A. Scalia, the local issues, the gun violence and so forth.  It's a great time to be getting ready to vote or caucus in the primaries.

Debates and Winning

The Democratic Debates are a very different sort of civilized clash of ideas rather the mud wrestling match the Republicans put on.  There is no gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair or screaming that the opponent(s) is/are wack jobs.  The general idea is to present real differences in a calm and less confrontational way.

Along the way to the debates there is a bit of wrangling over the fact that there are only six debates scheduled and, taking a page from the Republicans, only Democratic Party sponsored debates will be allowed.  With that I have put forth the #ResignDebbie idea to rid us of a poor performance by Debbie Wasserman Schultz in not having a 50 State Strategy AND for restricting the number of possible debates so the Hillary Rodham Clinton is favored to the exclusion of the other candidates.

In any case, as the debates, one of which was actually a Forum, have been a breath of fresh air as I have said before and we are moving forward.  Now the memes are building.  It is early, there is a looong way to go before the Convention selects the Party's candidate.  The leaning of the rules favors HRC to be certain.  The reality of massive rallies favor Bernie Sanders.  Martin O'Malley is struggling to be heard at all.  Despite the handicapping of the candidates in several ways by the external sources of political distraction they have all moved forward with better campaigns than I recall in a long time.   There is some friction between the Sanders and HRC camps, to be sure, but overall the process has remained fairly civil.

The polls don't tell us much, the media is blind to anything but what they want us to see (and MAKE us see) so we rely on social media and chatting with friends and opponents.

Sharing information as well helping others maintain some perspective in this process is part of what the memes are doing right now.  The thing that Bernie Sanders has done is to calm the waters by not attacking the people he is running against in the primaries.  Not everyone is taking that direction so there is lots of bolstering that has to be done to keep as many as possible calm.  American politics has not been prone to calm.

 

There is a lot more that I could post here on this but time does not really allow that today.

An Efficient Bite of Government

One of the arguments that occurs regularly revolves around how Big the government should be.  It's not a smart discussion but you see it happen often enough that it is worth noting.  There are Big Government defenders and then there are those who want an ever Smaller Government.  Some have even stated that they want to shrink Government to the point that you could drown it in a bath tub... and, yes, that is a near quote of that position.  What is this really all about?

Imagine you got rich because you found a way to circumvent the rules that the "Marketplace" has in place such that the rules no longer applied to the way you got rich.  That is, asked another way, what if, without rules the marketplace was whatever you wanted it to be and your income and wealth was dependent on it continuing in that direction?  Would you overturn a system that was rigged in your favor?  

When I hear the comments about how Freedom is dependent on fewer rules I think about what that actually means.  I see no case for that being a factual idea.  Society can be free of rules... just look at Somalia.  There are pirates and everyone possible owns (and uses) a gun to enforce their own particular version of the rules.  When I see memes where someone essentially wraps themselves in a flag and tells the rest of us that their patriotic stance is the more correct (freer) version of what we should all aspire to I shudder.  Being patriotic has virtually nothing to do with a lack of rules.  A lack of rules just means the sins of one are projected on others.  It is the rule of, by and for the bully.  There is no way to make this fair for the majority of us.  We really do need the rules to  work FOR us.

                          

 One way this seems to be projected is when someone says they want a more efficient government.  What they mean by this seems to be that they want a smaller less capable government.  What is needed, they say, is fewer rules so that we don't need such a large government.  It costs money, you know... they say.  We need to cut government to the bone to force it to be more efficient.  Here is the problem with what they are truly saying: shrinking government eliminates the ability of government to enforce the rules that make it safer for most of us.  It eliminates the safety net.  It devastates the weakest among us by letting the predators take over.  It allows the worst of us to dominate.  Society shrinks when you shrink government in the name of efficiency.  Wages shrink when you lower the minimum wage... the floor becomes the ceiling.  You can shrink wages by inflation taking away the buying power you had or you can simply raise prices on essential things to take away the power that money once had.  When the banks do increasingly risky things we are talking about a lack of rules to keep them from taking additional risk... with your money.  With these additional risks I noticed that the benefit of the increased income they received did not trickle down to you in the form of increased interest paid to you, by the way.  But I digress.

When you take enforcement out of the equation you are breaking the value of the rules in the marketplace.  When you decrease the funding to the FDA/USDA and so forth you are allowing the industry to self police and if they do a poor job of it there is no penalty big enough to fix the problem.

We have had 40 years of the regressive diminishing of government.  Forty years of less and less enforcement.  Forty years of breaking government's role in protecting the citizenry.  Forty years of stupid economic policy.  Efficiency in government is not about continuing to decrease the budgets of the agencies that are supposed to defend us against this onslaught.  When you hear this argument you should be thinking about what billionaires are behind the scenes telling you that your money needs to be in their pockets because that is what "Efficient" government means to them.

   

Because a private prison can work its inmates as slaves.

FedEx & UPS want to take over the Post Office... just imagine what it would cost to mail a post card if the did!

A Great Week in Memes

 There are so many issues to taking on the 1% that it is hard to sort out where to start much of the time.  This week sort of spread the juice around a bit.

Yeah, I know, it's a bit of a dog-from-every-town kind of week. Sometimes that's just how it rolls.  There are plenty of days left to get to the vote part of the problem solving and THEN we have to stay on it to get things accomplished.  We tend to go back to our lives and step out of the battle... the 1% are counting on that.

In the long haul we just need to stay focused on the ideas we are contrasting.  It's about time we understand just how thoroughly the 1% has corrupted the entire system.  Don't lay down and continue to be run over.  Vote.