Look, I don't know what we're supposed to do about our bullshit political system but it seems to me that it must start with facing up to the facts.
Believing that this time, someone is actually going to deliberately deliver meaningful change and not just pretend to do so because it polls well is beyond naïve. It's willful blindness. It's like we're trapped in a Groundhog Day scenario with Lucy (I like my metaphors mixed) yanking the football as Charlie Brown goes to kick it...over and over and over a-fucking-gain, ad infinitum.
I'm convinced that one reason we haven't woken up is because nobody wants to wake up to a nightmare. Especially one that no one has the faintest clue what to do about.
I don't know what to do about it either, but I'm pretty sure the wisest course is not to continue to wallow in bullshit and paper over the crimes and injustices with lies...the way we always do. Let's just all pretend we got this while effectively tolerating the untenable status quo. Let's just pretend like it's all going to work out. We needn't exert ourselves to change any fucking thing.
In our political system, the status quo always wins. Whoever is elected, the status quo wins.
There are differences to the two sides of course, but narrow ones (I know we can argue about just how narrow and it is, to a degree, a matter of perspective, but still...). Who's for peace? Nobody. Who's for economic, social and criminal justice from the bottom to the top of society? Nobody. Who's for reforming our hideous and shameful prison system? Nobody. Who is calling for free education and universal health care? Nobody. Who's calling for justice for bankers, equality, compassion, humanity? Nobody.
“There is no way in the American political system to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs. It's impossible. Or Exxon Mobil.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges
Who gets elected does matter but usually within a fairly narrow slice of ruling class reality. For regular people, who remain trapped as serfs to the oligarchy, it's more of a distraction than anything else. Bread and circuses. Bullshit for the masses. In the mean time, nothing changes. The ruling class likes things just the way they are. That's what they've ordered and that's what they'll get.
So get ready for your fake change re-tread...and more of the fucking same: more war, more inequality, more police state bullshit, more racism, more economic injustice, more inhumanity, more greed and selfishness, more of the rich ripping off the poor. Albeit in a nice new poll-tested box slathered in the latest high-caliber bullshit.
Anything good and desirable will be AstroTurfed straight into meaninglessness.
American Politics To Continue Being A Grotesque Plutocratic Spectacle For The Foreseeable Future
It goes without saying that the fun part of this election is going to be watching all those political pundits argue about which candidate is the most "authentic."
So sit back and watch while people lose their minds over whose bullshit is best. Someone will convince enough people that they are 'the one' who will finally deliver on the nebulous and extremely dubious promise of 'change' or whatever else polls well at the moment to get enough votes to win. They will then lose all interest in those people and their issues and get on with their ruling class games while thwarting any and all efforts to change the status quo one iota. There will be lavish rewards all around...for the ruling class and their flunkies that is.
Let's hear it for the 1%. They've twisted and perverted our political system into a game they can't possibly lose. They've gotta be loving this shit.
Hillary Clinton Calls For 'Toppling' The 1 Percent
Hillary Clinton believes that strengthening the middle class and alleviating income inequality will require "toppling" the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, according to a New York Times profile published on Tuesday.
The Times article quoted a host of Clinton confidants characterizing Clinton's economic policy record as a populist agenda akin to that of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That includes a view that the ongoing accumulation of massive wealth at the top of the spectrum is holding back the broader economy.
Hillary Clinton is going to run on toppling the 1%. OMG, how cynical is that? I guess she had to one-up 'hope and change.' It is no stretch to say that HRC is on the coziest of terms with Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and the 1% power elite. Who could she possibly think she's fooling? The American public, I guess.
Me thinks Clinton covets Warren's mojo. But she had to one-up her too. She had to go and put on LeftistFace, as Cassiodorus puts it.
Clinton is doing the predictable thing, working the people for votes and spare change and assuring the 1% that they have nothing at all to worry about, whilst gleefully accepting their largess. 'We're going to topple the 1%!' wink, wink.
My prediction is that Hillary will be an ultra-liberal, rabble rousing populist right up to election day. Then, assuming she wins, she'll fall right into line doing the 1%'s bidding, just like Obama or anyone else who wins this stupid ruling class game. Get ready for more of the same. After election day, she or her henchmen will be calling us retards and telling us to shut the fuck up. We've seen this movie before.
My indictment is not of HRC or BHO, they are merely players in a rotten game, my indictment is of the game, the system, the one that keeps us at perpetual war and wastes human lives and precious resources perpetuating shameful practices that should have been abolished long ago. We must stop raping the planet and fucking over its people for profits' sake and start doing the right things because they are the right things to do. Our real problems, climate wise and otherwise, have become too large to ignore. Humanity and the planet need some attention. Right now.
A Drone Program That Has Killed Hundreds Of Civilians Finally Killed Some That The White House Regrets
This morning, the White House disclosed that a January 2015 drone strike, conducted in Pakistan by the CIA with the intention of taking out an al Qaeda compound, resulted in the deaths of two al Qaeda hostages who were not known to have been in the line of fire at the time of the attack. "The killing of American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto is the first known instance in which the U.S. has accidentally killed a hostage in a drone strike," Wall Street Journal's Adam Entous reported Thursday.
President Barack Obama held a brief press conference Thursday morning following a statement released by the White House, which described the incident as a "uniquely tragic situation."
Yes,
uniquely tragic because an American drone program that murders hundreds of innocent men, women and children is just ordinary tragedy. Plain old every day regular garden variety unavoidable tragedy that nothing whatsoever can be done about. We couldn't possibly stop doing such shameful shit. We couldn't possibly. Innocents must die for The American Way of Life™ – which is to say, for the right of our billionaires to prey on your country. That's just the way it is. Isn't that a good enough reason for you?
“This drone program is fkn evil.” ~ OPOL
Here, as a tribute to the recently passed, Ben E. King, is Playing for Change playing his most famous song, Stand by Me:
And again, Playing for Change, with a tune for our times, Bob Marley's Get Up Stand Up:
People become alarmed when victims get angry
It would be funny to watch, if it weren't so damned pathetic-nay, tragic-how the MSM (think Wolf Blitzer) act as scolding parents, challenging protesters and activists to defend the 'shocking' violence/looting/rioting/etc. “Burning your own neighborhoods!” they exclaim breathlessly. “How can that be justified?”
They report on police violence like ho-hum, another young black man killed today, the forecast is for more tomorrow.
If they'd EVER, over the decades, shown the same alarm at police violence and social/economic violence aimed at African Americans and other ethnic minorities and poor people in general, maybe we wouldn't have seen it get so damned ugly. This business of blaming the victims when they finally just can't take any more is bizarrely foolish and speaks of shameful and blinding privilege.
How on earth can this happen? Why would they do that? What could possibly explain it? Bring me my fainting couch!
Anyone who endeavors to serve society as a journalist should make some effort to understand the society they purport to serve. The American people shouldn't be the captive audience of millionaire journalists, all harrumphing about the 'riots' and the 'violence' as if the victims are solely responsible for this horrible mess and that slavery, racism, inequality, class warfare and American fascism has nothing to do with it.
And the priority in the aftermath is NOT to 'get back to normal,' it's to reinvent a new normal where this shit is unnecessary. We need to focus on helping those who are hurting - not punishing them for it. We do not need to return to the same fucked up conditions that caused this. We need to change.
If you can't see that, if you are that blind and ignorant about America, you don't deserve to be an American journalist. You just don't. Propping up the putrid status quo ain't your fuckin' job. And your extravagant salaries just add to the problem. You are so out of touch, the only people you make any sense to at all anymore are the rich bastards trapped in the same bubble as you. What could possibly be bothering these rowdy brown people?
Surely it has nothing to do with hundreds of years of white supremacy, racism, repression and violence and a stubborn refusal and/or dismal failure to do any-fucking-thing about it. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the shitty quality of life parceled out to the poor.
If we were to do anything about it, we'd have to reform the whole damned system.
So we'll just do nothing. Once again, we'll settle for what the fat cats want.
For the people to get nothing.
Maybe some happy talk.
If it's deemed necessary.
Maryland Republican Suggests Taking Food Stamps From Rioters' Parents
"I think that you could make the case that if there is a failure to do proper parenting and allowing this stuff to happen, is there an opportunity for a month to take away your food stamps," Maryland state Del. Pat McDonough said Wednesday during a radio broadcast clipped by The Intercept.
"It would never get past the legislature because it seems a little bit harsh, but I think the principle is there has got to be some way to connect to the lack of parenting," McDonough continued.
Yes, it seems a little harsh, you know, if you want to think about it, but if we're not going to blame the victims, what
are we going to do? And then there's this Texas Republican who is confused about which oppressed group he wants to blame this on. He decided to go in a creative direction:
Texas GOP Rep. Bill Flores Links Baltimore Protests To Gay Marriage
Texas Rep. Bill Flores made a bizarre link between same-sex marriage rights and the current turmoil in Baltimore, Maryland, arguing that "breakdown of the family" has contributed to income disparity across the country.
As a white man, I have to apologize for the astonishing dumbness of the stupid white asshole class. The ones who can't believe this is happening. The ones who wonder where this is all coming from. The ones asking, 'why is there suddenly a race problem in America?' The ones who think you can take an historically oppressed people, long deprived of economic, social, educational or political justice and shove them into some urban wasteland, give them nothing but a kick in the teeth and then expect them to take pride of ownership for stuff they've never owned and otherwise act exactly like their privileged white oppressors without any of the benefits pertaining thereto. And the hubris, gall and ignorance to then demand that the victims of these historic and
present crimes take responsibility for them...as if they had done it to themselves. How dare they freak out about all the horrible shit that's been done, and is
being done, to them?
You squeeze people and squeeze people and squeeze 'em some more, but when they break, it's their fault.
Its always all about the irresponsible rioters in Baltimore, or Ferguson, or Watts, or where-the-fuck-ever. It's never about classism, racism, police violence or economic inequality. It's never about the centuries of racial injustice that led up to those points. Its never about the four hundred years of bad fuckin' road that brought us here. It's always about the crimes of the poor, never about the crimes perpetrated against them. The crimes of the poor are the lesser crimes, people.
"The pain that people feel is real. And you are making a comparison. You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines, right? And what we know to be true is that the police are killing people everywhere. They're killing people here."
Activist, DeRay McKesson
Broken windows are
not worse than broken spines, and sporadic rioting should
not be more alarming than systematic police killings and class warfare.
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I want to know where my humanitarians are!"
Chad L. Coleman