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Yes, we can break the cycle. It may be an ongoing fight, but we can do this. Thanks, Frank for the courage to fight the good fight.
Let the late Dr. Martin Luther King’s words inspire you. “Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference…. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”
“It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.” Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King
Thursday, Senate Democrats joined Republicans to approve the massive expansion of the US military demanded by President Donald Trump. That House vote slashed $23 billion from food stamp spending and a ‘cost cutting’ scheme to consolidate the departments of Labor and Education.
The bill both houses approved expands military spending at the fastest rate since the war on Iraq.
This increase alone is larger than the total budget of the Department of Education, approximately $70 billion. It is also larger than the annual military budget of Russia [$61 billion].
Says the Stockholm Peace Institute – one third of the US annual defense budget would end world hunger. Another third would provide primary and early secondary education for the world population.
Instead, oceans of cash are squandered on tools of mass murder.
And military parades are now allowed at the president’s discretion.
Democrats claim to oppose this. Yet only7 out of 47 Democratic senators voted ‘nay,’ ensuring its lopsided passage.
The only substantial Democrat criticism – insufficient hostility toward China!
The Democrat Party hosts virtually no public debate or oversight of the vast social resources devoted to the military. There is even less public control over or even knowledge of the deployment of US forces all over the world.
Also this week, the Intercept released a study showing that the US military carried out over 550 drone strikes in Libya alone, twice as many as previously believed.
Imperialist crimes of this magnitude cannot co-exist with democratic governance at home. This is why the US military plays a lead role in the mass round-up, imprisonment and torture of refugees and their children.
Those huddled masses? Democrats no less than Republicans own them.
Vote Common Good, Frank Schaeffer’s blog and other pseudo-left outfits in the orbit of the Democrat Party provide a veneer of normalcy that serves as political cover for US crimes against humanity.
Pseudo-left cynicism is unbounded. It proceeds on the assumption that people can be made to do anything, including pretend that they oppose these horrors when they actually approve them.
Love, beauty and creation make wonderful discussion topics. They don’t address our complicity in these crimes. So I will.
The ‘cycle’ is in fact a prostitution ring.
The state is a whore. The ruling class is its pimp. It’s time to end the political prostitution.
Don’t incarcerate the nation. Incarcerate the ruling class that runs the prostitution circle.
Pentecost blessings!
Good rant gdd
Sound a lot like frank!
All the worlds a stage
Nine
Dear Nine:
Really?
Where does Frank Schaeffer speak like this?
https://www.facebook.com/wsws.org/videos/10156733357714684/
Pentecost blessings!
Well, as our dear Frank said as the women around him says since Trump got in you have been so angry as you have to let that anger go as its a funny thing the women around me say the same thing…
My dearest Gdd I will try to ‘splane it to you again.
We have a two party system to change power peacefully as you saw the results of our last civil war….
I was asked by the Bryce campaign to put a 4 by 4 on the lawn as that is ileagle in my town….
the war has come home as my dear wife is afraid…
right wing extremists rule my town…
As I appeal to our vets
for protection
public drama?
all the worlds a stage
N
Dear Nine:
‘ We have a two party system to change power peacefully…’
No.
This two party system intends NOT to ‘change power peacefully;’ it intends the suppression any outbreak of genuine opposition by the 90% to the fiscal dictates of the ruling elite.
On your terms, the 1% [GOP] and next 9% [Democrat Party] struggle for power.
The 90% have 0% political power, only deciding whether the 1% or next 9% ‘rules.’
The Democrat Party problem is that the 90% is figuring out what a next 9% win means:
A massive transfer of wealth from the working class to corporations
Lifesavings eliminated for millions of working class families
Bank bailouts expanded
Medical premiums hiked.
Medicare spending cut.
Insurance giants grip on health care tightened.
Illegal war on Afghanistan was expanded.
War preparations for war on Libya and Syria.
NSA surveillance on US citizens was increased.
Those are the great, Democrat Party achievements over the last three decades! And that list says naught of Clinton’s abolition of welfare ‘as we know it,’ the deregulation of the financial system, bombing Serbia, slashing autoworker wages, drone-missile warfare, and more deportations than in any other period in US history.
Even after major victories resulting in control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the Democrat Party enacted right-wing policies parallel to those of the GOP!
What has the Democratic Party done to deserve the loyalty of the working class?
History belies the claim that Democrats will alter the trajectory of bourgeois politics. The ruling class is awaking to the reality that the SOLE way forward is breaking out of the two-party political straightjacket.
The 90% has zero political representation in the two-party system. Increasingly, the working class response is, ‘your “representation” is neither requested nor accepted.’
The Democrat Party sides 100% with the administration and 100% against the 90%. In the face of massive anger, the DNC refuses to context Trump’s next fascistic appointment to the Supreme Court. Not content with that, it will contain all opposition to
Last Friday [June 29, ‘18], Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post an article, ‘An explosion is coming.’ It concludes with a hope that this explosion will occur ‘at the ballot box and not in the streets.’ That is the ruling class doing exactly what the ruling class does – containing any independent opposition in political forms that afford the working class zero political power, and which are therefore 100% irrelevant to the 90%. This is the Democrat Party offering zero leadership and seeking only to contain all independent resistance by channeling it into the voting booths.
Since you’re in the mood for explaining things, Nine, I invite you to explain this small matter:
Knowing what a ‘next 9%’ victory means, why should the 90% agree to be retained as political hostages to this ‘two-party system?’
Pentecost blessings!
GDD
Gdd
You sound just like my Hitler pal as he says the same things you do yet refuses to vote even though he lives in Wisconsin ‘s first with me as I call brainwashed…brainwashed weather it is a far right or far left perspective!.
My Hitler pal is one of those nasty alt righters but gdd you and him have much in common!
You refuse to support good men like Randy Bryce!
What can I say other than nothing at all?
Nine
“What can I say other than nothing at all?”
Nine, some folks just want an opportunity to rant about whatever suits their fancy. Trying to have a productive conservation with them is useless. Live and learn. And ignore. Cheers.
Dear Nine:
In one post, you tell me that I sound like Frank; in the next, I sound like Hitler.
Honestly.
Did you know that private prison companies are making a bonanza off current immigration policy? Did you? Where is your chosen party rallying the nation against CoreCivic and GEO Group? Where is the outcry against the abuses that invariably accompany these buzzard businesses?
Ten years have lapsed since the Wall Street crash. Today, stock buybacks, mergers and acquisitions reach record heights. That’s where tax cuts go. These parasitic practices rob hospitals, schools and vital social services of desperately needed cash for an artificial inflation of stock market values so that uber-wealthy billionaires can purchase ever more and bigger yachts, mansions and private jets. All that wealth becomes unavailable for social production.
Where do the treasons sons of Belial you adulate as ‘leaders’ in your glorious party implemented a permanent campaign explaining how and why the entire economy is geared to pilfer society of hundreds of billions?
Dystopian conditions emerge all around you at neck-breaking speed. Civil rights are collapsing. Rule of law is replaced by open oppression. Your chosen ‘leaders’ not only refuse to fight; they are terrified by the tsunami of outrage they know is coming against systematic injustices which look altogether too much like those outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
Yet you refuse to break with this criminal cult of assassinating antichrists. If that is the best you can do, you have no basis to cavil when you are depicted as a weak, cowering, vacillating, shivering, impotent, pusillanimous little weasel.
Your little republic is not dying. It’s dead. D – E – A – D. It has already passed. It doesn’t exist. Wheels, gears and clogs haven’t quite stopped, but the experiment is finished. It lacks sufficient legitimacy even to host elections that are legally binding on its population. Yet in the face of unimaginable horrors of a coming, third world war, you back a party which leads the charge against press freedom!
Under such conditions, support of illegitimate state policies and actions evidences a fundamental disloyalty to the US working class. One day, a great reckoning will come. I’ve said this once before – history is coming for the United States. Get on the right side of history before it catches up with you. The die is cast.
Pentecost blessings!
Gdd,
I am with our wise Joelyn as you are like a police interrogator as I shall plead the fifth as my moms taught me never ever talk to the police.
N
Nine, your Mom was right of course. LOL! I try to avoid engaging in back and forths with folks who troll or rant. It ruins a blog and discourages others from leaving comments. So folks, if you are tired of seeing the usual suspects like me leave comments most of the time, please join the conversation. Your opinion is valued even if some may disagree with it. The revolution will be televised. Cheers.
Dear Joelyn:
It seems not to occur to you that it is precisely because of Democrat acquiescence on the wealth transfer and destruction of savings, the bank bailouts, our illegal wars, etc. that the working class has abandoned the Democrat Party.
We’re pressing 60% of eligible voters refusing to vote.
Do we need to push that to 70%?
How much punishment do you need before you face reality?
Pentecost blessings!
Dear Nine:
I sound like Frank. Then I sound like Hitler. Then I sound like the police.
Think this through.
Pentecost blessings!