As Another Pissed Off Liberal, There Are Some Things I'm Not Interested In.

There are some things I’m not interested in as an eight year trusted user here.

I’m not interested in getting the school letter to put on my DK varsity sweater, or wearing the blue Dem uniform, if it requires a Loyalty oath. Oathkeepers and their ilk make me sick. Witch hunts, whether conducted by paranoid and delusionary RW conservative Senators or intolerant religious folks in Salem or by white supremacist racists in Nazi Germany or white-hooded Confederate businessmen and cops in the South, revolt me.

I’m not interested at all in the Front Page’s insistence on shooting-Repugs-in-a-barrel ad nauseuem. I’m also not interested in fear-based motivation that lies at the heart of incrementalism as a strategy.

But there is a simple, stark truth often overlooked here of which I am very interested in.

And that is, we only exist as Americans because we stared down the Loyalists and fought our oppressors in a revolution. The greatest Democratic president in our history, F.D.R., reminded us to “remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionaries.” There is only one presidential candidate who speaks of revolution today.

These are the kinds of things I’m interested in:

I’m interested in why there’s chronic dysfunction and a Revolving Door in DC.

I’m interested in why my country administers healthcare through for-profit insurance companies.

I’m interested in why my democracy requires the endless dialing-for dollars by elected officials to do the work of The People.

I'm interested in why my friends can’t afford the ever-rising rents and cost of living because we won't challenge the malignancy of an economic system in which the end game is rigged to concentrate wealth in the hands of a greedy financial and real estate cabal.

I’m interested in why the CEO of Con Edison makes $10 million a year in a sector everybody relies upon that should mandate it it collectively owned by the public as a non-profit.

I’m interested in fighting against the vested interest of a power elite which have turned our political system into an auction house sold to the highest bidder of campaign “donations.”

I’m interested in exposing a system which has forced my friends to have to go to other countries to get prescription drugs and surgery because it’s too costly here.

I’m interested in finding out why we give massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations, an upward redistribution of funds, which they continue to use to further solidify their monopolistic positions in the market and leave us with the bill.

I’m interested in finding out why my local family-run vegetable stand and sausage maker have closed up their shops and there’s a Dunkin Donuts and Sprint cell phone store there instead. I’m interested in a larger scope why my entire city has become a dystopia overrun with corporate franchises and gleaming banks on every corner and new high-rise luxury living with balconies and floor to ceiling open windows while small businesses are few and far between to be found and the average home price and rental keep soaring though wages remain stagnant or depressed.

I’m interested in knowing why politicians don’t have the courage to begin to dismantle a system that saddles college students with $1 TRILLION of debt, doesn’t prosecute murderous cops, has military bases in over 100 countries around the world requiring a bloated budget, but refuse to see that this could instead be used to defray the costs of healthcare for all, improve broken community relations and assure free higher education.

I’m interested in finding a place that venerates the work of activists, protesters and dissenters, who are the lifeblood of democracy. I’m interested in a place that inspires solidarity groups to form and to coalesce with overlapping ones to push back against the status quo of a feudal system designed to confuse and dispirit folks from working together for the common good of the many.

I’m interested in why we have a monoculture food system predominately of processed food dominated by a few monopolistic corporations.

I’m interested in why public schools are no longer offering arts and music programs, but there’s been a spike in business programs and for-profit colleges.

I’m interested in knowing why my parents could buy a home in the suburbs in the early 70’s on one income while my mom stayed at home with us, but today almost everyone I know is paying upward of half their monthly income for rent just to have a roof over their heads, which means hardly anybody I know is thinking of home ownership in NYC.

I’m interested in finding out why in my home of NYC tolls and bridges were hiked up over 50%, subway fare is now almost $3 one way and the streets in my neighborhood are teeming with packs of roving parking attendants ready to pounce on anybody whose meter has expired. But politicians can’t get a one cent tax levied on high speed financial transactions, or a 1% tax hike on the income of the wealthy or stark reduction in the wildly bloated and unnecessary Pentagon budget.

I’m interested in why there’s socialist welfare bailouts for the banks and corporations but austerity and belt-tightening for the 99%. I’m interested in why the middle class is constantly gouged in a thousand different ways in order to appease whiny greedheads who don’t want to pay for the system they’re using to steal accumulate their wealth. 

I’m interested in prosecuting the Economic Terrorists of Wall St whose relentless hyper-focused pursuit of profit has destroyed the American middle class, by hijacking the economy in the 2000’s and continuing to savage it even more today with ongoing rampant ponzi schemes, institutional fraud and fine print deception. This pathology will destroy the planet and its resources.

That’s where my loyalty lies. Not to any website or political party or my own ethnicity or the college I graduated from. Whoever speaks that language clearly and unequivocally will earn my fealty. We will stand and fight together.

My loyalty is to the dispossessed, the marginalized, the downtrodden, the unjustly imprisoned. My loyalty is to the great mass of people forced into the desperate shadows of un/under-employment, hunger, not being able to spend time with their children, working while sick and not able to take proper vacations. To the poor folks harassed, beaten and killed by the cops.

I look at these folks crushed in the grinder of unbridled capitalism the way the Okie character, Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, looked at the world :

A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody...

I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready and where people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build. I'll be there, too.

And I sing the praises of socialism as an antidote to an economic world gone amok with greed and self-interest, along with the great Kurt Vonnegut, who explained in his last book “A Man Without A Country”:

One of my favorite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.

"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

Bernie Sanders once made a film about Eugene Debs and submitted it to a public television station in Burlington. Debs is also a favorite human being of Bernie’s.

Here’s a sobering truth at the heart of Bernie’s Political Revolution: Every single advancement we’ve come to enjoy and take for granted, every single one, requires people to stand #Together in solidarity, revolting, if you will, against the injustices of their time. First step is to realize how we’re being divided and conquered by powers who wish to keep the status quo.

This about sums it up:

Today that injustice is gross economic inequality and police brutality. Occupy Wall St is a clarion call that reverberated around the world because it focused on the Economic Terrorism of global financial elites on Wall St. It’s spirit lives in the hearts millions and millions of folks all over the world being trampled by concentrated wealth (oligarchy) and financial schemes that pillage the public coffers and enslave the masses with debt. #BlackLivesMatter is an uprising of young black kids who were fed up with seeing their ilk murdered in the streets for the crime of being black. But this new civil rights movement is being led by queer black women, upon whose standing expanded this next generation’s uprising to be more inclusive as a sweeping Oppressed People’s Movement, taking on LGBT rights as well as the Fight For 15 minimum wage.

Yesterday it was the Abolitionists in the 1840’s and 50’s and the fierce single-mindedness of Calvinist John Brown’s revolution against the abomination of enslaving black human beings who brought an end to slavery. It was the Socialists and Anarchists of the 1870’s-90’s who achieved worker’s rights, collective bargaining for unions, child labor laws, work place safety regulations, the 8 hour workday, and the 5 day work week. It was the Women’s Suffragette movement. It was the Civil Rights movement of blacks using non violent civil disobedience to dramatize the brutality of Jim Crow segregation and whites answering their appeal to stand #Together with them. It was the Gay Rights movement and ACT UP protesters who stared down falsely pious “religious” people who bought the propaganda of movement conservatism’s intolerance.

These (were) are Political Revolutions.

In the harbor of my birthplace there lies this inscription:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

My ancestors benefited from that credo, and this country benefited from having them. We were known as an egalitarian, compassionate and forward-thinking nation. Compassion and empathy have been jettisoned for greed and individualism.

Charlie Chaplin, a noted socialist, wrote and gave one of the most moving speeches on the purpose of humanity in the 1940 film he also produced, starred in, scored and produced called “The Great Dictator.”

I submit it will be one of the most moving things you’ll ever hear:

I’m moved to write this because this isn’t a game to me, in which we blindly root for our team. As NY Times reporter Mark Leibovitch concluded in his book “This Town,” there’s only one color in Washington DC, and it’s not Red or Blue as most think. It’s green, as in Money.

If you want to know why there’s rampant dissatisfaction and defection by liberal people toward the Democratic Party all across the country amounting to a mass insurrection against a rigged system (and I’m not talking about registered Democrats alone, but the many Independents and more disconcertingly, the largest bloc of potential Democratic voters, those 40% or more who don’t even bother to vote), here's a little dose of reality for you folks:

I’m not interested in electing more and better Democrats, if they’re not better. Voting for the lesser of two evils isn’t just a losing party platform. It is much worse. It results in compounded evil. I’ve had enough of that.

Enough is enough.

Candidates like Bernie come along maybe once in a lifetime. He is running a historic campaign funded primarily by record numbers of individual contributions. That alone is revolutionary. His reliance on small donors a big Fuck You to the Big Money donors who have made a mockery out of our elections by brazenly turning our government into an auction house to the highest bidder. He out-raised Hillary by $15 million last month. Bernie is proving to the political world that it can be done. A candidate with integrity does not have to beg for Wall St and corporate lobbyist money. He’s turned the whole system on its head.

Bernie’s absolute domination of young voters, in many cases exceeding Obama’s historical campaign, will take this party deep into the next generation, on top of which the overwhelming numbers of Independents and sane Republicans who will vote for him means one thing very clearly: Bernie Sanders wins in a landslide of epic proportions in November.

I’m tired of seeing too many stumble and fall, then get crushed under the relentless and merciless grinder of unbridled capitalism. It has run its course. People know it too; they just haven’t heard any politician talk about it honestly, until now.

They haven’t been told how the government has been giving massive tax break to the wealthy, “subsidies” to oil companies and floating a bloated military budget, all of which leads to concentrated wealth in the hands of a few and monopoly business ownership. All that money could be used to bulk up a healthcare for all, restore broken communities and offer free higher education incentive to those who want it. That’s what taxes are supposed to be for. Again, there’s only one candidate with the courage and vision to frame it clearly and have been fighting against it with integrity for decades.

Like my gloriously rebellious American antecedents down through the ages I realize the only way to topple injustice and corruption is through revolution.

We have a chance to elect a rare human being.

It’s time to be bold. Agitate, agitate, agitate.

Our dream of a more humane and dignified society is fastened to the economic system of socialism, which Michael Moore makes the case for beautifully in his subversive film “Where To Invade Next.”

All men dream: but not equally.

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) "Lawrence of Arabia"

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