ATTN: Bonini, Reigle, La Mar Gunn, Lawson, Pettyjohn, Hocker, Hudson, Smyk, Lopez, Miro, Ramone, Short, Grey, Dukes, and Collins! Your Candidate Is A Racist and So Is Your Party! You Still With Them? IF SO, Don’t Expect To Stay With Us, You Racist!!!!! Get The Hell Outta’ Here !!!

 

My original plan for this article was to focus on our agenda to help small businesses and entrepreneurs.

This week I’d planned to propose new steps to cut red tape and taxes, and make it easier for small businesses to get the credit they need to grow and hire.

Because I believe that in America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it.

I’ll be talking a lot more about our economic plans in the days and weeks ahead.

But today, I want to address something I hear from Americans all over our country.

Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent in this election.

It’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States.

From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.

He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.

His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.

In just the past week, under the guise of “outreach” to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms:

“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership.

Crime at levels nobody has seen… Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”

Those are his words.

Donald Trump misses so much.

He doesn’t see the success of black leaders in every field…

The vibrancy of black-owned businesses…Or the strength of the black church… He doesn’t see the excellence of historically black colleges and universities or the pride of black parents watching their children thrive…And he certainly doesn’t have any solutions to take on the reality of systemic racism and create more equity and opportunity in communities of color.

It takes a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, “What do you have to lose?” The answer is everything!

Trump’s lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough.

But what he’s doing here is more sinister.

Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.

It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of President he’d be.

This is what I want to make clear today:

A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.

If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?

Now, I know some people still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

They hope that he will eventually reinvent himself – that there’s a kinder, gentler, more responsible Donald Trump waiting in the wings somewhere.

After all, it’s hard to believe anyone – let alone a nominee for President of the United States – could really believe all the things he says.

But the hard truth is, there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.

Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Well, throughout his career and this campaign, Donald Trump has shown us exactly who he is. We should believe him.

When Trump was getting his start in business, he was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants.

Their applications would be marked with a “C” – “C” for “colored” – and then rejected.

Three years later, the Justice Department took Trump back to court because he hadn’t changed.

The pattern continued through the decades.

State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turn-over rate for his minority employees was way above average.

And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.”

He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President.

In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true.

Oh, and by the way, Mexico’s not paying for his wall either.

If it ever gets built, you can be sure that American taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.

Since then, there’s been a steady stream of bigotry.

We all remember when Trump said a distinguished federal judge born in Indiana couldn’t be trusted to do his job because, quote, “He’s a Mexican.”

Think about that.

The man who today is the standard bearer of the Republican Party said a federal judge was incapable of doing his job solely because of his heritage.

Even the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, described that as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

To this day, he’s never apologized to Judge Curiel.

But for Trump, that’s just par for the course.

This is someone who retweets white supremacists online, like the user who goes by the name “white-genocide-TM.” Trump took this fringe bigot with a few dozen followers and spread his message to 11 million people.

His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website.

The Trump campaign also selected a prominent white nationalist leader as a delegate in California. They only dropped him under pressure.

When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack.

And when Trump was asked about anti-Semitic slurs and death threats coming from his supporters, he refused to condemn them.

Through it all, he has continued pushing discredited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.

Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t.

He suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps in Trump’s mind, because he was a Cuban immigrant, he must have had something to do with it. Of course there’s absolutely no evidence of that.

Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over.

His latest paranoid fever dream is about my health. All I can say is, Donald, dream on.

This is what happens when you treat the National Enquirer like Gospel.

It’s what happens when you listen to the radio host Alex Jones, who claims that 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were inside jobs. He said the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were child actors and no one was actually killed there.

Trump didn’t challenge those lies. He went on Jones’ show and said: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

This man wants to be President of the United States.

I’ve stood by President Obama’s side as he made the toughest decisions a Commander-in-Chief ever has to make.

In times of crisis, our country depends on steady leadership… clear thinking… and calm judgment… because one wrong move can mean the difference between life and death.

The last thing we need in the Situation Room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and who buys so easily into racially-tinged rumors.

Someone detached from reality should never be in charge of making decisions that are as real as they come.

It’s another reason why Donald Trump is simply temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States.

Now, some people will say that his bluster and bigotry is just over-heated campaign rhetoric – an outrageous person saying outrageous things for attention.

But look at the policies Trump has proposed. They would put prejudice into practice.

And don’t be distracted by his latest attempts to muddy the waters.

He may have some new people putting new words in his mouth… but we know where he stands.

He would form a deportation force to round up millions of immigrants and kick them out of the country.

He’d abolish the bedrock constitutional principle that says if you’re born in the United States, you’re an American citizen. He says that children born in America to undocumented parents are, quote, “anchor babies” and should be deported.

Millions of them.

And he’d ban Muslims around the world – 1.5 billion men, women, and children –from entering our country just because of their religion.

Think about that for a minute. How would it actually work? People landing in U.S. airports would line up to get their passports stamped, just like they do now.

But in Trump’s America, when they step up to the counter, the immigration officer would ask every single person, “What is your religion?”

And then what?

What if someone says, “I’m a Christian,” but the agent doesn’t believe them.

Do they have to prove it? How would they do that?

Ever since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, America has distinguished itself as a haven for people fleeing religious persecution.

Under Donald Trump, America would distinguish itself as the only country in the world to impose a religious test at the border.

Come to think of it, there actually may be one place that does that. It’s the so-called Islamic State. The territory ISIS controls. It would be a cruel irony if America followed its lead.

Don’t worry, some will say, as President, Trump will be surrounded by smart advisors who will rein in his worst impulses.

So when a tweet gets under his skin and he wants to retaliate with a cruise missile, maybe cooler heads will be there to convince him not to.

Maybe.

But look at who he’s put in charge of his campaign.

Trump likes to say he only hires the “best people.” But he’s had to fire so many campaign managers it’s like an episode of the Apprentice.

The latest shake-up was designed to – quote – “Let Trump be Trump.” To do that, he hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO.

To give you a flavor of his work, here are a few headlines they’ve published:

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

“Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

“Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield”

“Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.”

That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further.

Just imagine – Donald Trump reading that and thinking: “this is what I need more of in my campaign.”

Bannon has nasty things to say about pretty much everyone.

This spring, he railed against Paul Ryan for, quote “rubbing his social-justice Catholicism in my nose every second.”

No wonder he’s gone to work for Trump – the only Presidential candidate ever to get into a public feud with the Pope.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas.

Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.”

The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the “Alt-Right.” A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

This is part of a broader story — the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.

Just yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders,Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi.

Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are quote “worth less” than men, and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race — that’s who Trump wants by his side.

The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs.

Now he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.

Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies.

He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally.

American presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia.

We should, too.

All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.

Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.

On David Duke’s radio show the other day, the mood was jubilant.

“We appear to have taken over the Republican Party,” one white supremacist said.

Duke laughed. There’s still more work to do, he said.

No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here. The names may have changed… Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.

And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well. Don’t be fooled.

There’s an old Mexican proverb that says “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”

We know who Trump is. A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that.

He says he wants to “make America great again,” but his real message remains “Make America hate again.”

This isn’t just about one election. It’s about who we are as a nation.

It’s about the kind of example we want to set for our children and grandchildren.

Next time you watch Donald Trump rant on television, think about all the kids listening across our country. They hear a lot more than we think.

Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.”

Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants.

At a recent high school basketball game in Indiana, white students held up Trump signs and taunted Latino players on the opposing team with chants of “Build the wall!” and “Speak English.”

After a similar incident in Iowa, one frustrated school principal said, “They see it in a presidential campaign and now it’s OK for everyone to say this.”

We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior in our own homes. How can we stand for it from a candidate for president?

This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump. It’s a moment of reckoning for all of us who love our country and believe that America is better than this.

Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the Party to get out.

The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims “love America just as much as I do.”

In 2008, John McCain told his own supporters they were wrong about the man he was trying to defeat. Senator McCain made sure they knew – Barack Obama is an American citizen and “a decent person.”

We need that kind of leadership again.

Every day, more Americans are standing up and saying “enough is enough” – including a lot of Republicans. I’m honored to have their support.

And I promise you this: with your help, I will be a President for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. For those who vote for me and those who don’t.

For all Americans.

Because I believe we are stronger together.

It’s a vision for the future rooted in our values and reflected in a rising generation of young people who are the most open, diverse, and connected we’ve ever seen.

Just look at our fabulous Olympic team.

Like Ibtihaj Muhammad, an African-American Muslim from New Jersey who won the bronze medal in fencing with grace and skill. Would she even have a place in Donald Trump’s America?

When I was growing up, Simone Manuel wouldn’t have been allowed to swim in the same public pool as Katie Ledecky. Now they’re winning Olympic medals as teammates.

So let’s keep moving forward together.

Let’s stand up against prejudice and paranoia.

Let’s prove once again, that America is great because is America is good.

Thank you, and may God bless the United States.

Greed 101

One of the denizens over a Kilroy’s decided to jump into an economic argument throwing pies.

In the process of us demolishing his ignorance all of us realized he’d never been taught how corporate profits work. It then occurred to some of us that perhaps some of the reason the really “common-sense” arguments of how to “make America great again” have not resonated, is because perhaps a lot of you out there also don’t know the real shape things are in either….

This is not a screed. This is just a demonstration of where things are… using data and charts that are very easy to find only if you know where to already look (FRED) and very hard to find if you don’t know where they are…

We’ll start with a parable…..

Once upon a time there was a family whose last name was Quintiles… A little larger than average they were nuclear with a father who worked, a mother who also worked and 3 children spaced roughly 3 years apart…

The mother went back to work when her first child reached teenager status. They had unlimited food… All they ate was pie (there is a joke there). As the children were growing up, the mother portioned out the pie for all so all could get enough to eat….

When the mother went back to work she taught her oldest to put the pie in the oven and feed the children while leaving two pieces for the parents when they returned home.

He was to divide the pie into five pieces and give everyone their share… For a while they monitored the portions closely then seeing no issue never looked at it again. ..

Over time the portion being retained by the teenager gradually grew in size. After all he was cutting. The children couldn’t complain. And the parents never knew because he left portions for them that were consistent.

The smallest got it worst.. Being small and weak he lost the largest share of his portion first. After getting used to living on that bigger piece, when desirous of more pie, the oldest then began sliding the knife inward on the middle child’s portion… It got smaller and smaller.

Then he begin trimming Mom and Dad’s. who were really too busy to notice or care. In the end he was eating half the pie, and the other four were sharing the other half….

One day, the littlest one complained. Then the other four noticed they too had smaller portions. They banded together, and re-arranged duties so the first child now carried out the garbage and the other two children got to rotate pie cutting duties…

They all had enough food forever. However the oldest one threw a fit.. “Not fair”, he cried… “You all get more food, and I’m losing it… This is Socialism”. Eventually when his pleas had no listeners, he too shut up and was content with his “never-ending” piece of pi….

The end.

What does that mean you say? Master, please explain…

Ok.. so you may be clear. The family is American society. The earners are the American working class who earn and buy things that fuel the economy. During Conservative rule, the American people elected to let corporations be what run our government and by extension, our lives… They were put in charge of the government and for a while it was nice. Then they started wanting more. With no greater force to stop them, they took more and more and more.

Everyone else got less. They got more. Everyone else’s pie got smaller and smaller though the entire pie stayed the same. Those with smaller pie pieces were given a litany of excuses including saying they had no choice. Hard times were upon us. But no one was looking at what they were getting as they made our lives more miserable.

Finally the bottom class said we can’t live on $7.25 an hour, and the conversation got started. Everyone realized their portions too had decreased, and that all that decrease had accumulated to the pie of the ones who’d been appointed to do the cutting with no supervision or regulation or negatives for doing wrong.

They got together, changed the rules, forced the recalcitrant child to obey, and he screamed “Socialism”… and threw a fit.

The fit was ignored and the tantrum stopped. The child ended up being happy getting enough to live on as was everyone else…

Nice story.. you said something about charts?

This is the chart showing time since we began keeping records.  Notice the gradual increase in the inclines in the Clinton years, steeper in the Bush years, and steeper in the Obama years.

Even looking at this chart can be misleading.  For example in the Clinton years the rising tide did raise all boats.. Corporate profits rose because every level of income also rose, from poorer to richest.  Anyone living during those times of higher federal taxation did better each year than the year before.  But, with the cuts of the Bush era, the benefits only went to top earners, something Obama was not able to change with the Tea Party holding down both houses  and tax increase on the wealthy, during his term…

So a better guide would be the ratio of Corporate Profits (CP) to the total pie (GDP). This would show the how much corporate profits were taking of the finite pie.

The thing to remember when viewing this is that America’s middle class’s greatest times were between 1950 and 2000… The chart shows why.

The numbers on the left stand for percent of the national pie… At Bill Clinton’s swearing in, the national pie was divided 5% to corporations and 95% to the people. Today it is at 11% for corporations versus 89% for the people….

We, The People, under the new rules written by the corporations, for the corporations, and of the corporations, have been squeezed out of 6% ….. (6% which now mostly goes to  the top earning 16,000 people)

Currently our GDP is around $18 trillion dollars a year…. $18,000,000,000,000.

Six percent of that (amount originally ours but now corporate’s) is roughly $1.1 trillion… At a 150 million of us working that averages out to an rough income loss of $7.333 per worker…

Would you be ok with $7,000 more per worker in your family?  $14,000 more PER YEAR in two-income families?

That is what happens when you move $1.1 trillion from Corporate profits over to employee income.

Let them scream Socialism on deaf ears. We know it won’t hurt them, it’s all bluff, because we know they were doing quite well when they had far less profits…

So if you don’t have enough to live well, don’t blame Mexicans.  Don’t blame those on SNAP.  Don’t blame Muslims. Don’t blame inner city inhabitants. Don’t blame Obama. Don’t blame the Supreme Court.  Don’t blame anyone except those who are entrusted with the cutting of the pie you are to get…

Right now, that is Republicans in Congress and those lobbyists handing them laws to be passed…

The only way it changes is for all to gang up and make the change… Only one candidate is unbought and offering to do that.

Where’s Wally?

More on WDEL’s switch up.  Sorry to elaborate but you see, they are the reason I decided to settle in Delaware.  I have never been opposed to anyone expressing their views.. I have always been opposed to being forced to listen to ONLY one view.

And the former is what WDEL used to offer… Daily I got two viewpoints, morning and afternoon… Sometimes they merged. Sometimes they didn’t.  Ironically they merged on local issues for the most part; on national issues, … umm. not so much.

And the latter is what they offer now.

Now those of us who live in the real world (conservatives by their creed, don’t) know that the only thing consistent is change… So though it is with heavy heart that probably the only person in this nation who could get ahead of me and tell me stuff I didn’t already know, is no longer at WDEL, the pragmatic acceptance says that a new reality is upon us.

We can use it; or be ignored by it.

I listened to Susan Monday for a while this morning.  Even though she tried to get calls from upstate, they didn’t come… Her topic was Trump… and whether we thought he was “presidential enough”, basically she was playing right out of the Rubio playbook which would immediately disinterest the entire New Castle County.

Calls came in from Lewes, Milford, Milton, Frankford, Salisbury all sticking to the topic. There was no Liz.

And that’s when it hit.  As a state we are very different top to bottom. We always joke about it. We’ve been doing it for generations.. and with this listener trying to sit through this morning’s program like one would a corporate dog and pony show meeting, it became apparent real quick, just how different we are…

It was made stark reality by the station’s insistence of calling the station, ALL-STATE radio to advertise it was statewide, and not local.  Today’s show may have been carried statewide, but it certainly wasn’t listened to… state wide….

Then I remembered something.  During the golden years of blogging which I would rank between 2006 to 2010,  one of the greatest things about it was that we had an all-state community.  We all commented on each others blogs, north and south.  And we were loose cannons,… pretty much calling each other stupid for not agreeing with us, and it was lots of fun.

But what emerged from all that was an understanding of why they thought the way they did… If it wasn’t logical, we saw it was emotional.  It it wasn’t practical, we saw it was deeply embedded in how they were raised… Did I say it was fun?

But, over time in the back and forth and back and forth, if an idea was lacking in currency it quietly disappeared. For example, global warming which caused some of the most heated conversations, over time won convert after convert over to the side that humans need to do something.   It wasn’t a miracle of persuasion. It was the preponderance of the evidence.

The current went the other way with guns. Those originally wanting to ban ALL guns are nowhere to be found today. Again due to the preponderance of evidence.

It is with sadness that the civility found in the printed words flying back and forth, cannot be found in spoken words replacing them.  There is probably a reason for that; one primarily being that the world of written word allows us to take words back from between uttering them and them being communicated.  Not so with speech.

But the thought did occur to me today that these people below the canal live in their own little world where their own little world view makes sense.  The only way they will grow and expand their knowledge is for them to hear from different perspectives; perspectives which make them realize that they are living on a island and the appearance of water rising higher every year around them is no illusion. There are things out there they need to know.

So it does make sense then for Al Mascitti’s supporters to call the station and explain things as they are, to engage Susan in conversation. It does not make sense for them to boycott the show in deference to Al.  Especially when it comes to communicating that the entire problem we have with America today is not because we have a black president who most of America elected because they thought he was pretty awesome….. it is because most of those in Congress refused to do their Constitutionally mandated job because doing so, would make that black president look even more awesome.  We have broken national government;  it is entirely the Republican’s fault.

Constantly bringing up this fact repeatedly would make those who have only heard one line across the last eight years, that line that Obama has been an ineffective president, actually have to confront the fact that THEY were the ones who throttled government down to a standstill by voting Republican, and therefore THEY are the ones responsible for all our recent tribulations..  one being Donald Trump.

Reminders that facts make a difference.

So to keep Al’s legacy alive, perhaps it is fitting to call Susan Monday to say you represent the top half of the state, and then ask her your question…. politely.

Hello! We, up north, were wondering why you purposefully are avoiding the REAL issues?

• Issues like allowing the wealthy to make up new rules that steal all the middle classes’ money.
• Issues like crippling unions so none of us get paid anything close to what we are worth.
• Issues like underfunding government  so much it hurts all of us.
• Issues like allowing hidden money into elections, forcing politicians to be bought so they then pay their purchasers back with our tax money.
• Issues like saddling our children with huge levels of college debt we didn’t have when we bought our first house.
• Issues like not doing anything to stop carbon pollution.

 

It would be in WDEL’s interest to allow as many as possible of those liberal calls from the North to go through… So it would indeed be ALL STATE radio. For across the last two days, I have yet to see any reason why anyone north of the canal would listen at that frequency between 9 and 12 weekday mornings.

Sooner or later Northern big money cows are going to realize all those advertising dollars spent across that time frame are wasted.  I don’t think any of the current WDEL 101.7 advertisers get even one dollar of return on their investment from listeners living south of Dagsboro…

 

 

 

 

 

Corporate Behemoths

It is just another name.  In today’s reality it speaks of those 5 people who rule the world through their influence. That influence comes strictly tied to shares of ownership…. Those 5 own directly or indirectly enough of the global economy to hold everyone in thrall.

Which when they pull in the direction of our own interests, is ok. When they don’t, we have to modify their power or lose our power..

After the past recession if truth will ever become fact, you will one day learn how we needed them to jump start our post recessional economy. No one had seed money but them. We are now suffering the residuals of that effective policy. Like chemo-therapy, what once was needed for all of us, is now not.

Essentially we continue to let them benefit from the low tax rates then in effect… We used our low tax rates to compensate for other nations use of lowly paid labor in order to help us match their end-costs and stay competitive….

With the global economic implosion the top echelon lost a large percentage and in order to make them willing to throw their leftover good money into saving it, we the people had to make sure they got something back… While profits were low, our plan worked… Now that profits are high, it is working still but to our detriment.

So it is time to change.

Historically that happens with revolutions. France, Colonial America, Ireland, as well as hundreds of documented revolts in ancient Rome line historical accounts of record, where desperate men facing desperate measures had nothing to lose in completely dismantling their society….

And whether that attempt is effective or not, surprisingly…comes down to simply a contest of strength of wills between the two contesting parties. Ultimately that means it depends on your will. Do you yourself have the will for fight for your rights and if necessary risk everything you own to remain a democratic nation?   History implies we don’t; written accounts show us democracy has not been sustainable over the long term. 

Today if every American wanted some type of revolution, there would no way of putting it down. The only way a corrupt government can continue over the wishes of its governed, is to make them prefer the evils they have over what may potentially come upon them if they should ever decide to rise up…..

So as one example the force used against Occupy crowds was there to make others wary of joining in; not so much to wreak havoc on those few demonstrators who were as demonstrators, extremely almost to a fault, well behaved…..

The signal given was “yes, you can have free speech” as long as it is first approved by us…. Those few who picked their battles to demonstrate against Liberals and Socialists do not have cops dressed in intimidation descend upon their displays or bombard their gathering with helicopter backwash… Instead they have tacit approval and are left alone….

Now, none of us alive today felt affinity to those saying… “Rah, rah, rah, Support the Kochs” even though they had corporate America’s and big donor’s support solidly behind them. None of us cared to join. On the contrary in 2011, I think just about everyone felt some affinity towards the Occupy movement in one form or another so the impetus to join their ranks was very high. Many of today’s current politicians and community spokespeople were there at Occupy voting in pure democracy along with everyone else..

As an anti-authoritarian protest Tienanmen Square in China was relatively harmless in what it “did”, but was extremely damaging to the Communist Chinese government for what it “represented”, freedom of expression. Having happy people in a square is not a problem. A problem is that all other Chinese will next do the same and together coalesce and form a counter-government that almost everyone would prefer over the current existing one…

Therefore the brutality at Tienanmen Square was not necessary to clean a square of very harmless happy people… It was necessary to scare all others from doing the same… “Look what happens to you if you challenge your government”…

Now there was a huge risk in undertaking that controversial Chinese governmental policy. It could have flipped Just as easily as having a well cast die turn on its side; in turn it could have created the opposite effect causing a reaction like:… “Oh, no. They are killing us off, All of us need to join and overthrow every Communist Government leader now”… If every village simultaneously lynched, killed, or ran off their communist party, there would be nothing the Communists could do… They are hugely outnumbered.

But the Chinese leader read his population right. The massive numbers of the working class kowtowed and went back into their dutiful trained mode of keeping their head down to keep from having it cut off. On the other hand, the Russian junta two years later got it wrong… Just like the British got it wrong in America prior to 1776. Just like the French got it wrong in Vietnam in 1956. Just like the Russians and Americans both got it wrong in Afghanistan….

When large numbers of people choose to fight… it becomes very hard to regain control… One can only ultimately regain control as is ISIS today, by force and horror, and that force has to be completely overwhelming and destructively horrific enough to wipe out all bad blood, leaving only good available after one takes control… Very messy.

Our forefathers were much closer to violent history. Their ancestors unlike ours were there simply because whenever they attacked, or were attacked, they won and overcame adversity. Whoever lost got rounded up and killed off and their genes were long gone.

The founding fathers scoured history for a way to stop that trend from continuing in this brand new land. Only those of us most astute in historical archives are aware of their knowledge of interstate religious “wars” that took place here, on these shores, primarily between catholics and protestants, or Puritans and the established church… They were “wars” in quotation marks because they really only amounted to raids since so few people were here at the time.. But… they did their damage in spilled blood, but now todays children and most of the general population know nothing of it and think America was always one big happy family.

That big happy family came about solely because of the system established by the founding fathers. A system that was impartial almost to a fault, and left judgments strictly in the hands of society’s members whoever happened to be in power at that moment time…. Each of those people had to constantly receive the affirmation from those governed or lose their position to someone deemed more preferable by a majority of their constituents…..

And it’s worked so far… Just like Democracy in Rome also worked for about 250 years… Today all Americans are 12 years away from that mark in Roman history when at 250 years, Romans gave up their chartered right to rule themselves and instead settled for accepting whomever grabbed the mantel of tyrant or person holding absolute power.

Indeed. Our parallel is not only enumerative, but reflects parallels in our societies as well. We have a media that is controlled. We have the ability to monitor every citizen; to control them by intimidation over “what might happen” based on our knowledge of their peccadilloes. We are treating fellow human beings as things to be exterminated instead of human being fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, and grandparents who are for the most part, just like us. We are at the point where as serfs we have only two options: accept what our master gives, or starve. There is no opportunity to change or step up. Suck it or else.

Likewise right now we have education slowly closing its ranks to the poor, and giving top income earners a worthy jump in life over those whose lot was to be born in the 99%…. We have corporations poisoning our food, and killing the Monarch butterfly with our representative Congress accepting its private donations and voting willingly to kill both us and many other species, even outlawing counter-studies or discussion to prevent anything bad from surfacing which could cause masses of people to change their minds.. We have energy now monopolized into the hands of very few, and so to live, must accept their price or perish.

Like the Romans we now have continuous war because both parties in Washington now get rich off off it.

So yes. From a historical point, we may very well see democracy disappear in our lifetimes and for most of us if it did, would bode little change. We’d still work, get drunk, entertain ourselves, and go to bed. Romans continued as a dominant society 400 more years after giving up their rights to tyrants. But for others, doing this will mean extermination. It will mean life’s disruption. It will mean a return to slavery… Simply because there is no longer any possible way to override the will of whatever directive each tyrant decrees…

Like every prior civilization, eventually our governmental society will soon become corrupt; since when one is in favor by the rulers one is set for life, the best way to curry favor quickly is to bestow gifts: gifts paid for by you and me. Currently the only thing keeping Democracy in its place now, is the lucky fact that no one is seriously challenging it. But give us one major disruption and someone to effectively blame it on democracy’s inadequacies.. and that tyrant suddenly looks very appealing. That so far is what we have not had, but odds say we will face soon if we do not decide once and for all right now, who we really want controlling our lives: representatives of ourselves or a monarch….

The prime question we currently face right now is how to cut the string running from the handlers to the puppets… The handlers have no real effective power. Do you even know who the top 5 hedge fund holders are? But having Carper cast a certain vote. Have Coons cast a certain vote. Have Carney vote a certain way and with 60 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House, certain policies do quietly get set…. Policies that hurt 99% of Americans, always still squeak by with only a few votes which is all they need.

The reason we are at this point is because when that argument was made, that people with money should have more clout in government over ordinary people who don’t have money… it won. And it stood up in court… Citizens United opened the door for money to takeover our government and leave 99% of our people in its dust. The original idea behind Democracy was that every eligible man had one vote. The new forthcoming idea is that if you have a hundred million dollars, you should have 100 million more times of voting influence over someone worth one dollar….

In effect, the worth of any person through this decision now became more important than the individuality of that same person…

We come from pioneer stock. It wasn’t always that way. Our ancestors knew that worth was based on luck but survivability was based on effort and that every person had an equal share in making Democracy work, and every person should therefore have an equal representation….

What Citizen’s United did was turn this original idea on its head. The idea that money spent was a form of free speech immediately gave power to those with all the money… They now had all the free speech… It was a bad idea and one that disenfranchised 315 million Americans from their own government.

Now. Even if a politician-elect is a great people’s candidate, one who was very humanly oriented in their original candidacy, after one term they too are forced into this reality of kowtowing to those who can break them. This explains the fall of Chris Coons and John Carney. As soon as the reality hits of being in Washington, it becomes explained very quickly to them by their brethren that to stay in power one must acquiesce to power. There are great forces against which if you don’t comply, can flood your constituency with a lot of trouble against which anyone would prefer not to deal.

If you are in a solid party-controlled seat, they make someone with resources primary you. If you are in a close two-party election seat, someone with resources will challenge you.. the money will be forthcoming to them… Amazing amounts of money you can only dream of seeing… (O’Donnell- Coons)…

If you were in power… why on earth would you even listen to a single person like me? Seriously. I can do nothing more than give you one vote. But Acme Corporation, rich off of Wily Coyote’s sales, can buy challengers against you for pennies on the dollar. If you vote no, when its PAC says yes… you have to question which really is the best for your citizens long-termed interests? For if you vote no as you wish, and lose the next election round, someone much worse will be thrust in your place making all those same decisions. It becomes apparent rather quickly that if you wish to keep your values for which you were elected, you need to do the dance of listening to constituents and obfuscating from them all your votes for the power brokers as best you possibly can. Ironically under Citizen’s United, this becomes indeed the preferable course of action… The last thing we need is someone replacing Carney with Copeland in the next election… Then the little people have lost all clout…

So what needs to happen is that all the ground rules quickly change in campaign finance so the power becomes more balanced between those with money and those with numbers who have little money. And that is easily done. We already did it with McCain-Feingold. That is until it was deemed unconstitutional following the Citizens United decision. The court said any containment of influence by wealthy individuals or PAC’s was a violation of free speech… What happened next was that the new influence of unlimited money, in turn violated our rights to free speech by isolating us from all ongoing dialogue, since their ad-buys block my voice out…. I now lack the free speech once afforded me because of the effects of Citizen’s United… Which means if I can no longer speak out for any of your interests, then you too have lost your right to free speech ultimately because you do not have over $100 million dollars to spend simply to get access to listeners.

Unless Citizens United is quickly overturned, our government becomes a shill for those 5 people by default.  What it has done is create an environment very ripe for all the tools we used originally to create a police society protecting us from “terrorism”, to now be used upon ourselves to shift into a new society, one complacent to the loss of our right to determine our own future…..

That scenario is NOT democracy in action….