Second debate closing

I'm sure most of you have played the game of Monopoly, which first became popular during the Great Depression.

We know that at some point in the game, one person inevitably controls all the property and money, cackling as they collect more and more money from those who land on their spaces.

Unfortunately for us, our country today strongly resembles a game of Monopoly -- except it's a rigged game in which the “banker” get to play the game with all of the money. This new player – call it Wall Street – not only owns Boardwalk and Park Place but Pennsylvania Avenue, and a nearby property called Capitol Hill. And they’ve rewritten the rules to benefit them.

They have taken the power to put common people directly in jail for trivial offenses while they get an unlimited supply of Get Out of Jail Free cards. They’re taking the houses of people on Baltic Avenue through fraud and perjury. They are trying to make it so no ordinary player can collect $200 when we pass Go. They have robbed millions of the opportunity to earn any money and jack up the price whenever we land on the Electric Company by keeping us addicted to ever more costly fossil fuels. They are trying to privatize the Water Company. They've replaced most of the railroads with expensive gas guzzling cars. They lend us money but charge predatory interest rates as part of the bargain.

They even threaten the people who prefer to play Parcheesi.

It's time to reset the game.

We need people in Congress who will make sure that fair rules are made and followed, who will protect public property, who will make sure that the top 1 percent are taxed fairly, that money is distributed fairly, that everyone has an opportunity to continue playing and earn a decent living, and who respect the rights of people in other countries to go their own way.

Our economy should not be an institution in which a privileged few are allowed to “game the system.” In fact it shouldn't be a game at all. The economy affects how we live, and our quality of life. We need to rein in those who are manipulating the system and institute new rules that give every child born in America an equal and fair chance to thrive. That is what I will do my best to create if elected as your next Representative in Congress.

Obamacare and its Adherents and Opponents

Last year, when I ran for Congress, I was included in the debates.

At one debate, the entire audience, except for 6 Greens, were Democrats and Republicans, divided by an aisle, as if at a wedding.

The Democrat was defending Obamacare, while his people cheered, and the Republican was criticizing it, while his people cheered.

I was standing there, looking at these people, treating the election as some sort of sporting event, where they cheer on their team. I thought, I would really like to tell these people the truth, but that would be insulting both sides and I might lose potential votes. Nothing like telling hundreds of people that they are all behaving idiotically.

But I did it anyway.

I pointed out that so-called Obamacare was originally a Heritage Foundation-written, Republican-sponsored bill, but only Romney managed to push it through, so the insurance companies bought themselves Democrats instead, and now Democrats were cheering a Republican bill and Republicans were booing a Republican bill.

For a minute, everyone just looked at me. Then they went back to cheering for their team.

The Glory of War

The annual glorification of D Day, and the Saving of Europe by America has just passed. It's been almost 70 years, but Americans are still taught that fighting the Nazis justifies all that has come since then.
As a child, I was taught the party line about D Day. It was a big surprise, the Nazis were winning until the US invaded, we were giant heroes and deserved everlasting worship.

Imagaine my surprise when I read Anne Frank's Diary and she expressed impatience for the US to come to Europe's defense.

What? How could a teenager locked in an attic know about the Top Secret D Day plans?

I asked my Dad. He told me that FDR had promised Stalin in 194l, when the US declared war on Germany, that the US would open a second front to fight the Germans. But, we didn't. Not until 2 1/2 years later, when the USSR had managed to push the Germans back out of their country, and were pursuing them through the other occupied terrorities. (In the meantime, losing 20,000,000 people and undergoing destruction, starvation, rape and torture). Harry Truman, on the floor on the Senate, openly stated the US position - let the Germans and Russians kill as many of each other as possible, and then the US would move in.

Too late for Anne Frank, and millions of others.

My mom's friend participated in the invasion. He told her that he jumped in the water, made it to shore, and then hid until it was over. He didn't fight or kill anyone. In the book, "On Killing" by Lt. Col Dave Grossman, he points out that studies showed that only 15% to 20% of rifleman in the US military ever used their weapons in WW2.

This, of course, is a problem for the ruling class, which needs willing killers to perform their conquests.

The book was about how the US has managed to up the rate of killers in the military, with psychological manipulation and training, as well as the glorification of murder and the military throughout the US.

One of my friends was released from the military last week and announced it on Facebook. Everyone who commented ritually thanked him for his service. This genuflection has been drilled into the US public since Vietnam, and is as automatic as blessing someone when they sneeze. You are not allowed to talk to a soldier without repeating the mantra.

While I was running for Congress, I was on a talk show, and some irate soldier called to complain about my peace views and also to complain about how the military was being downsized and soldiers were having their pay cut.

I pointed out that the ruling class is turning to mechanized warfare, including robots and drones, and that they don't need actual unreliable human beings as much as they used to. I said that the rest of American workers had already been downsized and replaced by robots, so now it was his turn. "Welcome to the rest of America", I said, with not much sympathy.

The radio host said "Thank you for your service" before he disconnected the line.

Bluster and Bluff

As an ER nurse, I have a lot of experience with mentally ill people. There are times when they become angry and threaten various deeds.

But if a person is dressed in scrubs and in a room with a security guard at the door, and is screaming to kill me, or all of us, whomever.... do we nurses jump up and scream in terror? Do we scream back at him or her? Do we arm ourselves, just in case the person somehow gains a weapon and somehow gets out of the room and somehow comes at us?

No. We don't. We let them vent.

So why is the enormous country of the United States, the most heavily armed in the world, the one with bases in 180 countries, the one with spy satellites watching every move of people on Earth, pretending to be afraid of Kim Jung-un?

Frankly, I think it's embarrassing. We are constantly told by our corporate media that he is mentally ill. I don't know if that is true. His demands are reasonable. The US hasn't allowed any movement toward reunification in 60 years. It holds mantins bases in, and war games with South Korea. It threatens to use nuclear weapons "all options are on the table". And it has warships around North Korea and flies war planes over its terrority. Is it "crazy" to oppose such things?

It really doesn't matter what his mental state is. He can safely be ignored.

But our ruling overlords play us like patsies. If they want a war, they pick a victim, ramp up the propaganda and watch as obedient Americans shiver in fear as directed, and dutifully chant "USA, USA" as they hurl insults at the designated victim, and cheer on the bombs dropped on the people of the victim's country.

It's not a pretty picture.

Outlawing Hunter Gatherers

While the imperialist juggernaut continues its assault on the world's remaining traditional hunter gatherers, it is turning its vicious attention to those here at home who have been forced into the hunter gathering life by industrial and finance capital.

Yes, while there are still people on the planet who live in the ways of their ancestors, whether it be herding caribou, or gathering ants, people in the US who are the earliest vicitms of the 1% tend to eat day old donuts, or discarded hamburgers. Some are fed by well meaning fellow citizens in park gatherings.

Now, our ruling class is cracking down on those who can't afford to buy food, AND those who provide food for them.

From locking up dumpsters to outlawing Food Not Bombs, our ruling overlords are trying to make sure that those forced from participating in the money economy do not eat.

If the system isn't working for all the people, it's time to change it.

Thanks to those who missed me. I was caught up in my political campaign, and then I was rather depressed that only 5% of my fellow citizens wanted to save the planet and stop the wars.

The Politics of the Middle Class

As a child growing up in LA, I knew that different neighborhoods had different houses. My grandmother lived in a small wooden house in downtown LA, and I lived in a small stucco house in the suburbs. Other neighborhoods had different houses. At the time, I thought that it was geography that dictated the difference, but as I traveled more, I realized that it was time. There were small wooden houses in nearly every city, as well as stucco houses, and old Victorian houses. It depended on when they were built, not where.

Today we are seeing an uprising of Americans concerned about the loss of their standard of living. The politicians and many people refer to it as the loss of the "middle class".

What was the middle class? It was workers who were paid well enough to be able to buy a house and a car, have plenty to eat, take vacations and buy their kids toys and then send them to college.

The pretense now is that the middle class are a special breed of people, hard-working and college educated, honest and thrifty. But that's not at all true.

It was a time, not a people. A time when organized workers got good wages and benefits, and the ruling class was willing to share more of the proceeds of the labor that they got from the workers. People today work just as hard, usually for longer hours, and many college educated people make low wages. The people haven't changed, the times have.

When blue collar workers were attacked, and their living standards dropped, college educated people continued, for a while, to be well paid. And public sector workers still had their unions and benefits.

Now a college education has turned into a financial racket, with colleges acting as businesses, selling degrees to desperate students, and acting as middlemen to turn the kids over to the FIRE sector at the very beginning of their adult lives.

And now we are seeing the attack on the final sector, the public workers and their unions. The win of Scott Walker in Wisconsin is the triumph of money over justice, but the real tragedy was over a year ago, when angry workers were rebelling against his attacks.

Hundreds of thousands of workers, including teachers, firefighters, police and farmers descended onto Madison, protesting loudly. How to deflect this anger? The Democrats and the union leaders channelled it into endless petition gathering and conventional electioneering.

The pretense of the corporate parties is that the American middle class can be defended, and that they are the ones to do it. Romney openly said that he only cared about the middle class, not the poor. But if you define the middle class as an income level, and not a personal virtue, than you must realize that fewer and fewer Americans fit into that income level.

And it is immoral to want to recreate a standard of living that used an unsustainable amount of resources and exploited the poor, at home and abroad.

Our goal should be to create a comfortable standard of living that provides the basics for all, without destroying our ecosystem as a result. We will have to create joy from human community and solidarity, rather than the consumption of endless disposable trinkets.

What's Going on With the Military?

I may have blogged about one of my co-workers a few years ago, when he bragged about how much he loved going down to Texas, as part of his military police duties, and performing "cell extractions" for practice, because the Texas authorities didn't care how brutal they were. He gloried in his power over the inmates. Last week, he came to work and explained that when he woke up that morning, he had 5 phone messages from the military, telling him that he was honorably discharged, with full benefits, unless he got his Congressman to intervene in 24 hours. WTF? He was dumfounded. And so am I. He said that in no way would he quit the military now, not when he'd worked so hard to get where he is, and not when he had a sweet deployment coming up in October. What deployment? I asked, wondering if he was going to the Bahamas, or something. Khandahar, Afghanistan, he said. Why is that a sweet deployment? I asked. Because, he said, I am the head of a 35 man Special Forces unit that gets to kick in doors, everynight. He whined that he had just gone to a 2 week boot camp, and why did they send him there to be tortured if they were going to discharge him? Why indeed? And why was someone who has been in the military for years sent to boot camp? And how did someone in the Military Police end up in the Special Forces? I didn't ask him any of that. But I do know that the military picks the most brutal of their members to be in the most repressive of their units. So, I'm guessing that that is how he ended up in Special Forces. But why the sudden drumming out? Is it possible that the US is really taking the protests of the Afghan government seriously? And are they weeding out those that they know will live out their brutal fantasies of wielding power and dealing out fear, torture and death to those unable to fight back? Are they actually trying to stop US soldiers from raping, murdering and urinating on Afghan civilians? When I told this story to friends on Saturday, one of them said that the same thing happened to a friend of her children. Although he was diagnosed with PTSD, he was to be re-deployed to Afghanistan, until they suddenly informed him of his immediate honorable discharge from the military. Interesting.