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#Post#: 521--------------------------------------------------
The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the
USA
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: September 22, 2022, 11:54 am
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Luther Martin: Representative for Maryland and dissenting
Anti-Federalist. Was shocked at the attempt by the elite to
overthrow the existing government in secret in 1787, and swore
to tell the people what Washington, Madison and Hamilton were up
to. The rich were terrified of the people screwed by Hamilton's
bank bailouts and after Shay's Rebellion almost saw Philidelphia
captured by angry citizens, they were ready to install a police
state.
Martin warned we were ill-advised to install a President King
who would plot against the people in concert with the Senate: He
said we were crazy to put men into a chamber for six year terms
instead of the current one-year terms; men who would no longer
be paid by their states and move away from their constituents to
a corrupt political city, and who could not be recalled for any
reason by their state for misbehavior. He said we were going to
lose our freedom under the reintroduction of a hated standing
army and that we would suffer under the despotism of a Supreme
Court with no citizen jury.
He stormed out and refused to sign the Constitution without a
Bill of Rights, and broke the convention's signed oath of
secrecy that Mad-Man Madison made everyone sign before being
admitted. Martin went straight to the press and warned the
people not to ratify this powerful central government with a
crazy central bank and insane electoral college scheme designed
to strip citizens of any meaningful representation.
Before this abomination was ratified, there were 2,000
representatives for the people: One rep existed for about 300
citizens. The Constitution made it one rep per MINIMUM 30,000 to
60,000 but CONVENIENTLY DID NOT STATE A MAXIMUM POPULATION PER
REP!
That apparently wasn't good enough for the oligarchs as our
population grew so shortly after 1913 a cork was put on the
maximum number of representatives. Please note that ALL new
voting groups from women to minorities to Native Americans got
the "right" to vote AFTER the cork was put on the maximum number
of reps .
NOTE: The 14th Amendment right to vote for African Americans
after the Civil War became a cruel farce by 1876. The elitist
Supreme Court twisted the 14th Amendment to give Corporations
personhood as a cruel and cynical vicious slap to the original
intent of the 14th Amendment. Even as blacks where being
disenfranchised, the courts were busy giving corporations extra
privileges along with the license to break the law with impunity
called limited liability.
Now, in most states, there is only one rep for 740,000 citizens,
and virtually ZERO chance of you ever talking to one. >:( :P
Source: the Actual Anti-Federalist writings...
HTML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Anti-Federalist
#Post#: 631--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of
the USA
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 1, 2022, 12:00 pm
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May 31, 2015 By: Paul Street ✨
[center]Enough with the Holy Founders' Undemocratic
Constitution[/center]
The U.S. constitution has remained in place with occasional
substantive amendments over more than 220 years.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in a foreword to the book
Dollarocracy wrote that, “we cannot govern our own affairs when
our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by
billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down
anyone who disagrees…The money and media election complex,
producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is
not what the founders intended.” [1]
Sanders was right to suggest that the United States’ revered
“founding fathers” would be scandalized by the plutocratic
madness of the big money and big media elections racket that
passes for popular democracy in the ever more openly oligarchic
U.S. today.
Jefferson, Madison, Adams and other U.S. founders (including
even the state-capitalist Alexander Hamilton) would be revolted
by the crass commercialism and mass-marketed manipulation that
lay at the heart of contemporary major-party U.S. politics.
Still, we should not imagine that the founders were champions of
anything remotely like popular self-rule. Democracy was the last
thing they intended. Drawn from the elite propertied segments
of late British colonial North America, the delegates to the
U.S. Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John
Jay’s view that “the people who own the country ought to govern
it.”
As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his
classic text The American Political Tradition and the Men Who
Made it (1948): “in their minds, liberty was not linked to
democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to
them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure
to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the
very essence of liberty.”
In Hofstader’s account, the New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap
captured the fundamental idea behind the Founders’ curious
notion of what they liked to call popular government. “Let it
stand as a principle,” Belknap wrote to an associate, “that
government originates from the people, but let the people be
taught…that they are unable to govern themselves.”
Hofstader’s take on the Founders was born out in historian
Jennifer Nedelsky’s comprehensively researched volume Private
Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (1990).
For all but one of the U.S. Constitution’s framers (James
Wilson), Nedelsky noted, protection of “property” (meaning in
essence the people who owned large amounts of it) was “the main
object of government.” The non-affluent, non-propertied and
slightly propertied popular majority was for the framers “a
problem to be contained.”
To be perfectly blunt, popular sovereignty was the U.S.
founders’ ultimate nightmare.
Anyone who doubts the anti-democratic character of the Founders’
world view should read the Federalist Papers, written by the
leading advocates of the U.S. Constitution to garner support for
their preferred form of national government during the late
1780s. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that
democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and
contention” and “incompatible with…the rights of property.”
Democratic governments gave rise, Madison felt, to “factious
leaders” who could “kindle a flame” amongst the dangerous masses
for “improper and wicked projects” like “the printing of paper
money,” “abolition of debts,” and “an equal division of
property.”
“Extend the [geographic] sphere [of the U.S. republic],” Madison
wrote, and it becomes “more difficult for all who feel it to
discover their own strength and act in union with each other.”
That was an explicit statement of anti-democratic/anti-popular
intent. So was the following argument given by Madison at the
Constitutional Convention on behalf of an upper U.S. legislative
assembly (the 🎩 Senate) of elite property holders meant
“to protect the minority of the 🎩 opulent against the
majority” and to thereby “secure the permanent interests of the
🎩 country against innovation:”
“In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should
not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An
increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion
of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and
secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.
These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the
feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage,
the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian
attempts have yet been made in in this Country, but symptoms, of
a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently
appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future
danger. How is this danger to be guarded against on republican
principles? How is the danger in all cases of interested
coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded against? Among
other means by the establishment of a body in the government
sufficiently respectable for its wisdom and virtue, to aid on
such emergences, the preponderance of justice by throwing its
🎩😈 weight into that scale. Such being the
objects of the second branch in the proposed government, a
considerable duration ought to be given to it.”
Consistent with these openly authoritarian sentiments, the
nation’s rich white fathers crafted a form of “popular ;)
government” (their deeply deceptive term) that was a monument to
popular incapacitation. The U.S. Constitution’s preamble claimed
that, “We the people” had formed a new government “in order
to…establish Justice… promote the general Welfare, and secure
the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” But
the framers’ fear and loathing of the “wicked,” “factious” and
“violent” masses shaped the structure of America’s not-so
democratic experiment at inception.
The Constitution divided the federal government into three
parts, with just one-half of one of those three parts (the House
of Representatives) elected directly by “the people” – a
category that excluded blacks, women, Native Americans, and
property-less white males (that is, most people in the early
Republic).
It set up elaborate checks and balances to prevent the
possibility of the common people influencing policy to any
significant degree. It omitted any mechanism to enforce elected
wealthy representatives’ direct accountability to “the people”
between elections and introduced a system of intermittent,
curiously staggered elections (two years for the House, six
years for the Senate, and four years for the presidency)
precisely to discourage sweeping and focused electoral
rebellions by the majority.
[b🎩 It created an 🎩 elite Supreme Court[/b]
appointed for life with veto power over legislation or executive
actions that might too strongly bear the imprint of the
dangerous masses.
It sanctified the epic un-freedom and anti-democracy of black
chattel slavery, permitting slave states to count their savagely
disenfranchised and incapacitated chattel towards their
Congressional apportionment in the House of Representatives. The
Constitution’s curious Electoral College provision guaranteed
that the popular majority would not directly select the U.S.
president —even on the limited basis of one vote for each
propertied white male.
It is true that the Constitution’s Article V provided a
mechanism technically permitting “We the People” to make
critical amendments to the nation’s charter document. But the
established process for seriously amending the U.S. Constitution
is absurdly difficult, short of revolutionary and civil wars
(and of course the U.S. War led to the Constitutional abolition
of slavery and the formal introduction of Black voting rights,
not actually achieved in durably practice until won by the Civil
Rights Movement during the middle 1960s).
As the progressive Constitution critic Daniel Lazare observes,
“Moments after establishing the people as the omnipotent makers
and breakers of constitutions, [the 1787 U.S. Constitution]
announced that they would henceforth be subject to the severest
of constraints. Changing so much as a comma in the Constitution
would require the approval of two-thirds of each house of
Congress plus three-fourths of the states.”
At the end of the 18th century, that means that 4 of the 13
states representing less than 10 percent of total U.S population
could forbid any change sought by the rest. Today, 13 of the
nation’s 50 states can disallow constitutional changes while
containing just more than 4 percent of the nation’s population.
“The people,” Lazare remarks, “did not assert their sovereignty
in Philadelphia in 1787. Rather, the 🎩 founders
😈 invoked it. Once they uttered the magic incantation,
moreover, they hastened to put the genie back in the bottle by
declaring the people all but powerless to alter their own plan
of government.” This harsh reality defies both the
Constitution’s preamble and the U.S. Declaration of
Independence’s determination that governments “derive[e]…their
just powers from the consent of the governed.” It negates
popular sovereignty, as intended.
As Lazare and other Constitutional scholars have shown, we are
still dealing on numerous levels with the purposefully
authoritarian consequences of the nation’s practically deified
founding charter. Democratic politics are gravely crippled in
the U.S. by numerous factors and forces (not the least of which
is the development of a modern corporate and financial
capitalism of epic national and global reach) that have
developed and emerged over the last 22-plus decades, but the
democracy-deadening procedural grip of the revered U.S.
Constitution continues to play a critical role in that
disablement.
U.S. progressives have long advocated constitutional amendments
meant to more properly align U.S. politics and policy with
public opinion, which stands well to the left of both of the
nation’s reigning, business-captive political organizations.
Among the changes proposed through the amendment route:
abolition of the anti-majoritarian Electoral College and the
introduction of direct national popular election and majority
choice either in a first multi-party round or (if no candidate
obtains a majority in the first round) a runoff race between the
top two presidential candidates; reversal of the Supreme Court’s
equation of political money and “free speech”; the full public
financing of campaigns (eliminating private money from public
elections); undoing the special legal “personhood” protections
enjoyed by corporations and reversing the plutocratic Citizens
United decision; the introduction of proportional representation
(whereby seats are awarded to parties in accord with their share
of the vote, opening the door for significant third, and fourth
parties) into Congressional elections; the elimination of
partisan gerrymandering in the drawing of electoral districts;
an economic democracy amendment requiring (among other things)
that economic institutions incorporate internal democracy,
social responsibility, and environmental sustainability; the
mandating of well-funded and genuinely public and non-profit,
non-commercial media.
But chances are slight for winning real socially progressive and
democratic changes in the nation’s economy, society, and polity
through constitutional amendments when alteration in the
nation’s political and government rulebook require the support
of super-majorities among plutocratically selected politicians
who sit in the US Congress and in the nation’s 50 state
legislatures largely at the behest of the nation’s unelected
dictatorship of wealth. The same corporate and financial
largesse that plays such a critical role in tilting the nation’s
elections towards the business-friendly right would also come
into play in powerful ways in fighting efforts to amend the U.S.
Constitution to further the causes of social justice, equality,
democracy, and environmental sustainability.
Around the planet, “constitutions do not last very long.” As the
U.S. academicians Thomas Ginsburg, Zachary Elkins, and James
Melton note in their book The Endurance of National
Constitutions (2009), “The mean lifespan [of national
constitutions] across the world since 1789 is 17 years. …the
mean lifespan in Latin America and Africa is 12.4 and 10.2
years, respectively…Constitutions in Western Europe and Asia
typically endure 32 and 19 years, respectively… [Since] World
War I, the average lifespan of a constitution …[is] 12 years.”
The U.S. is different. Its absurdly venerated founding
constitution has remained in place with occasional substantive
amendments over more than 220 years. The absurdly long endurance
of this 😈 purposefully 🦍 authoritarian,
🎩 wealth- and property-protecting document is nothing to
be proud of.
Those who advance progressive amendments to the U.S.
Constitution are right to sense the importance of a nation’s
rule-making political and governmental charter. Still, given the
intentionally remarkable difficulty of amending the US
Constitution in progressive ways and the profoundly and
purposefully undemocratic nature of the Constitution more
broadly, it really makes more sense for Left (and other) U.S.
democracy activists to think of constitutional change in terms
of a total re-write. Pardon my sacrilege, but it’s long past
time to stop standing in awe of the framers’ explicitly
authoritarian document and to think about designing and creating
a new governmental structure appropriate to social and
democratic values in the 21st century.
Serious advocates of popular sovereignty should call for –
imagine – a new U.S. Constitutional Convention dedicated to
building and empowering popular democracy, not checkmating and
containing it[2].
Other countries hold such constituent assemblies (for example,
Venezuela in 1999, Bolivia in 2006-7, and Ecuador in 2007-2008)
and so should the U.S. Certainly, it’s absurd to think that a
document crafted by wealthy slave-owners, merchants, and other
vast property-holders with the explicit purpose of keeping the
“wicked” popular majority and its “secret sigh for
redistribution” at bay can function in meaningful service to
popular self-rule in the 21st (or any other) century.
Paul Street is the author of They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy
(Paradigm, 2014).
HTML https://www.routledge.com/They-Rule-The-1-vs-Democracy/Street/p/book/9781612053271
1 .Foreword to John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney’s important
book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is
Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013),
2. So argues the highly respected legal scholar and professor
Sanford Levinson. See his books Our Undemocratic Constitution
(Oxford University Press, 2006 and Framed: America’s 51
Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford University
Press, 2012).
HTML https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Enough-with-the-Holy-Founders-Undemocratic-Constitution-20150531-0025.html
More Relevant articles by Paul Street:
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040422164555-532108.png
The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/08/the-real-constitutional-crisis-the-constitution/
“The Envy of the World”: Still No Functioning Democracy Here
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/the-envy-of-the-world-still-no-functioning-democracy-here/
#Post#: 1167--------------------------------------------------
Why The US Is Not A Democracy – Second Thought
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: July 10, 2023, 2:31 pm
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THE CLASS STRUGGLE
Friday, July 7, 2023
[move]People often assume that capitalism and democracy are
synonyms, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Why is
that? And what prevents the United States from being the
democracy it claims to be? Why The US Is Not A Democracy –
Second Thought[/move]
[center]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040422164718-540294.gif[/center]
[center]Why The US Is Not A [glow=blue,2,300]Democracy[/glow]
HTML https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2023/07/why-us-is-not-democracy.html[/center]
BC
At the time of your "revolution", the consensus amongst the
bourgeosie in both the colonies and Europe was that democracy
was foolish because the uneducated and unwashed majority would
vote for the wealth of the wise and hard working elite to be
transferred to them. Thus, not only would the diligent and
virtuous be deprived of the fruits of their labours, but it
would all be frittered away in an o r g y of drunken debauchery.
Unfortunately, this is still the prevailing view amongst a
sizable and powerful section of your ruling class and your
constitution seems to be designed to keep them in power.
AGelbert > BC
"..., this is still the prevailing view amongst a sizable and
powerful section of your ruling class and your constitution
seems to be designed to keep them in power."
BINGO!
July 07, 2023 by MICHAEL HUDSON
SNIPPETS:
The effect of the corporate capture of Congress as well as the
Supreme Court as the ultimate oligarchic backstop is to block
Congressional politics as a vehicle to update laws, taxes and
public regulation in keeping with what voters recognize to be
modern needs. The Supreme Court imposes the straitjacket of what
America’s 👿 18th-century slaveowners and other
😈🎩 property owners are supposed to have wanted
at the time they wrote the Constitution.
James Madison and his fellow Federalists were explicit about
their aim. They wanted to block what they feared was the threat
of democracy by populists, abolitionists and other reformers
threatening to check their property “rights” as if these were
natural and inherent. The subsequent 19th century’s flowering of
classical political economists explaining the logic for checking
rentier oligarchies was far beyond what they wanted. Yet today’s
Supreme Court’s point of reference is still, “What would the
authors of the U.S. Constitution, slaveowners fearful of
democracy, have intended?” That logic is applied
anachronistically to limit every democratic modernization from
the right of unionized labor to go on strike, to abortion rights
for women, cancellation of student debt and the right of
government to tax wealth. ... ...
A nation’s constitution should have the flexibility to modernize
laws, taxes and government regulatory power to remove barriers
to broadly-based progress, living standards and productivity.
But these barriers have been 🦍 supported by
😈🎩 oligarchies through the ages.
Read more: 🕯️
Should There be a Supreme Court? Its Role Has Always Been
Anti-Democratic
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/should-there-be-a-supreme-court-its-role-has-always-been-anti-democratic/
#Post#: 1400--------------------------------------------------
I am convinced Social Darwinism CAUSED the FAILURE of the
American Experiment with democracy.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 1, 2023, 6:52 pm
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I am convinced by empirical evidence and objective observation
that the American Experiment with democracy has failed.
I am convinced by empirical evidence and objective observation
the 🐍 worm in that Constitutional 🌟 Apple
promising a Golden Age of ✨ Egalitarian Democracy that
caused the failure was the NATIONAL EMBRACE of
[glow=red,2,300]Social Darwinism[/glow]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/who-can-you-trust/corruption-in-government/msg1119/#msg1119.<br
/>100's of millions of Americans, most who cannot define Social
Darwinisim without looking it up on their cell phone, have, for
all practical purposes, embraced this [glow=red,2,300]socially
destructive ideology[/glow] spawned by [glow=red,2,300]Darwin's
Capitalist followers[/glow].
Thomas Jefferson is not my hero, but I agree 100% with this
quote of his, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what
[glow=red,2,300]Social Darwinian 🦍 Ideology[/glow]
Pushes:
--- Quote ---
> "I consider our relations with others as constituting the
boundaries of morality... Nature [has] implanted in our breasts
a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in
short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their
distresses...
HTML http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco36.htm
The Creator
would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for
a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It
is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no
rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which
converts exceptions into the general rule." --Thomas Jefferson
to T. Law, 1814.
--- End Quote ---
[move]FAST FORWARD TO 1947: [/move]
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/>[center]
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[move][glow=red,2,300]DOWNHILL[/glow] ALL THE WAY TO 2001[/move]
[center]
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[center]
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[move]GOING OVER THE CLIFF [glow=red,2,300]AFTER
9/11[/glow]:[/move]
[center]
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[glow=green,2,300]larrymotuz[/glow] > AGelbert
I agree with Jefferson about the boundary for what society
broadly terms socially moral behavior. It is indisputable that
ethical behavior towards others must always and without
exception constitute the boundary for any behavior towards
others to be considered moral.
Any social morality not based upon ethical behavior towards
others is either amoral or immoral in my eyes. I've said this in
the past and repeat it now. Indeed, to me the test of what is or
is not moral is whether it helps or hinders our ability to live
peacefully with others.
And, yes, I agree that there's more to 9/11 than any official
accounts of it have provided.
#Post#: 1401--------------------------------------------------
Absolutely any claim that the US is a "democracy"a
logical fallacy
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 1, 2023, 7:11 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Absolutely any claim that the US is a "democracy" in any way,
shape or form, INCLUDING the "lesser evil" BALONEY, is, to put
it as charitably as I can, a logical fallacy.
If a person labors under the FANTASY that a nation where 2% of
the assets are owned by the bottom half of the population and
73% are owned by the top 10%
HTML https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/31/a-new-portrait-of-the-worlds-wealth-and-wealthiest/<br
/>is NOT an OLIGARCHY, but a "democracy", psychiatric counseling
is recommended. IOW, if 10% of the population of a country
TOTALLY RUN THE PLACE, the FACT that they VOTE among themselves
on what to dictate to their bought and paid for TOOLS in
Government is the "democracy" of an OLIGARCHY. THAT IS NOT A
DEMOCRACY, PERIOD!!!
[center]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-240422183939.jpeg[/center]
I'm not sure exactly when our Representative Democracy in the
USA became totally irrelevant as encroaching post-FDR Capitalist
corruption pushed us towards Inverted Totalitarianism (i.e.
Fascism with a sophisticated Orwellian Propaganda modus
operandi/vivendi), but September 11, 2001 was when Pandora's
"Patriot" Act finalized OLIGARCHS 'R' US RULE.
[center]
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[center]
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[center]
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[center]
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[center]
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We-the-people are, for all practical purposes, as capable of
"voting out" the corrupted tools of the Oligarchs, now
DOMINATING every single Branch of the US Oligarchs 'R' US
government, as Wiley Coyote has of countering gravity.
[center]
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No, it isn't OVER. NO, I am not "giving up". Those judgemental
AND slanderously pejorative verbal attacks on anyone who
recognizes the futility of "voting", and the utility of sending
a clear message to the Oligarchs 'R' US that their morally
bankrupt Social Darwinist "Paradise" is worthy of Opprobrium and
Disdain by People of Good Will, are par for the DUOPOLY
PROPAGANDA Course (i.e. "You don't count if you don't vote and
will be held responsible for all the baddies that stay or are
elected. Move to Russia or Venalzuela, you undemocratic
traitor!").
[center]
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#Post#: 1402--------------------------------------------------
I used to think that voting mattered somewhat, as in "It's
better than nothing".
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 1, 2023, 8:51 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The Class Struggle
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
[center]
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[center]I Can No Longer Justify Voting for Joe Biden in 2024
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122257-657398.png
HTML https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2023/11/i-can-no-longer-justify-voting-for-joe.html[/center]
AGelbert
I used to think that voting mattered somewhat, as in "It's
better than nothing". I haven't voted since 1980, so many would
say I am part of those asleep at the wheel.
Well, I WAS "asleep" when I voted, not when I didn't vote.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040422164614-5342345.gifhttps://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040422164519-508103.gif
For the last 30 years or so I have watched with interest, hope,
and then dismay, as every single time the will of the people
appears to make itself felt in Congress (or the White House or
the Supremely corrupt Court), "something" STOPS IT.
The Press always portays it as a "surprise". Remember Newt
Gingrich's "Contract (to trash Welfare) for America?
How about Pelosi and the "VOTE" in Congress AGAINST the Wall
Street Bailout in 2008 that the SENATE then flipped (according
to that obsolete piece of paper known as the Constitution, which
they are NEVER supposed to do!)?
Remember that Senate "Gang of Eight" the Repukians INVENTED out
of anger at having a Senate that could stop Shrub from going
nuts with Wars here, there and everwhere? A Senator from Vermont
stopped caucasing with the Repukians and that drove Cheney up a
wall. So, since they couldn't FAKE the US being "democratic",
they just went full autocratic Gang of Eight in the Senate, and
let the media BS the public about it.
I did not fall for the media Senate sanitizing legerdemain.
Here's some more: EVERY SINGLE TIME, from the time Pelosi first
got to be "Speaker" of the House (never mind when the Gingrich,
or the other "Speakers" from the Repukian Party that played door
stop to anything the people wanted and booster to anything
fascist ), EVERY single bill put forward by a Democratic Party
Congress person to improve Social Security followed EXACTLY the
same Pelosi DEMONCRAT "pattern". That is, Pelosi would say it
sounded like a great idea and she loved democracy and the people
and poor and so on. She would then ENSURE that the bill was
"tabled" (i.e. NOT come to floor for a vote before that Congress
ended all its sessions, thus forcing the Bill to be resubmitted
next term. OVER AND OVER AGAIN this has gone on with ALL the
Bills that actually addressed reducing inequality, corporate
criminal behavior and eliminating polluter handouts
("subsidies") were STOPPED by NEVER reaching the FLOOR UNLESS
Pelosi and her demoncrat pals KNEW the Bill DID NOT have the
votes.
My point with all this quixotic rambling is that there are
several levels of oligarch tool placed anti-democratic
administrative and legislative STOP GAPS placed there to DEFEND
the Social Darwinist Capitalist People Impoverishing Modus
Operandi from ANY REFORM that reduces inequality, PERIOD. That
IS a CONSPIRACY. That is why the media works overtime to keep
people from connecting the dots by calling anyone that DOES see
the PATTERN as a "Conspiracy Theorist".
Are you with me here? Did you get that about the VOTES?
WE-THE-PEOPLE DO NOT VOTE. It is those in Congress that VOTE.
And when their VOTE could COUNT, even THEY ARE NOT GIVEN THE
OPPORTUNITY TO VOTE!!!
And that is why I am certain that the only way these fascists
running this Oligarchy consider that they are in real trouble of
being overthrown is if "voter" participation is LESS THAN 15%
(we know the wealthy 10% that own 73% of the US will continue to
vote) . I will not vote. I recommend all who read this to
completely withdraw from registering to vote or voting. We have
ZERO chance of changing things for the better by voting for a
third party. The Oligarchs must be convinced that they have lost
the support of the public. ONLY with a 15% or less voter turnout
will they get THAT MESSAGE. If they do not get that message,
things will get more autocratic and more in-our-face Police
State.
Collectivist Action > AGelbert
Hmmm . . .
My dear friend and cyberspatial correspondent, I FEEL YA!
Even though I principally disagree on the utility of electoral
politics.
Of course, I TOTALLY agree that, what you identified as the
'Social Darwinist Capitalist People" will never allow real
reform, let alone fundamental transformation.
Many of us on the left maintain that, in particular in the U.S.,
the nation state was founded (behind the French 'enlightment'
veil of liberty) as a capitalist slaveocracy. It could also be
described as a settler colony, especially from the perspective
of indigenous communities. The African captives, working in
small and large slave labor camps throughout the 13 colonies,
originally, were living under a virtual dictatorship. When the
U.S. constitution was ratified only rich white men could vote.
My point with all of this is that: the PEOPLE were never meant
to have power.
And voting won't change that.
I agree.
Old news, to intelligent people.
However, the 'good news', imo, is that there is plenty of
historical evidence that, PRINCIPLED, RADICAL participation in
electoral politics (where elections haven't been banned,) can
often, profoundly, objectively, ADVANCE struggles for social
change*. . .if not ignite revolutions.
Strange, huh?
When we review the history of the Civil/Human Rights Movement of
the 20th century- which actually had its origins, not in the
1950s, but at the turn of the century - we see a powerful,
multicultural, mostly working class-led* NATIONAL movement, IN
LARGE PART, organized around electoral campaigns.
Moreover, based on my own experiences in Movements, MOST people
who become politically active, start out in electoral politics.*
(The far right(ists) appears to understand this MORE than a
lotta leftists.)
I still maintain that: if voting is useless, why do the efforts,
by the ruling class, to SUPPRESS the franchise of the POOREST
people, continue, unabated. . . ?
*Wherever these efforts fell short, they were mostly sold-out by
the 'leadership'.
**I was one of a bunch of exceptions
AGelbert > Collectivist Action
The French 'enlightment' veil of liberty as a capitalist
slaveocracy is IMHO, spot on.
The VOTING suppression is ongoing, but the fact that it exists
does not mean TPTB are overly concerned. This is part of their
MO. It has inertia. That does not translate to them feeling
"threatened" if we all go out and vote. See my other post about
all their stop gaps. It is part of their evil GAME.
I just cannot see any difference in basic human nature from WAY
BACK before hunting and gathering fell out of fashion in favor
of herded game (see: shooting ducks in a barrel) and land with
crops that are better eatin' than that wild stuff.
There is no "new man". We are just as tempted to lie, cheat and
steal (for starters), as when Pontius Pilate said, something
like, "TRUTH?, you're kidding, right?".
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All the philosopher Voltaire horses and all of Marx's Men (and
women), though they gave it the old college try, could not, can
not, and will never alter that SIN IS BAD FOR HUMANS equation.
Pretending EVIL "AIN'T THERE" is step one in social destruction.
Humanity has collectively decided that God "ain't there", along
with an absolute standard of morality.
So, our civilization is going, like every Prophet in the Old
Testament predicted woud GO when you tell God that he "ain't
there", to Earthly Hell in an 'anything goes if you can get away
with it' "civilization" handbasket that only Nietzsche might be
surprised at.
No doctorate in philosophy is required to understand that when
you 💩 s-h-i-t where you eat, the consequences are
cummulatively 😖 defecatory.
Rejection of an absolute standard of morality is the basic
problem here, bro.
I find it amazing that people can long for voting in an "honest"
politician when those very same people tie themselves into
thirty knots defining what "honest" means.
I know you have other views. but I continue to ask you to ponder
exactly WHY ANYBODY should NOT accept "donations" from a
billionaire looking for a tax break or something? What is to
stop the hitherto "honest" politician from thinking about that
new Tesla he or she could get or maybe rationalizing the
"donation" by doing the "at the end of the day" routine?
We are done without FIRM, FIXED Moral standards. No we don't
have them any more. I have them but I'm considered a nut case in
this "Brave New World" Huxley would love. And no, I do not see
them coming back any time soon.
It is a free-for-all out there. Most people told God to beat
feet. They don't need Him no more... That is an old story.
It always ends VERY BADLY for any nation and any people that
refuse to worship anyone or anything but themselves.
So much suffering. All because of our PRIDE, COVETOUSNESS, and
REBELLION against the Creator. And yet, it is "RELIGION" that
supposedly "caused" all this HELL we humans are putting other
humans through...
ISAIAH was quite a Prophet; he knew this was coming and warned
that the consequences are DIRE:
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#Post#: 1608--------------------------------------------------
Re: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of
the USA
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: January 8, 2024, 3:36 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Yes, I am posting snippets from the Heather Cox Richardson
article in The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very
Start of the USA topic.
No, it isn't because of Heather Cox Richardson's accurate
information about George Washington's soldiers. The American
History she recounts is true, though she has always ben careful
to leave out how the Senate control of the House of
Representatives was a deliberate UNDEMOCRATIC RULE BY OLIGARCHS
set up from the start (and still is), never mind the
UNDEMOCRATIC CAPITALIST TYRANNY FACT of how
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120822162250.png<br
/>Land Owning Founding Fathers defined
"we-the-voting-eligible-people".
No, it isn't about Heather Cox Richardson's accurate description
of the January 6, 2021
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-240422193742-835209.jpeg<br
/>[glow=maroon,2,300]rioters[/glow] as
[glow=maroon,2,300]Insurrectionists[/glow]. I post this here
because Democratic Party Apologist Heather Cox Richardson, not
only flat refuses to see the oligarchic tyranny embedded in the
Constitution FROM THE [glow=maroon,2,300]START[/glow], but even
more BLATANTLY refuses to see how Biden's
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-100823181638.png<br
/>Corrupt Corporate DUOPOLY pleasing actions (completely
ignoring
the needs of we-the-people) FUEL the
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-020623123430-24321191.jpeg<br
/>anger of ALL Americans, not just the right wing
Pseudo-Christian
Trumpers. The US has gone full Weimar.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-010123182425.jpeg<br
/>
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422142505.gif<br
/>The
Democratic
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202551-13971996.gifParty<br
/>
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-261123171835.png<br
/>is ENABLING [glow=maroon,2,300]TRUMP[/glow], the "new and
improved version of HITLER", to retake the Presidency and become
our [glow=maroon,2,300]ANTI-CHRIST wannabe DICTATOR[/glow].
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/>
As usual, all graphics are my doing.
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Letters from and American
January 7, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson
[glow=maroon,2,300]January 6, 2024[/glow]
SNIPPETS:
Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack
on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral
ballots that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, officers
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three
fugitives wanted in connection with that attack.
Siblings
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202719-14071062.gif<br
/>Jonathan and
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-240422193742-835209.jpeg<br
/>Olivia Pollock, whose family owns Rapture Guns and Knives,
described on its Facebook page as a
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122619-680240.png<br
/>“christian owned Gun and Knife store” in Lakeland, Florida,
and
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202719-14071062.gif<br
/>Joseph Hutchinson III, who once worked there, are suspected of
[glow=maroon,2,300]some of the worst
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122619-6812456.gif<br
/>violence[/glow] of January 6. The FBI had offered a $30,000
reward for “Jonny” Pollock, while the other two had been
arrested but removed their ankle bracelets in March 2023 and
😈 fled.
Family members of the fugitives and of other Lakeland residents
arrested for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the
Capitol insist
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202527-13931485.png<br
/>their relatives are innocent
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422145441-5641222.gif,<br
/>framed by a government eager to undermine their way of life
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422145441-5641222.gif.<br
/> The Pollock family has gone so far as to erect a monument “in
honor of the ones who lost their lives on January 6, 2021.”
🤦‍♂️
But it does not honor the law enforcement officers who were
killed or injured. It honors the[glow=maroon,2,300]
insurrectionists[/glow]:
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-240422193742-835209.jpeg<br
/>[glow=maroon,2,300]Ashli Babbitt[/glow], shot by a law
enforcement officer as she tried to break into the House Chamber
through a smashed window (her family today sued the government
for $30 million for wrongful death), and three
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/>others, one who died of a stroke; one of a heart attack, and
one
of an amphetamine overdose.
The
🐘🐍🦍
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/>monument in Lakeland, Florida, is a stark contrast to the one
President Biden visited yesterday in Pennsylvania. Valley Forge
National Park is the site of the six-month winter encampment of
the Continental Army in the hard winter of 1777–1778. After the
British army captured the city of Philadelphia in September
1777, General George Washington settled 12,000 people of his
army about 18 miles to the northwest.
There the army almost fell apart. Supply chains were broken as
the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the
soldiers, and wartime inflation meant the Continental Congress
did not appropriate enough money for food and clothing. Hunger
and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of
clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten
deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the
Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny.
Even if they didn’t quit, they weren’t very well organized for
an army charged with resisting one of the greatest military
forces on the globe. The different units had been trained with
different field manuals, making it hard to coordinate movements,
and a group of army officers were working with congressmen to
replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the
war.
By February 1778, though, things were falling into place. A
delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley
Forge and understood that the lack of supplies made the army,
and thus the country, truly vulnerable, and they set out to
reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian
officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into
unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned
that France had signed a treaty with the American states in
February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of
American independence. When the soldiers broke camp in June,
they marched out ready to take on the British at the Battle of
Monmouth, where their new training paid off as they held their
own against the British soldiers.
The January 6 insurrectionists were fond of claiming they were
echoing these American revolutionaries who created the new
nation in the 1770s. The right-wing Proud Boys’ strategic plan
for taking over buildings in the Capitol complex on January 6
was titled: “1776 Returns,” and even more famously, newly
elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5,
2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most
important days in American history.” On January 6, she wrote:
“Today is 1776.”
Trump has repeatedly called those January 6 insurrectionists
“patriots.”
HTML http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/sick/barfing-smiley-emoticon.gif<br
/>... ...
Commemorating them as heroes is the 21st century’s version of
erecting Confederate statues.
The January 6th insurrectionists were nothing like the community
at Valley Forge, made up of people who had offered up their
lives to support a government pledged, however imperfectly in
that era, to expanding that right. When faced with hunger,
disease, and discord, that community—which was made up not just
of a remarkably diverse set of soldiers from all 13 colonies,
including Black and Indigenous men, but also of their families
and the workers, enslaved and free, who came with them—worked
together to build a force that could establish a nation based in
the idea of freedom.
The people at the Capitol on January 6 who followed in the
footsteps of those who were living in the Valley Forge
encampment 246 years ago were not the rioters. They were the
people who defended our right to live under a government in
which we have a say: those like the staffers who delayed their
evacuation of the Capitol to save the endangered electoral
ballots, and like U.S. Capitol Police officers Eugene Goodman,
Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, and Aquilino Gonell and
Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, along with the more
than 140 officers injured that day.
Fanone 👍, whom rioters beat and tasered, giving him a
traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, yesterday told Emily
Ngo, Jeff Coltin, and Nick Reisman of Politico: “I think it’s
important that every institution in this country, every
American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy
seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they
can to ensure that
a.) Donald Trump does not succeed and
b.) the MAGA movement is extinguished.”
Unlike the violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, the
experience of the people at Valley Forge is etched deep into our
national identity as a symbol of the sacrifice and struggle
Americans have made to preserve and renew democracy. It is so
central to who we are that we have commemorated it in myths and
monuments and have projected into the future that its meaning
will always remain at the heart of America. According to The
Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Federation Excelsior-class starship
USS Valley Forge will still be fighting in the 24th century…
against the Dominion empire.
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Full article:
HTML https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-6-2024
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