(01-19-2021 02:31 PM)ken d Wrote: (01-19-2021 01:49 PM)JRsec Wrote: You keep believing the Main Stream Media.
I believe what I see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears.
I believe people when they tell me they are lying to me. I believe Lindsay Graham when he tells us that we can't believe anything he says, because what he says is "just politics".
I believe Fox when they acknowledge in open court that they lie, and when that they argue under oath that no reasonable person should expect that they are speaking truthfully.
I also don't believe people when I have seen and heard them lie countless times, as Donald Trump has done. Anybody who believes anything that man says is simply a fool - one of those suckers said to be born every minute. And Trump knows that his supporters are suckers - he's counting on it.
I believed Ted Cruz when he said that Trump was nothing but a con man. He was right. I don't believe him now that he has become a gutless bootlicker like most Republican Senators and Congressmen.
I have lived long enough to have witnessed the complete transformation of the Republican Party I was once proud to belong to. What was once the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has deteriorated before my eyes into one where an unprincipled scumbag like Donald Trump is the embodiment of that party.
So you keep believing the conservative media. They'll tell you what you want to believe, and their audience will follow them like sheep. What they won't tell you is the truth.
And as usual you miss the whole point. Where did I once say I believed any media? I said I believe what I see and hear and have the frame of reference to interpret. I've done organizing work. I see all of the leaders out there in those riots and know who is doing it. I didn't organize for any of them, but I used my training to counter organize and prevent them and to instruct common citizens about how to organize for change they needed for real issues in their neighborhoods and not some outsider's political agenda which was ancillary at best to their needs. They trusted each other regardless of race and in spite of past political affiliations.
If we are going to change this mess we have to find the organizing principles in communities, states, and the nation, and the organizing principle is what unites people from diverse backgrounds. This is precisely why Corporations are paying for "Critical Race Theory" and other divisive agendas. They can't maintain such a total power over an elected government if the citizens set the agenda. But then Ken all fascists rule by division.
We can agree on Lincoln and my absolute favorite President was Teddy. He was progressive in the right ways, pushed anti-trust to prevent such monolithic corporate power as that illustrated by the Tech companies over information in this past election, and gave the people the prettiest parts of the nation to enjoy, but in ways where their presence wouldn't spoil much of it. That's what I call foresight!
Since the assassination of JFK the warning of Eisenhower has been sounding truer each year. He didn't fear the Iron Curtain or Cold War, but the rise of the military industrial complex which he rightly foresaw would take us into needless wars for profit's sake. They just happened to be the same corporations backing the Federal Reserve and over the years IBM and Chrysler have been replaced by Microsoft and Apple. The marriage of corporate enterprise and innovation with the military could be used to justify anything and has. But the balance that once still separated sympathetic government from Corporate interests has now been completely eroded by PAC money which buys Corporate cooperation on both sides of the aisle.
Johnson's unabashed sellout to the FED Backers who wanted to compromise SSI for leverage we get Nixon/Agnew/& then Ford. All of them in the pocket of corporate America with Nixon perhaps a little less predictably. Out of the mess of '68 and mistrust due to the progress of a bizarre war, we get Jimmy Carter. He's not Beltway, and he's not Corporate. His own party sabotaged him. In fact what the Republicans did to Trump was very reminiscent of what happened to Carter.. Carter gave us Reagan who was not Corporately influenced but the RNC forced him to choose between H.W. Bush and Ford as a running mate if they were to endorse his nomination. H.W.. was very Patrician and very corporately connected. After Reagan regardless of party we had a steady diet of Corporate first presidents all loosely connected through corporate money and think tanks. Clinton, W., Obama all were of their bent. Trump like a less socially gifted Perot was an anti establishment candidate which is why he won.
Fear of losing to him again led to the largest conspiracy this nation has ever seen to job the American public of their choice. There was no way in hell Corporate America was going to let a populist movement get started. Trump's organizing principle was simple, Washington is corrupt. Well hell, everybody knew that, but he was at least saying it. Trump isn't the issue here. He won because he was the anti Washington candidate in a nation where nobody believes their Government operates fairly with regard to business and trade and where many suspect we send sons and daughters to fight not for national security, but corporate interests. And whether or not that is actually true is irrelevant to the fact that people in numbers believe it to be so.
The issue right now that the left can't see, and neither can many on the right, is that as long as we fight each other the Corporate agenda continues. They use their monetary influence in education to push agendas of division. Look at the world. We are one of the most diverse and inclusive communities on Earth. I damn sure can't see how anyone can look at the PRC and say they are anything but repressive. They have strict racial purity policies, essentially genocide minorities within, are as anti gay as any modern government can get, and yet the left accepts Corporate America's collusion with them. That doesn't make any sense!
The poor and middle class have much more in common than any of our media outlets are indicating. Stereotypes and crime are used to promote an atmosphere of fear in this country and the Virus, real though it may be, has been used to further erode community cohesiveness. Add the Tech giants social media and hand held devices that have electronically isolated us and created a false sense of community with information seeking bots and surveillance taking the place of the backyard fence and what do we have? A disconnected and fearful people.
This is exactly what Hitler created first with the SA (brownshirts) then with the education camps for everyone's children (Hitler Youth), and then Gestapo, and pretty soon anything that happened to your neighbor you didn't protest, especially if the Nazi controlled media stated their crimes (usually lies). The family unit was busted up, workers unions essentially eliminated, places of Worship given new Bibles (Nazi Revised Bibles) and then all social connections were either severed or altered with state policy.
I'm watching our country today and seeing the same things, just camouflaged. Public education is not exactly the Hitler Youth in that they aren't learning to pilot gliders for future Air Force purposes and they aren't learning to shoot, but they are learning a new political dogma. The churches in order to keep tax exempt status had to adapt their moral codes to be inclusive. And now Antifa, BLM, Proud Boys, etc are sufficing for the Fascist and Socialist street gangs that gave rise to the Fuhrer. And quite frankly the rhetoric coming out of this election from the left was talking about outlawing the party of Trump. Never mind that Hitler, when the Nazis won majority status, outlawed all other political parties.
I don't lose sleep over Communism because Russia is not behind this kind of attack, China is. China is a fascist government that calls itself communist. So when I see the Corporatists trying to remove obstacles to what they see as global dominance through trade by elimination of the nation state in Europe and U.S. teaming up with a xenophobic Chinese fascist system, that does keep me up at night.
The problem is Trump wasn't a savvy as Perot, wasn't as tactful as Reagan, wasn't as altruistic as Carter, and was an easy foil in the midst of a populist rebellion against business as usual in Washington and now they Fascists Corporatists intend to take us to a place where they don't have to face populism again.
And that is far far cry from the man in the moment that TR represented as we were challenged by Corporate zealots from 1890's up and through WWI, or FDR faced in the rising growth of fascism abroad, or Churchill faced in stemming the same dismal tide in Europe. We are fresh out of principled individuals to rise to meet a crisis of morality. Why? We've quit instilling morals like we once did. We've quit teaching people to think for themselves. We've permitted corporations to absorb media and the news, and all political candidates at the state and federal levels are already indebted to corporate money before they can be elected.
We need to be teaching the children that what they have that they can count on is each other, and while we are at it it's not to late to teach their parents either. E Pluribus Unum! Out of many, One! That's not diversity, that strength through unity.
