Steggies wrote a derogatory comment on my most recent post, A Note From The REAL Progressive World. It essentially said that the “real progressive world” to which I was referring is…”merely the juvenile and overweening self-satisfaction in identifying a problem of which everyone else was already aware…the problem was that clinging so frantically to an obvious and unsophisticated prognosis seemed to actually prevent the writers from considering any solution other than ‘but they’re BAD!'”
I answered as rationally as possible. The above comment is a perfect example of what has brought us to Donald Trump. Mocking the left, it prefers to support the supposed “grown-up,” so-called “pragmatic” stance of neocentrists like Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party’s real current power structure. Nota bene, please…they lost…as did the real power structure of the Republican Party…to a criminal who is hell-bent on taking over total power here in the U.S. Maybe it’s time to stop calling names and start kicking ass.
I think so, myself.
You?
Here is my answer to that comment.
Read on.
You oversimplify.
There is…or at least there was well within living memory…a balance in the U.S. between profit-making/profit taking and a system that functioned well for its people. That balance still exists in many nations of Europe, especially Western Europe and even more especially, in Northwestern Europe. I have traveled widely…not as a pampered tourist, but as a not-particularly-honored-in-a-financial-manner performer of people’s music…throughout the world, and in the process I have gotten a very good taste regarding the relative well-being of the places in which I have played. I see this balance almost nowhere else. Cuba had it despite the efforts of the U.S., and so did Argentina and Chile. Also Japan. Very few other areas of the world have had that balance, in my own experience.
No matter how you define it in a technical, governmental sense, that “balance” is called Democratic Socialism. A system which works well for its people while neither stymying the growth of profitable businesses nor being run totally by and for the rich. It is a delicate balance. The U.S. had a taste of it from FDR’s Great Depression correction right on through to the assassination years, but since that time the balance has steadily shifted toward oligarchy.
We need another correction, and it is quite plain that we are not getting…nor are we going to get… that correction from the Democratic Party as it now stands. We are only going to get more of the same…a faux leftiness routine on the Clinton/Obama level.
You are who you work for, and the the Democratic Party is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the same kinds of corporate interests that own the Republican Party.
So it goes.
Solutions?
I have only one.
Tell the truth about what is happening.
Which is what I am trying to do here.
Do you really think that this ongoing calcification of Democratic progressivism is not happening after the way Bernie Sanders was treated in the primaries? “WTFU” is not a strong enough exclamation!!! He was defeated by the same monied interests that own the Republican Party. End of story, except for the…unexpected by those monied interests and the people who swallowed the neocentrist lines of both the Democratic and Republican parties…except for the Trump phenomenon. Criminal outlier that he is, he out-lied them.
And now both sides of the largely non-existent fence between the DemRats and the RatPubs (and their wholly owned media as well) have been…failingly, for the most part…howling for his downfall.
So that goes as well.
You think that I am some sort of wild-eyed, crazed revolutionary?
I am not.
I just want checks and balances.
Why?
So we can all go back to pursuing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” instead of running around in circles swatting at media-produced fear memes.
Now?
The only “checks” and “balances” that remain in place and in positions of real power are those that exist in the financial statements…themselves largely falsified and covered up…of the .01%.
You support the gradualism…the so-called “pragmatism”…of the current Democratic Party?
Fine.
Feel free.
It is just more “gradual” calcification of a once fairly loose and free-swinging system.
Enjoy.
Rigor mortis is only a few steps away now, with the Trumpists poised to land the killing blow.
Watch.
And if they are actually defeated?
Great.
Then we have a new prognosis.
A kinder, gentler, more gradual strangulation by the .01%
Once again..Scylla and Charybdis.
I choose neither.
Ulysses was wrong.
There is always another course to follow.
Get some new chart-makers.
Later…
AG