CHANGE in AMERICA reprise

GO STRAIGHT AT THEM:  Tasks for Progressives

PROTECT THE PLANET.  JOB ONE.  Everything else is subordinate in priority.

• Eschew any advice from Wall Street chameleon Robert Rubin and his clones who brought us NAFTA, GATT and WTO, and mentored Clinton, Bush, and now Obama with the same advice that created the present fiscal disaster.  Prosecute Goldman Sachs and take their obscene bonuses back!
• Speak Keynesian economics again. Emphasize we the people, public issues, community, human rights, common sense, and the common good; not the bottom line for a gaggle of avaricious stockholders.
• Seek new, innovative solutions – not stock re-runs of old routines; that’s the pattern of alcoholics and addicts.
• Corporations must pay their fair share to support the system that enabled their success; stop treating them as “individuals” in the legal system; hold executives and stock holders personally accountable for their actions.
• Educate the children – dump top-heavy, discriminatory Trojan Horse Standards obstacles; eliminate public subsidies (vouchers) for boondoggle separatist, preferential, and elitist “home” schooling; insist upon a democratic public education, scholarship, and scientific rationalism.
• Call the nation to service: “Let’s get our hands on these problems and solve them.  We can do it, if we stop procrastinating and move on.”
• Tell Republicans they can worry about haircuts, dirty words, and sexual mores, and hurt people, making more money than they reasonably need, using wage slaves, exploitation, lies and violence to do it.  The rest of us will go to work to: save our livable environment; end our disastrous blood- and treasure-draining wars; create a strong single-payer public option for health care; develop a sustainable economy; and treat people as if they mattered.  The nation’s now critical issues (thanks to years of flagrant and cynical Republican (and conservative Democratic) corporatist neoconservative neglect, abuse, misuse, and outright theft) are approaching critical mass on the verge of the Second Great Republican Depression.  Fact: Republicans have created every American bank failure, financial panic and stock market collapse since they first won national office.
• We can’t let the Republican monarchists kill the real American dream: a better life for all our people, children, posterity,  not just ourselves. We’re not in this life for the next quarterly report, we’re here to build a lasting nation under a rule of law that we can be proud of again; and that means saving it from the right wing  Republican cabal that brought us this fiasco, before it collapses us in an economy of chaos and death, while they smugly profit off our bones.

How’d that be?  I’d like it fine.  And, we need to dump the blue dog Democrats and give President Obama an overwhelming progressive majority in both houses of congress, too, or we will spend generations living under and undoing the harm of the Bushies and their corporate neocon royalist masters.

If it will be done, it must be done soon, or it may not be done at all (although the planet will outlive us, barren as the moon, perhaps).

LAST BITS:

Now, here’s an arresting classified ad:  “I would like to fight a Republican supporter.  If you are one and have a fiery streak, please contact me so we can meet and physically fight.  I would like to beat the s—t out of you.” – From a posting on Craigslist.org

“I am bored by people who keep returning life to a moral plane, as if we were reducible, now, to some Biblical concept or its opposite, as if all our history and prehistory had not conditioned us for what we’ve become.  It’s enough to make a moral nigger out of a man.  The niggers are down there, no doubt about it.  But Jack didn’t put them there and neither did I.  When we get off the moral gold standard, when the man of enormous wealth is of no more importance to anybody than the man in rags, then maybe we’ll look back to our own day as a day of justifiable social wrath. Meantime, the game is rising, not leveling. Jack taught me that. Cured me. (Brother Wolf, are you listening?)” William Kennedy, LEGS. 

“Never judge a book by its cover unless it’s red.”  Leo Gorcey, Bowery Boys.

“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Gandhi.

 Something about blind faith: 

Kant said that no one could or would ever empirically establish whether or not god exists, so why bother? The people scurrying about the “Holy” Land gathering up broken pots in ancient garbage heaps, and digging out the battered remnants of distant lives, will not thereby prove or disprove the presence of any holy spirit at any site at any time.  The fact that some bricks are scorched in Jericho and that the prostitute-traitor’s (read the book) house “may be that one” are conclusive of destruction, but mute on the subject of an invisible god’s genuine and verifiable machination causing it.

But people need to believe: in anything, in something, the more hopeful, the better.  The less plausible, still acceptable (see: Mormons, Scientologists, the knuckleheads in tenny-runners who went off to see the comet, Jim Jones, et al), provided the final reward is colossal (so you want to be a millionaire?).  Hope, aka faith, springs eternal for all of us, and, as Martha says, “That’s a good thing.”  However, “wishing on a star” doesn’t pay the bills.

“Faith is belief in things unseen,” said “St. Paul,” Saul of Tarsus, inventor of the Paulist Christian doctrine, which was adopted by the Roman Emperor Constantine as a weapon against his political enemies.  It is in fact, anything anyone wants it to be.  Believe it, or not.

Dead, uncorrupted saints make good listeners.

In ancient China they didn’t think of history as the past, but now, and in the future too, so it all blurs or blends in one unending flow, beginning, middle, and end.  In the west history is neatly compartmented with dividing lines between epochs and eras.  The classic Chinese view has us live in the stream as part of the stream; the Western Way allows us to cut off the past from relevance in our present, and as an influence on our future.  We can forget time in a sense and float in a bubble, separate from time and space, in it, but not of it.  The Western view, in this, as in religion and everything else in life, divorces one from connection to the Creation and instead makes men gods, capable of managing and directing their own fate, of manipulating the universe to their exclusive ends.  Conclusion: the Western Way is a confusion of humankind’s actual stature and status in the universe, and hazardous to one’s health.

• Maybe human civilization has progressed; it depends upon what you’re measuring.

And the drum beats, “How-ward Thomp-son, How-ward Thomp-son…” Note: Feel any loss of identity?  Eager to believe in something?  You’re prime fodder for cults.

 STILL INTERESTING still relevant older LINKS:

Revealed: Secret Climate Change Evidence Bush Tried to Hide.  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/26

Whistleblower Reveals Sickness of For-Profit Health Insurance.  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/26-2

Global Trend for Sit-Ins and Occupations as Mass Redundancies Continue.  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/25-2

Trillions to Banks as Taxpayers Left in the Dark.  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/25-0

Not in Kansas

Tags: american dream, dump trojan horse school standards and testing, free children and women, ignore wall street, progressive majority needed in congress, prosecute goldman sachs, regulate wall street, stop the conservatives, tasks for progressives, use keynesian economics again