What happened to the Republican and Democratic Parties?

As much as we must loathe and castrate the 21st century American version of Trump and his neofascist MAGA Republican Party, the senior Democrats’ subordination to corporate, financial, and military-industrial authority - our Nation’s concentrated wealth and power  - has once again compromised too much of their electoral platform, pandering to the "dirty energy" ego of Manchin and the greed of Sinema, instead of holding to their promises like a healthy and functional party would choose to do.

Too often, once they win elections, Democrats often reveal their progressive-sounding rhetoric for what it is: minority voter manipulation, followed up with post-election inauthenticity.

Unfortunately, this disappointing pattern bizarrely gives the dominant Trump-hostage, white supremacist wing of the Republican Party the ability to exploit the immediate national disappointment that is the result, especially with uneducated blue collar whites and the Party's criminal elite (e.g. the Donald Trump crime family and their cronies).

This is largely how Reagan, the Bushes, and the most corrupt of all, Donald Trump, used nationalist lies, scapegoating, and fear-mongering to con their way into the White House.

Bill Clinton and the making of the current Republican Party 

When the Democrats shifted from their 20th century New Deal and Great Society commitments - and become a consolidated corporate-neoliberal party under the pro-big corporate Bill Clinton, the Democrats rendered irrelevant most of the Republican Party’s traditional Big Business constituency and policy agenda.

As a result, to keep functioning as a competitive force in our duopoly two-party system, the Republicans chose to move further to the racist, nativist, and xenophobic right to reinforce their “white identity” legitimacy as a viable (and separate) political party.

Ugly “Duopoly” Party Agendas and Narratives

During the 1990's, the Clinton administration cynically collaborated with the Gingrich Republicans to kick Black and minority mothers and their children off federal family cash assistance - in the name  of 1) “free markets personal responsibility” and 2) the “capitalist duty” of unprivileged Americans engaging in a lifetime of low-wage labor.

The Clinton Dem cabal then joined with his Republican allies to force ever more Black men into prison with his racist “Three Strikes” crime bill. This gave Bill Clinton the "useful idiot" label in spades!

Not surprisingly, conman Bill Clinton also started up plans for a southern border Wall to stem the surge of migrants resulting from his US labor outsourcing scam - the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - which displaced millions of Mexican farmers with subsidized U.S. agricultural exports.

Barack

Eight years into the 21st century, after the Republican Party lost its remnants of leadership credibility under W. Bush (with the costly intel deception of the Iraq War and the Wall Street complicit "Great Recession," Barack Obama was essentially elected to model for poor Blacks on their personal and cultural responsibility to act civil and responsible in spite of their position at the bottom of the nation’s race-class hierarchies. In other words, Obama served as “proof” that racism no longer posed serious obstacles to Black upward mobility.

Obama also scolded legitimate Black resisters of racist police violence on the sanctity of “law and order” – deeply empty words in a nation that provides liberty and justice only for the privileged Few.

Not done yet, to prove his corporate credentials, in Obama’s first term his administration sabotaged efforts to make health care a “right” - instead advancing the flawed ACA healthcare scheme that preserved and advanced hugeprofits for insurance and drug companies - as well as the broader medical-industrial complex.

Duopoly Militarism

Yet history shows that spurts of “nationalism” (including tariffs, xenophobia, and domestic violence) are directly a result of fading military power and bankrupt “defense” budgets. 

Not withstanding the new evils of global neofascist authoritarianism, the Democrats are still deeply committed to the U.S. military empire, which eats up more than 20% of federal discretionary spending to maintain more than 800 military bases spread across more than 100 “sovereign” nations.

As a nation we can credit Clinton and Obama with keeping the American military machine set on “active duty” - exemplified by Clinton's bombing of Serbia and the Obama's drone attacks which killed civilians.

Even today, Joe Biden's new "War on Dangerous Autocrats" could be used to advance an even more massive Pentagon budget that will cancel out desperately needed social and environmental expenditures.

The Democrats are more skilled than the Republicans when it comes to managing the American warfare state and selling its actions as “democracy promotion.” Just look at how the disastrous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld wars are remembered.

Bipartisanship Corruption  

Unfortunately, out of a deranged political desperation, the Republican Party has become ever more “fascist” over  the last 30 years.

It is openly hostile to “normal” parliamentary give and take in Congress and now wants to  “eliminate” the other ruling class party (the Democratic Party) through decentralized totalitarian means - disguised as repressive “big government” State’s rights and "The Big Lie" racist election fraud propaganda.

Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Shortly after Biden’s victory, the vastly incompetent Trump Republican party’s leaders, along with other Trump-corrupted elected officials, failed to nullify the 100% legitimate 2020 presidential election. 

So now many of the pro-Trump Republican states are successfully passing racist big government laws targeting minority voting so they can rig the electoral game in 2022 and 2024, because they know they cannot win otherwise. 

This neofascist voter democracy nullification effort even included a traitorous MAGA insurrection assault on the U.S. Capitol, encouraged by Trump and his political goons, leading to a handful of police deaths on January 6th, 2021.

Despite all this and more, it’s difficult to understand why the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats insist on “reaching out” to the ugly Republican white-nationalist party in the name of bipartisan “getting things done.” Again, "useful idiots?"

The only decent thing to do with a vicious party like the Trump Amerikaner GOP is to muster all one’s influence and power to cut off its head and destroy it.

Its unfathomable why the top Democrats won't go down that sensible political warfare path.

In a clear display of political ignorance, the corporate-captive leaders in charge of the Democratic Party seem more concerned with marginalizing the progressive, social-Democrats (Bernie-Ocasio-Tlaib-Omar) faction than they are with routing the anarchistic Trump Republican neofascist party.

Refusing to Dismember MAGA Hate 

Moreover, Americans are trapped by the ridiculously antiquated Electoral College and the population-distorted nature of the U.S. Senate - where each state has two senators (e.g. Wyoming has 134 times more representation than diverse and liberal California).

Yet somehow these are “sacred” topics Democrats never broach - all while the nation is being torn apart by violent right wing extremism and corporate neoliberal income inequality.

That is unsurprising since some undemocratic features of the U.S. political order are revered in our Nation's archaic 18th Century slaveholders’ Constitution. 

Yet no fundamental alteration of that document is imaginable - short of a popular revolution the Dems would never embrace (but apparently violent right wing extremists would).

As of today, the Wall Street Democrats are afraid to undertake actions deeply needed and permitted within the confines of our venerated national charter: 1) the abolition of the reactionary Senate filibuster; 2) a deep analysis of the antiquated U.S. Supreme Court’s preposterous lifetime appointment rule; and 3) the admission of Washington D.C. as a state.

Surrendering to the filibuster (the 60-vote rule) in the Senate means the blockage of numerous basic and much needed reforms, including a purely democratic Voter Right Bill (supported by 75% of Americans) - which would have outlawed big government Republican voter suppression tactics and the corrupt state-level gerrymandering of Congressional districts.

It’s the same with numerous other measures, vetoed not only by the corporate-financial plutocracy but also by a Louis XVI-era constitution designed by and for slave-owners and merchant capitalists for whom “democracy” was never the ultimate objective.

Embracing Fascism’s Seedbed: Failed Capitalism. 

Top Democrats continue to embrace the soulless and anarchic “big corporate” profits system, weeping about its “excesses” all the way to the bank - as they are rewarded for their dutiful service to the nation’s owners (ask future NBA owner Barack Obama about the payoff?). 

The ultimate destinations of an elite controlled capitalist system 1) authoritarian rule and 2) environmental collapse, are both currently underway.

These two terrible consequences are interrelated: 1) the American capitalist order has exhausted its global and ecological natural resource frontiers; and 2) it is running out of “cheap nature” to replenish its profit rates.

American capitalism is no longer capable of escaping its deep internal contradictions. 

Hence Americans and humanity are faced with the choice between [eco-] socialism or fascist barbarism - if we’re lucky.

Hopefully, in the end top elite Democrats will not ultimately side with barbarism and fascism (fueled by ecological breakdown), when they clearly must adopt sane egalitarian economic solutions every time. They must give up their illusory elite grandiosity.

Punish Political Criminals for Their Crimes

After the Great Recession, Obama promised, but his administration refused, to prosecute the Great Recession’s Wall Street criminals, citing a desire, in Obama’s words, to “look forward, not backwards.”

Even today, one could easily make the case for the tangerine tyrant Donald Trump being in a jail cell for a range of transgressions, even his neofascist and sadistic child separation policy or his deep assaults on environmental protections. 

But it’s Trump’s “pandemicide” incompetence - ignored and fostered by his own party - and the attempted subversion, nullification and 1-6 violent insurrection related of the 2020 presidential election that completely justifies Trump being locked up.

But Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland (whose 2015 Supreme Court nomination was insultingly torpedoed by the McConnell controlled Republican Senate) apparently has “no stomach” for indicting Trump on any of his criminal behavior.

And now the orange Cancer is back on the hate rally campaign trail, still selling his “Big Election Lie” and otherwise stirring the neofascist pot without serious consequences from a government he tried to overthrow.

Choosing elections over “street activism”

Sadly, corporate Democrats will never call citizens into the streets and public squares - out of their low wage workplaces - to challenge the environmentally destructive corporate-financial plutocracy, or to destroy the racist Republican electoral structure, and thecapitalist-imperialist order - that gives rise to the GOP neofascism that has congealed around what is “the most dangerous organization in America.

Moreover, Democrats won’t call people into the streets even for basic reforms like their “For the People Act.”

When millions of Americans take to the streets on their own initiative to protest the folly of US policy corrosion, the Democrats and their media machine will do everything they can to co-opt and pervert popular rebellion, steering it into a power-friendly sinkhole of major party electoral politics, or try to make fundraising profits off the movement.

Back when the genuinely populist, anti-plutocratic Occupy encampments rose up in the late summer and fall of 2011, the Wall Street-captive Obama administration - and its blue (Democratic) metropolitan police allies worked to infiltrate and dismantle the protest sites even as Obama and his party deceptively appropriated Occupy’s language and spirit for his 2012 campaign (used against the made-to-order 1%er Republican candidate Mitt Romney).

Selling violence with the “White victim card”

The current Trump “Amerikaner” Republicans are finally being accurately reproached for their ugly white supremacy, but they have no monopoly on the power-serving irrationality and silly, anti-scientific standpoint of identity politics.

The Democrats and their media allies have constantly stoked the identity flames in their own deeply conservative fashion, privileging the placement of Black, LatinX, female, and gay faces in high places over truly serious engagement with the oppressive underlying structures that create the nation’s horrible income inequities affecting class, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities.

Plus, the Democrats’ “liberal” media regularly pushes the white “heartland” guns and violence buttons even as it promotes a TV and film culture of cop show and gangster violence that psychologically steers deranged and armed whites into acts of violence.

Let’s face it: Liberal” and “politically correct” Hollywood manufactures and celebrates powerful images and sounds of bloodshed on a mass scale.

The Nice Cop Needs a Crazy Cop

As a ruling class party, the Democrats are now challenged in their effort to win the votes they need to stay viable in an electoral system that is dysfunctionally all too constitutionally tilted to the far right.

Given their ownership by the capitalist class, Democrats gain electoral support less by advancing a positive vision of progressive change (though pretending to possess such a progressive vision is central to their electoral marketing) than by intelligently exploiting the economic fear of the other ruling class party.

This invests them perversely in the continued existence and awfulness of the Republican Party. In other words, you can’t be the “nice cop” (lesser evil) without a “bad cop” (greater evil) on hand to scare the jailhouse captives.

The fact that the Republicans, having insanely crossed into fascist space - and really are a greater immediate evil, does not make the Democrats’ co-dependent complicity in the game any less at fault.

Summary

The most important and most relevant truth of the [January 6] riot is that it was not the culmination of the insurrection, but its prologue.

If the Republican Party, as currently constituted, takes back the House and Senate next year (an outcome that is not only plausible but, as history tells us, likely), and if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2024, it doesn’t seem likely that the neofascist controlled Republikaner Congress will certify the victory. And then the four horsemen will most certainly ride.”

The 4 horsemen will ride with pathetically little resistance from the so-called “party of the people,” - the dollar-drenched neoliberal Dems - who may go down in the history books as the junior partner party in the rise of an American fascist order inthe third decade of the 21st Century.

It will be up to the people themselves to write a different history. They must form new organizations appropriate to the tasks of refuting and destroying “Republikaner fascism“ - and creating the kind of society that doesn’t breed the deadly fascist bacteria like “Trump disease” - while also destroying our livable ecology.

SoberMoney.org

“There’s nothing more frightful than political ignorance in action.” - Goethe

The Growing Nightmare of American Neoliberal Neo-Fascism

My father fought against the Nazis in World War II. He served in Patton's campaign up from Southern Italy which ultimately defeated Hitler and Mussolini. I didn't understand the significance of his effort this while growing up, but my father's experience and the horrors he saw had a profound and detrimental affect on him for the rest of his life. It also imprinted on me later in life.

I spent the first 13 years of my life in Hawaii, where white people were the minority race. I had friends from all Asian cultures; and other than my parent's latent bigotry, I didn't know what racism was until I moved to Los Angeles in the early Sixties.

During my college years in California, I also developed many gay friends, witnessing first hand the obviously sane reality that gay Americans are no different that heterosexuals, except that they are often kinder - and the absolute best folks you can live near if you want your neighbors to help improve the value of all properties in the community.

As an adult I spent much of my life reading about World War 2, what led up to it, and what happened afterwards. I read voraciously about the Versaille Treaty, citizen culture in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Europe in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis, and the role American bankers and industrialists played in facilitating Hitler's rise to power.

As an educated and constantly maturing adult, I worked hard to be responsible, productive, a good husband and father, and a citizen that my son could be proud of - and hopefully partially model himself after. I also love the work I do for all of my clients, most of whom I consider friends as well.

That all said, I cannot pretend that our country isn't in deep trouble. For the time being, it is not only our weakening middle class economic system that is failing.

But almost everything else - at least from the America I want my son and his family to live in in the future. And I'm not talking about being "progressive" or mostly voting Democrat.

In fact, I would consider myself a fiscal libertarian (except where the private sector has no business meddling in (water, for example). I consider myself to be a sane social liberal. I also believe people who are not by nature social liberals are generally unhappy in their lives and must find blame in others who don't have their same values.

What I am absolutely certain about from my vast and long life experience, having been born and raised in Hawaii and lived in California, Europe, Texas and Michigan, is that racism, white supremacy, homophobia, and disregard for others less forturnate than ourselves has become the new 21st century American collective mental illness and national dysfunction.

And if we add in our Nation's callous greed, the ugliness and mass gullibility of the Trump cult, and the Federal and State legislators who abuse Christian values to repress homosexuals, the poor, voters they don't want voting, and (sometimes) women, America' is fast losing its exceptionalism.

All of this National dysfunction is a visible national insanity to anyone that wants to live in a civilized modern society. Which leads up to the topic of this Update. 

Now, I know that the topic is is not directly economic or investment focused, but our angry and dysfunctional social decline will ultimately end up being an economic disaster if our Nation keeps going down our current "uncivilized" path.

Here, in my opinion, is what we should be most worried about as Americans:

Donald Trump’s ascendancy into American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, facilitated by a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason, science, and education that has been decades in the making.

It also points to the failure of civic balance, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life, and the destructive erosion of any sense of shared citizenship.

As "market" obsessions and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and our public spheres are being even further downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish - from public schools, non-corporate media, health care for the poor or uninsured, and empathy for the less fortunate - there is also a serious erosion of community, justice, equality, public values and the common ngood.

At the same time, reason and truth are not simply contested, but wrongly vilified - banished by the legacy of Donald Trump’s poisonous and mostly bogus world of “fake news.”

Under the Trump administration, sane language was pillaged, truth and reason almost totally ignored, and words and phrases emptied of any substance (or turned into their opposite), all via the endless production of Trump’s Twitter addiction and the ongoing clown spectacle of paranoid and conspiracy theory right wing media (e.g. Fox News).

This grim reality points to a current failure of civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips society of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of public education as an essential national good.

What we are witnessing is not simply a political anarchy used to consolidate power in the hands of the corporate and financial elite, but also a reworking of the very meaning of literacy and education, crucial to what it means to create an informed citizenry and democratic society.

In an age when literacy and thinking become dangerous to the anti-democratic forces now governing most of the commanding economic and cultural institutions of the United States, truth is viewed as a liability, ignorance becomes a virtue, and informed judgments and critical thinking are demeaned and turned into more "fake news."

Under the reign of this now normalized perspective, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to trash and science is replaced with pseudo-science. Moreover, traces of critical thought appear more and more at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society.

Now, after a 40-year reign of primarily American corporate (neoliberal) power and lobby money dominance, civic culture is being demolished, shared citizenship eroded, self-interest and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos has been elevated to a national ideal.

In addition, language has been militarized, handed over to advertisers, and a political and culturally embarrassing anti-intellectualism is now sanctioned by a white supremacy pandering Republican Party.

And not unlike the cult following of Donald Trump as a political force, we have a celebrity culture that produces an ecosystem of babble, shock and tawdry "reality" entertainment. Add in the cruel and clownish anti-public intellectuals who defend inequality and infantile forms of masculinity, and define ignorance and a warrior mentality as part of the natural order, we see the dethroning of any viable sense of national committment.

The current American culture of manufactured illiteracy is also being produced through a media apparatus that trades in illusions and the spectacle of violence. Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of a zombie politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding institutions that now control American society.

In this age of manufactured illiteracy, there is more at work than simply an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. In fact, our Nation's manufactured illiteracy has become a political and educational project central to a growing corporatist American neofascist ideology and set of policies that work to depoliticize people and make them complicitous with the neoliberal and racist political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives of those outside the system.

Finally, there is also the workings of a deeply malicious form of 21^st century scapegoating and lack of personal responsibility.

In our current American moment, the illiteracy, ignorance and blaming others by roughly 40% of American voters can only offer the paving of a path toward a more dominant form of 21st century Americans neofascism that has descended upon the United States.

SoberMoney.org

The Plunder Capitalism of the US Republican Party

We see once again that so many Republican pieces of legislation are often destructive acts of pointless cruelty - and an enduring monument to the Republican Party's total contempt for the majority of American people it has decided NOT to serve.

It is worth taking a step back and marvel at the sheer insanity of what the Republican Party is on the verge of doing.

There is no public purpose behind the legislation GOP elites are orchestrating, no courage to defend it to voters whose lives they are about to destroy, no recognition that it utterly lacks support and buy-in or even a kind word from any organized group in the entire field of medicine or insurance, no compunction about how it will radically remake one-sixth of the economy with a law they can't even explain to each other and haven't actually seen or helped draft, no shame about reversing themselves on public statements they made weeks or days or even hours ago about how they just can't bear to vote for it, no regret about using it to put millions of their fellow human beings through hell every day for weeks as Congress carelessly threatens their lives and livelihoods, no ability to stand up to their malevolent president who won't bother to understand or care about what they're doing as long as a bill ends up on his desk and allows him to tweet about his BIG WIN!

The GOP is full of people who want to stick it to The New York Times and college professors more than they want to make policy that will actually help people, or at least not make their lives demonstrably worse.

They are willing to ruin their constituents and ruin the lives of millions of people so that they might back-slap each other for a few minutes in the Rose Garden in the company of a demented charlatan President who will either end up humiliating and destroying them anyway or collapsing American society around himself and eating ice cream on top of the ruins.

The current Republican Party is run by the most selfish, cruel, and dangerous people to lead this country in 150 years and every day they find new and innovative ways to debase and invite shame on themselves. They make the corrupted elitism-lite of the Democratic Party look like the Girl Scouts. 

The only comfort right now is imagining the future that awaits the Republicans - that is if the Trump voters figure out that their angry gullibility has actually further filled the "Swamp" with more toxicity and crony tax revenue plunder - bogus tax dollar economic stimulus money they will not see a dime of.

The Republican Party's reward for kowtowing to their megalomaniac donors and their anarchistic primary voters - that is assuming that the United States does not continue down the road towards Trump's attempt to create a right wing police state - will hopefully be a series of stinging, comprehensive electoral defeats.

After three more years of Donald Trump (if he makes it that far) and the incompetent leadership of the current Republican Party, their deceptive populace ideology will be decimated as an organized force in American politics for a generation. They will have sacrificed themselves, their principles, their reputations, and their constituents for nothing more than greed, grandiosity, and their addiction to abusing poor people. They will forever be remembered as the enablers of a trash-heap president who is literally losing his mind in front of us and who may very well succeed in erasing a 240-year-old republic.

But in the end, if there is any justice in the universe, what they will do instead is watch a hopefully remodeled Democratic Party (or better yet a viable third-party run by good people) who crush them in the next three election cycles, sweep them and everything they believe aside, ignoring the lamentations of their vanquished press secretaries as they embark on a years-long progressive bender that will make Republicans wish they had just made their peace with ObamaCare and acted like the principled opposition they pretend to be.

Some Republican politicians will be gone before their legacy of toxicity becomes undeniable even to their most die-hard supporters. But others will live long enough to read the first chapters in the history books documenting their unfathomable cowardice, titanic greed, and galactic stupidity, describing how they precipitated a series of domestic Cuban Missile Crises and voted to launch the missiles, how they tried to bury the republic rather than keep it, how they prioritized their narrow political interests over basic human decency, again and again and again.

And in that moment, we can only hope, they will process the words describing their own depravity and they will understand that they have wasted their careers in the service of avarice and evil.

Americans have to make a very important decision very soon: Choose between an intelligent problem solving leadership that uses science, compassion and cooperation for all Americans - or choose an ideologically greedy and angry neo-racist capitalism that blames the "others" for our country's increasingly ominous economic and social problems.

SoberMoney.org

Thoughts from the Anonymous Underground

“The US President and Congress are irrelevant. Multinational corporations and organized crime run the world now” – TV’s Raymond Pennington

POLITICAL ECONOMIES:

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU SELL ONE AND BUY A BULL. YOU’RE HERD MULTIPLES, AND THE ECONOMY GROWS. YOU SELL THEM AND RETIRE ON THE INCOME.

TODAY’S CAPITALISM: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU OWE $175,000 PER COW, UNLESS YOU ARE A HEDGE FUND OR WALL STREET BANK CEO.

POST CAPITALISM: THE COW YOU NO LONGER OWN HAS TWO JOBS.

SOCIALISM: YOU HAVE 2 COWS. THE STATE TAKES ONE AND GIVES IT TO YOUR NEIGHBOR, WHO DOESN’T HAVE A FIELD TO PUT IT IN.

COMMUNISM: YOU HAVE 2 COWS. THE STATE TAKES BOTH AND GIVES YOU SOME MILK. THE COWS DIE DUE TO NEGLECT.

FASCISM: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. THE STATE TAKES BOTH AND ARRESTS YOU FOR DEMANDING SOME MILK.

AMERICAN REPUBLICAN: HE HAS TWO COWS. HIS NEIGHBOR HAS NONE. WHO CARES!

AMERICAN DEMOCRAT: HE GIVES A SPEECH ABOUT HOW HE FEELS COMPELLED TO SHARE HIS THREE GREAT COWS. HE SAYS TO HIS NEIGHBOR IF HE VOTES DEMOCRAT HE WILL GET ONE. HE GETS A GOAT INSTEAD. THE NEIGHBOR, DISILLUSIONED, STOPS VOTING OR VOTES FOR THE NEXT AUTHORITARIAN.

AMERICAN LIBERTARIAN: THE LIBERTARIAN BLAMES BIG GOVERNMENT FOR NOT HAVING HEALTHY COW. HE DIES - NEVER OWNING A COW, BUT KNOWS HE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG. 

AbomiNation Corporate Structures

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU SELL ONE, AND FORCE THE OTHER TO PRODUCE THE MILK OF FOUR COWS. YOU ARE SURPRISED WHEN THE COW DROPS DEAD.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. BOTH ARE OBSERVED BY CLOSED CIRCUIT TV.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. BUSINESS SEEMS PRETTY GOOD. YOU CLOSE THE OFFICE AND GO FOR A FEW BEERS TO CELEBRATE.

CHINESE CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU HAVE 300 PEOPLE MILKING THEM. YOU CLAIM THAT YOU HAVE FULL EMPLOYMENT AND HIGH BOVINE PRODUCTIVITY. YOU ARREST THE NEWSMAN WHO REPORTED THE REALITY.

JAPANESE CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU REDESIGN THEM TO BE ONE-TENTH THE SIZE OF AN ORDINARY COW AND PRODUCE TWENTY TIMES THE MILK.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION: YOU HAVE TWO COWS. YOU WORSHIP THEM. YOUR PEOPLE STARVE OWNING CELL PHOHES.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION: EVERYONE THINKS YOU HAVE LOTS OF COWS. YOU TELL THEM THAT YOU HAVE ONLY ONE. NO ONE BELIEVES YOU, SO THEY BOMB AND INVADE YOUR COUNTRY. YOU STILL HAVE ONE COW, BUT NOW YOU ARE PART OF A FAKE DEMOCRACY.

A TRUMP CORPORATION: YOU HAVE FOUR COWS. THE CEO TELLS YOU HOW GREAT YOUR COWS ARE SO YOU KILL ONE OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND FILE FOR BANKRUPTY AND GET RICHER FROM BRANDING YOUR BUSINESS ACUMEN. YOU RUN FOR PRESIDENT AND WIN ON PROMISES OF USING YOUR BUSINESS MODEL TO GOLD PLATE YOUR DEAD COWS.

“There is no Planet B"

THE CHOSEN

It’s hard to fathom how the Israelis can stand to live with themselves given the ongoing misery and cruelty they have inflicted on the Palestinians; and it’s equally not easy to understand how the rest of the world has let them get away with it.

Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of Nazi genocide unequivocally condemn the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, regardless of the historical terrorism of Hamas.

Israel is possibly the future of global Nation-States: A modern internment camp democracy! 

ALMOST ALONE

The global crisis, which is as much moral and intellectual as it is political and environmental, puts into question above all our long submission to Western ideas of politics and economy. Whether it is catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or disastrous interventions in Syria, the latest financial crisis which began in 2008, soaring unemployment in Europe (which is likely to empower far-right parties across the continent), hideous income disparities in both Europe and the United States, the widespread suspicion that big money has corrupted democratic processes, the dysfunctional American political system, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency, or the dramatic loss of a sense of possibility for young people everywhere—all of this separately and together has not only severely depleted the West’s moral authority - but also severly weakened its intellectual authority.

Yet no one needs to become depressed or despondent over disasters befalling mankind.

Know your politics. Know your history. There’s nothing new happening here. Only the names have changed.

Man seeks to crawl back into the womb after realizing the world isn’t a friendly place. Problems are self-inflicted but solvable. Should we wake from distraction, insipid entertainment and activist slumber, positive change is at our beck and call.

Abominations and goings on don't happen without our consent. Self governance isn’t a spectator sport.

5% of colonists participated in the 1st American Revolution.

95% hid out until the fighting was over, grew fat from war profiteering, looked down from Canada or rooted for King George III.

Let others decide which color nail polish to wear and which NFL team to champion. We can choose our future.

Adbusters, EFF, We Are Change, Glenn Greenwald, Chuck Baldwin, Stewart Rhodes, Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning, Ross Ulbricht, Edward Snowden and countless others are already on the front lines.

Stop whining and move forward!

“Unlimited economic growth on a finite earth is the logic of a cancer cell.”

www.SoberMoney.org

Democracy is Dependent on Challenging Corporate Absolutism

As a society, how do we define what a "moral economy" is?

Here at SoberMoney, we define a moral economy as one that allows most of the citizens to at least have a fair chance to work, provide for their loved ones, and to attain some degree of long-term life independence and retirement security. Clearly there is no perfect economy, whether it be capitalist, socialist, or one of the social democracies we see in the Nordic countries.

In reality, achieving a true "moral economy" is a constant work in progress. We now have enough human history to know what is NOT a moral economy. Elitist oligarchies like we see in Russia and India are not moral economies. Repressive neo-socialist states like in North Korea or Venezuela are not moral economies. Oil theocracies like we see in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East are not moral economies.

Here in the United States, we are starting to look more and more like the oligarchical corporate model of India. Except instead of having one company dominate each sector of the domestic economy, our duopoly party system is working toward the "regulation" of a two company oligarchy for each economic sector. Current examples of US sector duopolies are 1) Verizon and AT&T, 2) Apple and Samsung, 3) Amazon and Wal-Mart, 4) Monsanto and Con-Agra, and 5) if the merger with Time Warner Cable is approved by the FCC, Comcast and Comcast (no, not a mistake).

The Big Lie

Contrary to US Reagonomics revisionist neoonservative economic theory - which obviously began when Ronald Reagan became US president, the United States has since become a corporate welfare state. It was under the Reagan presidency when the US corporate sector began to achieve more powerful advisorial influence in the federal political system. More importantly, the federal regulatory agencies became profit-inhibiting pariahs, were gutted, and thus began the massive income inequality seen now, as well as the trashing of public health and public safety laws.

As a direct by-product of Reaganomics, the beneficial achievements of labor unions - fair wages & benefits, occupational safety, and worker bargaining rights - began to see its demise under the bogus belief that "trickle down" economics was the answer to global competitiveness and the waning stock market at the time. Ironically, the union corruption that existed at the time made it easy for the Republicans to start dismantling unions and sell pro-corporate Reaganomics.

Since the 1980s, the United States economy has seen a consistent favoritism toward corporate rights over consumer, worker, and citizen rights. The fall of Russian communism in the late 1980s accelerated the almost religious belief system of a pro-corporate mindset . And since the beginning of the 21st century, while still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, we are closer to becoming a quasi-corporate police state - where anyone who questions the rights of the free markets over social justice and a moral economic order is considered a troublemaker, or at worst, a terrorist. 

The Contradiction Between "Free Markets" and Global Corporate Absolutism

Most Americans are now plagued by a macro-economic form of faulty thinking. And that faulty thinking goes like this: Freedom = the Free Markets = the Global Corporate System. It is a pervasive yet bogus fixed mindset that presents itself as the final solution of how people everywhere must now live. 

On the surface, this unquestioned preference for "the global free market" is dinned into the heads of US and global citizens by slogans saturating the corporate media around the clock - or conversely, by police and security beatings, clubbings, tear gas and rubber bullets - if the slogans don't imprint, as in Seattle during the IMF/World Bank meetings or in NYC as a result of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Yet underlying the instituted corporatist propaganda and potential for violence is this value equation always at work: brainwashing the public mind for global corporate acquiescience. Hence, freedom has become equated with the free markets, and in turn, globalization is equated with transnational corporate "ownership" to ALL of the world's natural resources.

The challengers of this assumed multinational corporate privilege are those who are in direct ethical and emotional conflict with this mindset: the poor, artists and musicians, many educators, some government workers, progressive liberals, progressive libertarians, and a few old guard conservatives who still believe in the classic definition of  no corporate bailouts "free markets." They see, in fact, that the new Wall Street version of the American capitalist system is one of banking oligarchs and the privileged political elites.

Sadly, the Democratic Party is now mostly part of the latter, primarily paying political lip service to consumer rights, public health, public safety, and citizen freedoms.

The US profit and growth addiction

South African Steven Biko said: "The most effective tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

As Americans, we clearly see our addiction to profit and money every day. We see and hear it from the patronizing cable business channels like CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business. In fact, these plutocrat-owned media outlets are for the most part corporate apologists for the institutionalized monopolizing behavior of the Wall Street elite. in fact, the US elite greed addiction has recently been called "affluenza" by a judge who gave a rich 16 year old Texas kid ten years probation for killing four children while driving drunk. 

Currrently, our nation's "collective self-worth" depends largely on the disingenouis American Dream fantasy of how much money we can make, how little taxes we can pay, how quickly we snap up new technology to show off our adult toys, how "cool" our numerous vehicles are, how over-acheiving our children are, how little we have come to care about worker rights and our public health, and how cavalier we have become regarding having active compassion for the poor and the less unfortunate.

Much of America has become a nation of self-centered, elitist-adoring greed addicts. 

The Narcissism of Profit

Sadly, our profit addiction comes at a huge cost. At this stage in our world's human and social development, we are in the process of creating the largest wealth disparity we have ever seen. 

Simply put, a narrowing group of rich elitists are getting richer, the middle class is getting poorer, the poor and less fortunate are continually neglected, our prisons are overcrowded with young black males - with no programs for rehabilitation, and our children are being increasingly massacred in their public schools and in public enertainment centers by a national gun culture that ignorantly thinks owning guns is the answer to their "impotence" in the growing corporate-controlled government police state they now live in.

Many Americans naively believe the lie that owning guns and exotic military weaponry will get them back to their almost total lack of individual economic (worker) power. Not surprising in the current economic environment, they simultaneously blame foreign workers for a declining middle class, fostered by the same politicians they vote into public office.

SoberMoney believes our national gun fetish is an example of a subconscious Aryan male powerlessness. We see states run by vote-pandering white male dominated Republican poltiticians who pass laws that force women to undergo mandatory sonograms (like government broodmares).

These mysogynist right wing evangelical legislative efforts helps create the illusion they still have some control over their social beliefs - which are all they really have left after the global corporate elites havetotally compromised their labor rights.

The "Free Markets" Addiction  

Our Nation's unquestioned worship of "free markets" and wealth is very much like an alcoholic or drug addict who will harm or hurt anyone or anything that gets in his or her way of achieving unfettered profits. Money and profit has become our national pain killer - an insidious "drug" that numbs the fear and anger caused by four decades of middle and worker class economic neglect and abuse. 

In the United States, we no longer live in a free markets economy. We live in a globally coordinated, increasingly corporate totalitarian state - which controls governments with massive sums of lobby money and legal political bribes. If citizens balk, it uses its vast oligarchical police and security powers to coerce and convince gullible and fearful citizens (through their media news comglomerates) into believing that the global corporate system is the only sane way to live.

Functional Economic Thinking

If you read some or most of this website, we will provide information on how "mass economic activism' - both consumer and investor activism - is the most effective way to break our personal addictions and dissolve our economic delusions so we can dismantle economic elitist tyranny and the growing wealth and income disparity we see everyday.

In fact, our biggest political and economic problem in the US is our dysfunctional cognitive thinking. We must change both the way we think and act. We must give up the political lies that keep us feeling crazy and angry. In some cases we must change our thinking through our economic actions, and in other cases we must change our economic actions through self-respecting financial and poltiical analysis.

Bottom Line Reality-Based Economic and Political Thinking for open-minded US citizens:

• Politicians work for their corporate lobby money masters - not you, the gullible voter-citizen

• Big corporations control and manipulate our federal and state governnments - not the reverse

• "Free markets" do not apply to large corporations - whose chartered objective is to control and own everything 

• What benefits Wall Street most often hurts Main Street

• True "Economic Freedom" would actually prevent global corporations from having unlimited access to the world's natural resources

• Corporations reap billions of dollars in profit from individual addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling, debt, and celebrity fanaticism.

• The evangelical "family values" politicians receive millions of dollars in lobby money and campaign contributions from media conglomerates and hotel chains who sell and distribute pornography and casinos. 

• Republican politicians say they love small government - but constantly create big government legislation to restrict 1) women's reproductive health choices, 2) voter rights, and 3) the rights of the LGBT and Muslim citizen community.

• Democratic politicians tell workers they look out for their interests, but behind the scenes get most of their campaign and lobby money from big corporations who keep workers in debt and disenfranchised.

• Democrats talk about caring for the environment - but in reality have become part of the elite - working as high paid lobbyists for big dirty, coal, and mining companies after their political career ends.

Get real - or get left behind.