The American People Have No Allies In Washington, DC
Primary tabs
(579 Obama-dumping days until 2012 election-Hugh's Obama's Scandals List)
There is little empathy, integrity and legality in Washington, DC
.
Members of both parties are pimped out by their corporate backers. The sell-out began long ago but it is truly merciless today, no longer covert, and the momentum of this ravaging of ordinary Americans absolutely breathtaking.
Now this week, we, the victims, are watching the craven, media-titillated political gamesmanship about a shut down when the shark was jumped long ago by all of them, heartless Republicans and heartless and hypocritical Democrats.
Joseph Stiglitz revealed that the top 1% of the country controls 40% of the wealth of this country. Nomi Prins claims the cost to the American taxpayer of the banks and stimulus bailouts for the rich by both Bush and Obama is nearly $8 trillion. $8,000,000,000,000. Others say you can double that and add some. Kucinich estimates that the cost of war with Libya is $100 million a day. $100,000,000. $1 trillion has gone to the Iraq War it is estimated. $1,000,000,000,000. Obama’s military budget for this year, sacrosanct to our corporate-war-mongering leadership, will be $719 billion. $719,000,000,000.
The deaths and suffering caused by the US leadership is staggering, domestic and global. Its dismantling of the American social net is obscene.
The dirty dancing our oath-taking faux-representatives are doing about this shut down high drama is disgusting. One more indication that we are all disenfranchised now. Save the corporate-pimped ruling class political and media elite. The wealthy top 1% have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The rest of us can eat shit and die. They, pimping and pimped ones, don’t care. They got theirs.
Empathy, integrity and legality should matter. They don’t to our leadership, from the top down.
We have no allies in Washington, DC.
- libbyliberal's blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Comments
great minds think alike
I was thinking of writing a post like this. It is as if no one is paying attention to Wisconsin and Ohio and the entire country is irrelevant to the drama Queens on Capitol Hill and the White House.
DC -- one party the corporate money party, one media ...
corporate money media ...
how can they scream the sky is falling when the Dems and media encouraged the fall? still the media plays the titillation game! As if this were about a horse raise and not massive sell-out.
Obama getting ready for another game of Lucy and the football? The 2012 version. This will be hard to stomach.
I agree about the Drama Queens!
There is always some day by day, blow by blow, drama going on in the news to keep attention away from the bigger picture and what is really going on. It is not even as if the information regarding the bigger picture is not out there. It is just squeezed out of the news by the Drama Queens - on purpose, I think.
Even if what the newscasters wanted was excitement, what has been happening in Wisconsin is much more exciting than DC as usual!
well said, fran ... totally agree
MSNBC et al. with their pin-light flashlight (singular) and they insist where the story is, i.e., where the establishment wants the story.
the horse race... who came out looking worse this week, Dems or Repubs.
It is disgusting.
allies... right.
I would have started with the last line first and left out many of the frothing adjectives, but fundamentally correct.
Rudolf Rocker's classic "Nationalism and Culture" (I admit, difficult to find and expensive), or much easier to find, Alice Wexler's "Emma Goldman in America" & "Exile", or any of Paul Avrich's histories of Anarchism in America, or even the volumes of the history of the Spanish Civil War would provide a well thought out basis to support your conclusion. From Thoreau and Kropotkin and John Cage and all the Dadaists, all this has been systematically laid-out. This is not new analysis. There is a much more modern and complete vision than simple 19th century English style class-conflict.
What is happening is ~rational~ and institutional not (just) the result of moral turpitude and greed of a wealthy elite. The greed and immorality of the wealthy elite is no different than our own. Human beings are human beings. We do not control reality.
But,
1. Industrial capitalism is killing us.
2. Socialism cannot save us.
3. The economy is autonomous.
We have to deal with it.
good vs. evil ... conscience vs. sociopathology ... it is the
contest of humanity. E-G-O ... "Edging God (or spiritual awakeness) Out" ... The war on empathy has been waged rigorously for too long. Reagan really boosted it. Xenophobic American exceptionalism. Backlash from the healthy collective ego reckoning of the 60s from the defeat in Viet Nam that was humbling and should have been. The New Deal of Roosevelt, too, was a healthy period with backlash. The evil cockroach survivors of those periods want their vengeance and are mentoring new monsters.
It is a sociopathic patriarchal paradigm based on power and competition and we need a paradigm shift to the feminine paradigm -- humanist one -- of cooperation and partnership. It is possible. We have to trust it is and find each other.
You know when Milgram gave his experiments with the electric shocks, on obedience to authoritarianism, 4 out of 10 did not inflict the critical shocks on people. So there is hope that that 40% did not bow to authority. It may not be the majority but it is 40%. That gives me hope that that 40% can convince at least the next maybe wobblier with potential 20%.
We do control reality. There are people of conscience. After years of arrested development leadership that has placed amoral cronies in positions of power we have to dismantle that incompetent and malicious matrix of cronyism.
Ostrich American citizenry and a craven media induce voting personality not character.
People possess the potential of living within their "higher" selves. But there can be a mass psychosis. There can be societal Stockholm Syndrome. Authoritarian enthrallment. Alice Miller called it poisonous pedagoguy and cited the German religious authoritarianism in the home that ripened things up for Hitler.
We need an American spring, whereby citizens can wake up to the oppression and fight for human values.
We need good leadership and we need people of conscience stepping up to the plate.
I think multinational corporations have changed national psychopathic corporatism to global psychopathic corporatism. I think we need to take a lesson from environmental groups who work together now internationally and our human rights groups need to communicate with other countries and we should build a UN that is based on human and citizen rights not economic militarist patriarchal ones.
Btw, I was restraining myself on the frothing adjectives I thought.
John Cage?!
That sounds interesting. References, please.
Unplugging from the Capitalist Matrix
I would argue that socialism is the ONLY thing that can save us. People got used to the postwar economic boom and the idea of a comfortable middle-class existence came to be seen as "normal". It's not. Capitalism always existed based on the exploitation of the working class. The postwar boom ended decades ago, but the ruling class tried to keep it going through deregulation, growing financialization of the economy, and of course, by extending credit. All those measures just ensured that the eventual crash, when it came in 2008, would be much worse.
Now we're seeing class warfare on a scale none of us is really familiar with, even after 30 years of the neoliberal squeeze. We're back to the era of robber barons, people, and the sooner everyone realizes that - to quote the International Workers of the World - "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common" - the better.