Tag Archives: GOP

Thank you, Alabama

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Dear Grady, Connie,
and other friends in the State of Alabama;

Thank you.

I believe you Alabamians have put at least a speed bump, if not a road block, in the effort by the powerful and wealthy one percent to slurp up America’s resources, destroy the vision of our founding fathers, and damage institutions that made America great.

This vote was not easy and you experienced tough conflicts in coming to the decision you did. During our conversations last summer and this fall, I developed respect for you conservatives from the very conservative State of Alabama, as different as your beliefs are from my own, a liberal from the very liberal State of Oregon.

In recognition of the difficult aftermath of yesterday’s election in your communities, I’d like to personally make a few promises to you.

First, I do not gloat. The fact that Moore lost does not represent a moment of celebration for me, especially since I know that some values he claimed to represent are values you hold dear, and some of the values I share with Jones anguish you. I’m relieved, certainly, but when you see others gloating, please do not think I’m among them.

I promise that when I speak out for the right of two people in love to get married regardless of their sexual orientation, I will also speak out for the right of a baker to bake a wedding cake for whom he alone chooses. It gets difficult when civil rights bump against rights of an individual, but this is not the only bus to the other side of town.

When I speak against the wall, I promise to recognize the impact of immigrants on your home town. Americans need to speak the same language for the melting pot to blend. Immigrants made this country great, but there is a reason that community and communicating share the same root. It’s important.

When I say every American should have quality health care, I promise I’m talking about insurance, and that you can choose your doctor and pay as much more as you want. But insurance only works if we all buy in at some level. That’s what insurance is. The free market does not work well in health care, and we don’t want our neighbor’s child to suffer.

While some need public housing, I don’t think it should be better than your house, and every able-bodied person who receives free health insurance or subsidized rent payments should do something in exchange for our support.

When I speak out for a woman’s right to determine what happens with her body, I will point out there is a point before birth when abortion is not a trivial decision. Science has changed the debate in the last 50 years, and travel down the birth canal does not magically confer the status of human being. At the same time, there are fewer unwed mothers and fewer abortions in states where contraception and family planning are available. Maybe we can make incremental changes instead of fighting for all or nothing absolutes?

That’s it for now. Again I’d like to thank you for sharing your point of view on these topics with me, and thank you again for what you did for America yesterday.

~ Erik

No longer a Democrat

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I was an Independent once, and it’s that time once again — I’ve had it with the Democratic Party.

Democrats lost their base of working Americans not because of Russia or working class ignorance, but because the party is run by coastal elites who don’t understand working Americans nearly as well as a corrupt big-city President Plutocrat.

While arguing over budget deals with Republicans, the Democrat’s stated priority is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It may be laudable to protect 700,000 Hispanics from deportation to countries they’ve never known, but millions of working men and women see Democrats putting the needs of non-citizens over the needs of Americans without jobs.

Why aren’t Demorats making affordable health insurance the one priority they will force Republicans to accept in exchange for a budget compromise?

Advancing their self-assigned role as the party most pure, Dems shoved one of their more effective senators, Al Franken, out the door for boorish behavior. It may be laudable to take an impassioned stand against harassment, assault, and retribution, but American working men and women know the difference between tacky and rape, and they know how to deal with loutish and offensive behavior. They also understand the power of sexuality, and see the current flat spin of sensitivity as just another example of effete elitism.

Why aren’t Dems demanding work for those who can’t find jobs, as bridges crumble and roads lie in ruin?

Russians may have thrown the election, Jerusalem may be erupting, places they’ve never heard of may be descending into chaos, but a baker in Colorado can’t refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? Many American working men and women could not care less if their sister’s son is straight or gay, but don’t want someone in Washington D.C. telling them they have to do something they feel is wrong. Land of the free!

Racists? Many working men and women voted for Obama and don’t like Trump, but they see Democrats in backrooms focused on demographic calculations that leave out most of the nation’s geography, they see Hillary still whining about being a victim, and they listen to Fox News at least validating their knowledge that something terribly unfair is happeneing and it’s wrong.

What about American working men and women growing old, cold and hungry and alone, while watching their children struggle with addiction to opioids pushed by corporations that will never face criminal prosecution? Banks that gamble with dwindling retirement accounts and slurp up tax dollars to fatten balance sheets while paying bonuses of millions? Oh, what it must be like to be too big to fail!

While Democrats eat their own or insult those they pretend to represent, Republicans inch their way closer to an oligarch’s dream of destroying opportunity for those who would oppose them, selling the primary source of information, Internet, to soulless corporate oligopolies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, and forcing state governments into bankruptcy so Koch Industries can buy highways on-the-cheap and charge the working class a toll to drive on pavement they used to own.

American working men and women know it’s class warfare, that they didn’t start it, they still have no champion and they never had a chance. Yes, I’m leaving the Democratic party, as so many others already have, but perhaps I’m not leaving, perhaps the party left me. By what they’ve done and not done, they’ve declared I’m not a Democrat. I now accept this. They shall not have one more of my dollars, not one more party-line vote.

Self-evident truths

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Democrats need to quit pointing out hardships faced by so many ordinary people. They act as if hardship and despair is a byproduct of greed. It’s not. Hardship is itself a goal of the Republican Party, the means to an end.

Oh, I hear the snarls and howls of outrage coming from the right. “Class warfare!” they exhale with feigned shock and dismay. Yes. And they started the war. But for a very good reason.

The GOP believes if they make life frightening, lonely, famished and cold for those not in the top one percent, society will return to a holy, orderly and value-based future. Not values-based, but value. You are what you own.

Since the GOP is the party of the ruling class, it creates laws that protects their ownership.

“But not ALL the people who voted for the half-smart, very cunning, pathological liar and malignant narcissist who occupies the White House is a member of the one percent!” foolish liberals exclaim. True enough. Many of those who voted for President Trumpkin are good, decent, hard working or decent and unemployed Americans who are angry that undeserving people are getting more than their share.

By undeserving, they mean someone who is not them.

Conditioned with fear and outrage by Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, those good people often still believe that a serial bankrupt who cheated in business, defrauded those who sought to better themselves, who abused women, who still hides his tax returns and flaunts his horrid ignorance, has their interests at heart. Seriously.

Democrats colluded in this, by the way. As towns and small cities across the country were being hollowed out by the offshoring of industry so Home Depot could sell cheap air conditioners to people losing their jobs, the Democrats were arguing among themselves about how many colors should be in the LGBTSQRXZEP flag.

Yeah, yeah, I know you Democrats think this is important, but that’s because you have a job and live on the Left Coast surrounded by people who agree with you. I think it’s important, too. But please… the house is burning down. Now is not the time to debate into which closet the photo albums should go. Because you’re so passionate about what doesn’t really matter in a time of crisis, you’ve lost so big it will take generations to clean this up.

Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. Go take an Econ 101 course and quit hating other people’s money. When Main Street was forced to bail out Wall Street a decade ago, you failed in your mission to support the working class and lost your moral authority.

The story of how Republicans seized control of the country using poor white people to vote against their interests is one for history books when they are written, if anyone has the education to write them, if anyone has the attention span to read them, if and only if control of the media by the ruling class is not yet absolute.

The Russians are thrilled.

It’s about to get much worse this year as the tax code is rewritten and deficit explodes, ownership of the Internet is handed over to AT&T and Verizon, and health insurance becomes such a heavy burden that everyone below the top 40 percent will have to choose between health care or college for their children.

What’s important to realize is that for the GOP, that’s a good thing! The evils of public education, hardship housing, choice of sexual identity, free flow of information, minimal standards of living, and social security, will be banished not by passing laws, but by freedom of choice!

Hardship will clean up society! Hardship will restore the work ethic, put people back in church pews, reduce crime, keep families together, promote proper values! Because people will be forced by hardship to choose the right thing!

When the economic crisis comes, because it must, from budget deficits so large that cuts will have to be made, taxes won’t go up on the wealthy. The ruling class will have shielded their income in loopholes or offshore accounts where it can’t be touched.

Corporations won’t have to pay because they’ll scream “Job killer! Job killer! Job Killer!” to the unemployed as they turn robots into truck drivers, servers, health care workers, taxi drivers, retail clerks, back hoe operators, doctors, lawyers, writers, musicians and maybe policepersons, too.

Through those corporations, the ruling class will own these robots, by the way. Public services will be privatized because The Free Market shall provide! and the rest of us will have to pay even as those services are cut because our nation can’t afford it! after tax cuts the ruling class will have given themselves in a free kleptocracy.

The Boston Tea Party may have been a protest of taxes to the king, but the tea was owned by the East India Company. We hold these truths to be self-evident…