ON REVOLUTION- Peaceful or Violent

Anyone who reads my posts with any regularity and/or anyone that knows me at all, knows that I have been speaking out against various administrations, their policies and the disintegration of the America created by our founding fathers for years now. But no matter how many bad things I noticed and discussed, no matter how many signs and symptoms I observed that we were losing our freedoms and that the ruling classes were gaining unprecedented power and wealth, I could not have believed even six years ago that things would get as bad as they have. The fundamental flaw in my logic was believing that the wealthy and powerful loved this country as I do, valued freedom and democracy as I do, and felt the same allegiance to our founding fathers to maintain what they fought, suffered and died to give to us as I do.


Those of us who have paid attention in the past thirty years have watched as everything that we were taught to value and love, all the precepts and fundamental ideas that this country was built upon, have slowly been eroded and replaced with the kind of system from which our forefathers fled. Opportunity became a thing for the wealthy-- blue collar workers were devalued; manufacturing jobs that paid a living wage disappeared and were replaced with service jobs that were largely minimum wage; public education was defunded and college tuition sky-rocketed. Meanwhile, unions were demonized and busted, attorneys were demonized and civil liberties degraded, the “wall” separating church and state was chipped away, and corporate interests seeped into every corner of our government like toxic waste. Our society began conflating capitalism with democracy, elevating greed over service, equating dissent with treason, and valuing blind nationalism over liberty and freedom. We as a people have been divided by race, religion, social status, financial status and political philosophy. It was under the Bush II Regime that my eyes were fully opened, but this has been coming for a long time.







Many who have been watching this have come to the conclusion that only violent revolution will turn things around. They have given up on the system; they have given up on all leaders. They sit on the sidelines and stew in cynicism. They have good reason to feel the way they do. Many of them have been very aware for many years that America as we know it is slipping away. And they have been active in attempting to change things, to no avail.





Though I understand where they are coming from, I am not there yet. I will not reject the possibility that they might be right, but I am not ready to accept that we cannot change our system using non-violent means. I will continue to advocate for change from within until I see proof that there is no hope.

I am advocating that EVERYONE get involved. Every time you hear a concerned citizen voicing the idea that somehow it is somebody else’s job to turn things around, you should be telling them that nobody else is going to rescue this country, it is up to them. If people want to turn things around, YES THEY CAN, if they will only: Get Informed!, Get Involved!, and Get Active! You are the change that you have been waiting for; you are the only change that you can believe in.



We all know that the media is pure propaganda. From Katie Couric to all of Fox News; you can’t trust them, you can’t believe them and, if you must watch or listen to them, you must do so with extreme prejudice. However, there is an occasional reason to hope and Glenn Greenwald writes about one:

This Fox News interview with Virg Bernero — the Mayor of highly unionized Lansing, Michigan and himself the son of a retired GM worker — is, for several reasons, really worth watching (h/t Brainwrap). The glaring discrepancy he notes — between (a) the consensus of our political class that workers must endlessly give up wage, health and other benefits even as (b) we shovel trillions of dollars in government subsidies to Wall Street for ongoing massive executive bonuses and the like for the very people who caused the collapse — is one that (whether you agree or disagree with it) is rarely heard in our mainstream debate with such clarity and passion.

VIRG

It gives me hope to see that people who are part of government, even local, are thinking this way. They are seeing the same things we are seeing and instead of pulling away, they are getting inside the system. They believe that they can be the change that they are seeking. Others are marching, joining groups, planning protests, speaking out, blogging and getting organized. This is the way that the people of this country have been able to bring about change in the past. I can’t say for certain that it will be successful in these days and times. But I still have hope.

This is not to say that I would not support violent revolution if it comes to that. Our Constitution lays upon us the duty to overthrow authoritarian rule. But it is a tool of last resort and I grow increasingly suspicious of those that are vigorously advocating that tool.

REAL CHANGE MUST COME FROM WITHIN.

Sphere: Related Content

Dangerous Times

The citizens of this democracy have become complacent and taken their democracy for granted. The natural course of things is degrading what was once the beacon of hope for all the world. This nation now more resembles the closed society of Communist USSR that we were taught to fear as children than it does the free and open society of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. BUT CHANGE IS COMING.

There is an excellent article on OpEdNews that clearly outlines the encroaching danger of the loss of civil liberties in this country. It is a must-read for anyone that questions how bad things have actually become. It may be depressing news, but there is a silver lining.

Change can happen in a good way, if everyone stands together. These are dangerous times, but in dangerous times it is our duty to stand up to tyranny. We can do this; our forefathers risked no more or less than we will and we stand to gain back all that they won. And we owe it to future generations to pass on what was gained so many years ago. If we have allowed it to slip away, it is our responsibility to regain it.

Don't believe that this election will fix anything without the vigilance, sheer force of will and determination by the people to win back all that has been lost. It is OUR government and we have to fight for it. But WE CAN DO IT. And NOW IS THE TIME.

Sphere: Related Content

COMPARING HEALTHCARE "CHANGE"

There are a lot of politicians talking about change lately. However, there ARE stark differences between the changes that each party is offering in the upcoming election.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning radical changes for the nation’s health insurance system. An independent study to be released on Tuesday by scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain-Palin plan.

The McCain-Palin health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on. Your employer will estimate the value of the benefits that you currently receive and this will be reported as income on each paycheck and you will have payroll taxes withheld.

Senator McCain says that he will offset this missing income by offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit of $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family. (Of course, for those who are barely scraping by already, no tax credit will make up for missing money from a paycheck. And for some, the $2500 will not compensate for the value of the health insurance they will be taxed on.)

The philosophy behind the McCain-Palin plan is that, if families opt out of employer-paid health coverage and enter into the health insurance marketplace, free market forces will fix the problems we are currently facing in healthcare. This free market philosophy underscores all republican platforms and the economic policies that have been in place for the past eight to ten years have all been based on it. Unfortunately, we are seeing (and feeling) the ill-effects of the free-market philosophy in the current mortgage/banking/financial markets crisis.

Some foreseeable results of this plan are that younger, healthier workers will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage; some older, wealthier workers will opt out for financial reasons; leaving employers with a pool of older, (and poorer) less-healthy workers to cover. Their coverage will then be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all. This will also force those who can least afford it to pay more or drop their coverage completely, worsening the crisis of the uninsured.

These changes will leave millions more Americans on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace, because Senator McCain states that “the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.” Meanwhile the plan also undermines state regulation of the insurance industry because McCain says he is committed to ridding the market of these “needless and costly” insurance regulations.

The McCain-Palin campaign says that by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country, they are offering patients more “choices.” However, current requirements in your state that force insurers to cover vaccinations, annual physicals, regular testing, breast examinations, or prostate examinations would essentially be meaningless. Their offer of "choice" effectively destroys local control and supervision of insurance company policies by state insurance commissioners without replacing it with any kind of control or supervision, leaving us to trust the insurance companies to do the right thing.

The findings of the study being released on Tuesday (9-17-08) are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs. I urge you to read this and decide for yourself.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/index.dtl

Alternatively, the Obama-Biden plan moves in a different direction. Their plan aims to modernize and increase the efficiency of our current system of employer- and government-provided health care by use of technological advances that will identify the best providers, treatments and patient management strategies.

The Obama-Biden plan retains the current income-tax exclusion on benefits for those currently receiving employer-paid benefits and offers households (including those still unable to afford private coverage) a refundable tax credit.

Employers not offering coverage or making ‘meaningful’ contribution to the cost of insurance for their employees would be required to pay a 4 percent payroll tax to help subsidize coverage for low- and moderate-income families. However, the plan would also give small firms the option of joining large insurance pools, decreasing the cost for them to provide coverage. Larger patient pools spread risk over a larger group, keeping premiums can be kept down and controlling cost volatility.

The Obama-Biden plan would offer individuals the option to buy in to the federal government's benefits system, ensuring that all individuals have access to an affordable, portable alternative at a price they can afford. SCHIP and Medicaid would be expanded and insurance coverage would be mandated for children.

Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and doctors will be based on patient outcomes (lower cholesterol readings, made and kept follow-up appointments) in order to focus the entire payment system around better health, not just more care. Their plan will also guarantee patient access to preventive services, improving overall health and in turn saving money.

The reforms included in the Obama-Biden plan are intended to lower premiums by $2,500 for the typical family, allowing millions previously priced out of the market to afford insurance, motivate employers to provide affordable coverage, extend coverage to the working poor, alleviate the current cost burden on employers, and eliminate the crisis of uninsured and underinsured patients in the current system.

Sphere: Related Content

Lies, Lies and More Lies Courtesy the McAin't Campaign

Todays News: More lies from the McCain campaign.

What a shocker.

Yesterday I read an article about how lying in political campaigns is some kind of time-honored tradition and that Americans actually admire politicians who lie. If that is true, we deserve exactly what we have gotten from the republicans for the last ten years. Since the republicans came up with the contract on America scam, they have played the same game in every single congressional and presidential campaign;

· republicans run on supposed moral superiority, but their behavior has often been immoral.
· republicans run against crime and support robust punishment of criminals, but their actions have been increasingly criminal and they have either gone unpunished or received slaps on the wrist.
· republicans run on their alleged moral character, but the number of Republicans that actually possess any character has become fewer and fewer.
· republicans ran on bringing “faith” into government, and then almost immediately broke faith with the Christian conservatives that worked so hard to put them there.
· republicans run on honesty and integrity…PLEASE!

It stretches the bounds of credulity that anyone would sell themselves as a maverick and a reformer after 25 years of going along with the status quo. If McCain is America’s Knight in Shining Armor, where the hell has he been while the country has been run into the ground? Voting with the ones who were driving us there! You might even say he was a co-pilot.

On what issues does he differ from the current regime? Zero, zilch, nada, bupkiss. He KNOWS what it means to be tortured and he wouldn’t even stand up to his own party about that, but he’ll use his experiences to garner sympathy. How disgusting.

How much more of this self-righteous hypocrisy, self-serving mendacity and delusional dishonesty are the American people going to stand for?

The McCain campaign lies so much, I have started calling him John McAin’t. (He McAin’t no maverick, he McAin’t no reformer and he McAin’t fit to be President).
The arguments that republicans make for their candidates would not even fly with a ten-year-old.

Today on The View, he actually made the case that Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President because of Alaska’s proximity to Russia. And in an interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin made the same argument, saying “"They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." Great news for those of you who have ever seen a foreign country; you now have the foreign policy qualifications to be Vice President!

She has also cited a less-than-one-year stint as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as “expertise” that would help her to bring about energy independence. And my one-year stint as Fundraising Chairman of the PTA makes me qualified to run a bank. (Makes just about as much sense).

Sarah Palin has been marketed by the campaign as a maverick and a straight-shooter. They say she reformed Alaskan government.

After spending weeks in seclusion from the press and media and repeating the same tired lies at campaign stop after campaign stop, the straight-shooter sure was SQUIRMING during her first press interview on ABC. It looked more like a game of dodgeball! After repeatedly attempting not to answer questions by repeating the same drivel she had been spouting at campaign stops, she finally had to answer some real questions and her answers were disturbingly enlightening.

Her foreign policy might be called “Leave No War Behind.”

· If Israel felt threatened, as Vice President, she would support them in a nuclear attack on Iran.
· As Vice President, she would welcome Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and be prepared to defend them in future “disagreements” with Russia.
· She is four-square behind McAin’t in leaving troops in Iraq (in the past he has stated that they may stay there for as much as one-hundred years).

It sounds like she thinks that we have an unending supply of troops. She is seemingly unconcerned about sending her “own troop” into endless war. Perhaps she is planning to repopulate the military with more of her “own troop(s).”

Meanwhile, the McAin’t campaign has surrounded her with veteran Bushies and special interest lobbyists. For the full run-down, check out “Palin Team Stocked with Bush Veterans.” On Yahoo.com:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/13323;_ylt=AtUbbBhgiu6p2n8m7uYex9Jh24cA

It looks as though McAin’t a maverick and Sarah Squirmin are planning to reform our government by adding more lobbyists and corporate insiders.

Hey, they said, “change,” but they never really explained what that change would be!

Sphere: Related Content

Not Mavericks-That's For Sure

Main Entry: mav·er·ick
Function: noun
Etymology: Samuel A. Maverick died 1870 American pioneer who did not brand his calves
Date: 1867
2: an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/maverick

The McCain Campaign has adopted the label of “Maverick” for themselves. They put out a commercial labeling themselves as such and repeated the label over and over again at the Republican National Convention. The crowd at the convention ate it up, but the label left many of us scratching our heads.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word “maverick” as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party.” How can you be a maverick when you are not only going along with your political party, but you have changed your stance on just about every issue so that it matches a faction of your party that you used to disdain? The answer is you can’t-unless you are misrepresenting yourself. And this is exactly what the campaign is doing.

The campaign was running on “Experience” as McCain’s advantage over Obama or Hillary, until they realized just how motivated the people of this country are to get things back to the way they were before the Republican party took over and destroyed the economy, our standing in the world, our military and our hope for the future. So, changing with the political winds, as McCain has a record of doing, the campaign adopted the successful message that Obama has run on and supported long before he even announced his candidacy. Suddenly, they were the “Change” party.
How can you be the “change” party when it’s your party that has screwed things up so badly? You can pretend you are an outsider and describe yourself as a maverick. And repeat it over and over again and hope that people believe it. So, that’s what they are doing. Hence the commercial and hence the fact that in every clip of McCain and Palin you will see on the nightly news they will just be repeating the same lies over and over again.

“Mavericks” No

“He fights pork barrel spending” Not until recently (In six of his 25 years in Congress, McCain voted for spending bills that included 12,763 pork-barrel earmarks worth more than $144.4 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service)

“Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere” Lie. (She ran for Governor in support of it and supported it until Congress decided not to fund it. Then she gave up on it but kept the funds)

“John McCain reformed Washington” Untrue. (If Washington is so reformed why is he running on “Change”, if he is so against lobbyists, why are there so many lobbyists running his campaign?)

“Palin took on Big Oil” Lie. (Records show that she has collected significant amounts of money in campaign contributions from oil company executives and their family members for years)

This is a campaign trick that has been successfully used in the past AGAINST McCain by Bush. Bush smeared McCain with lies and whisper campaigns. Now McCain is using the same tactics to win—just as he accuses Barack Obama of being the one who will say and do anything to win. The Washington Post has described this strategy as “Untruth Can Become Fact.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903727.html

And this does not address the accusations that McCain has leveled at Obama in some of his other television ads where he tries to scare people into believing that Obama will raise their taxes and bring about "years of deficits," "no balanced budgets" and "billions in new government spending." Factcheck.org calls this “Another Stitch in a Bad Pattern” and provides facts to dispute every single one of these claims.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/a_new_stitch_in_a_bad_pattern.html

As one viewer of that commercial observed “Everything they say about Obama is exactly what the Republicans have done for the past eight years. Obama is trying to fix all that. How can they get away with telling these outright lies?”

The answer is that they can only get away with it if we let them. They can only paint themselves as Mavericks if we believe it and they can only smear Obama with lies if we buy into the strategy.

So, if McCain/Palin aren’t Mavericks, what are they? How do we define them if we know that they aren’t the political outsiders, fighting to change the system as their phony maverick status was employed to make you believe?

What do you call people who lie and twist the facts? What do you call people who use smear tactics to defeat their opponents because they can’t win on the issues? What do you call people who accuse their opponents of caring more about their own ambitions than about the nation when they changed themselves over completely and misrepresented their records in order to win the nomination of their party and have repeatedly shown that there is no low they will not stoop to in order to win?

What do you call a party that constantly wears their Christianity on their sleeves but whose policies promote war, poverty, sickness, despair and hopelessness?

What do you call a party that constantly brings up the troops but refuses to fund benefits for returning veterans, denies their families benefits and steadfastly refuses to end the occupation of Iraq and bring those troops home for a well-deserved rest?

What do you call a party that constantly claims to be fiscally conservative and then every time they get into office they grow government, spending huge amounts of money and leave the country’s budget in historically huge deficits?

Hypocrites. Phonies. Liars.

But you won’t see those labels on your television screen anytime soon.

Sphere: Related Content