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Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice: for they shall be filled. Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me. The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.

Author Topic: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the USA  (Read 133 times)

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AGelbert

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Luther Martin: Representative for Maryland and dissenting Anti-Federalist. Was shocked at the attempt by the elite to overthrow the existing government in secret in 1787, and swore to tell the people what Washington, Madison and Hamilton were up to. The rich were terrified of the people screwed by Hamilton's bank bailouts and after Shay's Rebellion almost saw Philidelphia captured by angry citizens, they were ready to install a police state.

Martin warned we were ill-advised to install a President King who would plot against the people in concert with the Senate: He said we were crazy to put men into a chamber for six year terms instead of the current one-year terms; men who would no longer be paid by their states and move away from their constituents to a corrupt political city, and who could not be recalled for any reason by their state for misbehavior. He said we were going to lose our freedom under the reintroduction of a hated standing army and that we would suffer under the despotism of a Supreme Court with no citizen jury.

He stormed out and refused to sign the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, and broke the convention's signed oath of secrecy that Mad-Man Madison made everyone sign before being admitted. Martin went straight to the press and warned the people not to ratify this powerful central government with a crazy central bank and insane electoral college scheme designed to strip citizens of any meaningful representation.

Before this abomination was ratified, there were 2,000 representatives for the people: One rep existed for about 300 citizens. The Constitution made it one rep per MINIMUM 30,000 to 60,000 but CONVENIENTLY DID NOT STATE A MAXIMUM POPULATION PER REP!

That apparently wasn't good enough for the oligarchs as our population grew so shortly after 1913 a cork was put on the maximum number of representatives. Please note that ALL new voting groups from women to minorities to Native Americans got the "right" to vote AFTER the cork was put on the maximum number of reps .

NOTE: The 14th Amendment right to vote for African Americans after the Civil War became a cruel farce by 1876. The elitist Supreme Court twisted the 14th Amendment to give Corporations personhood as a cruel and cynical vicious slap to the original intent of the 14th Amendment. Even as blacks where being disenfranchised, the courts were busy giving corporations extra privileges along with the license to break the law with impunity called limited liability.

Now, in most states, there is only one rep for 740,000 citizens, and virtually ZERO chance of you ever talking to one. >:( :P

Source: the Actual Anti-Federalist writings...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Anti-Federalist
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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AGelbert

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Re: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the USA
« Reply #1 on: November 01, 2022, 01:00:12 pm »
May 31, 2015 By: Paul Street

Enough with the Holy Founders' Undemocratic Constitution

The U.S. constitution has remained in place with occasional substantive amendments over more than 220 years.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in a foreword to the book Dollarocracy wrote that, “we cannot govern our own affairs when our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down anyone who disagrees…The money and media election complex, producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is not what the founders intended.” [1]

Sanders was right to suggest that the United States’ revered “founding fathers” would be scandalized by the plutocratic madness of the big money and big media elections racket that passes for popular democracy in the ever more openly oligarchic U.S. today.

Jefferson, Madison, Adams and other U.S. founders (including even the state-capitalist Alexander Hamilton) would be revolted by the crass commercialism and mass-marketed manipulation that lay at the heart of contemporary major-party U.S. politics.

Still, we should not imagine that the founders were champions of anything remotely like popular self-rule. Democracy was the last thing they intended. Drawn from the elite propertied segments of late British colonial North America, the delegates to the U.S. Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “the people who own the country ought to govern it.”

As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic text The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it (1948): “in their minds, liberty was not linked to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.”

In Hofstader’s account, the New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea behind the Founders’ curious notion of what they liked to call popular government. “Let it stand as a principle,” Belknap wrote to an associate, “that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught…that they are unable to govern themselves.

Hofstader’s take on the Founders was born out in historian Jennifer Nedelsky’s comprehensively researched volume Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (1990). For all but one of the U.S. Constitution’s framers (James Wilson), Nedelsky noted, protection of “property” (meaning in essence the people who owned large amounts of it) was “the main object of government. The non-affluent, non-propertied and slightly propertied popular majority was for the framers “a problem to be contained.”

To be perfectly blunt, popular sovereignty was the U.S. founders’ ultimate nightmare.

Anyone who doubts the anti-democratic character of the Founders’ world view should read the Federalist Papers, written by the leading advocates of the U.S. Constitution to garner support for their preferred form of national government during the late 1780s. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” and “incompatible with…the rights of property.” Democratic governments gave rise, Madison felt, to “factious leaders” who could “kindle a flame” amongst the dangerous masses for “improper and wicked projects” like “the printing of paper money,” “abolition of debts,” and “an equal division of property.”

“Extend the [geographic] sphere [of the U.S. republic],” Madison wrote, and it becomes “more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and act in union with each other.” 

That was an explicit statement of anti-democratic/anti-popular intent. So was the following argument given by Madison at the Constitutional Convention on behalf of an upper U.S. legislative assembly (the 🎩 Senate) of elite property holders meant “to protect the minority of the 🎩 opulent against the majority” and to thereby “secure the permanent interests of the 🎩 country against innovation:”

“In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in in this Country, but symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future danger. How is this danger to be guarded against on republican principles? How is the danger in all cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded against? Among other means by the establishment of a body in the government sufficiently respectable for its wisdom and virtue, to aid on such emergences, the preponderance of justice by throwing its 🎩😈 weight into that scale. Such being the objects of the second branch in the proposed government, a considerable duration ought to be given to it.”

Consistent with these openly authoritarian sentiments, the nation’s rich white fathers crafted a form of “popular ;) government” (their deeply deceptive term) that was a monument to popular incapacitation. The U.S. Constitution’s preamble claimed that, “We the people” had formed a new government “in order to…establish Justice… promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” But the framers’ fear and loathing of the “wicked,” “factious” and “violent” masses shaped the structure of America’s not-so democratic experiment at inception.

The Constitution divided the federal government into three parts, with just one-half of one of those three parts (the House of Representatives) elected directly by “the people” – a category that excluded blacks, women, Native Americans, and property-less white males (that is, most people in the early Republic).

It set up elaborate checks and balances to prevent the possibility of the common people influencing policy to any significant degree. It omitted any mechanism to enforce elected wealthy representatives’ direct accountability to “the people” between elections and introduced a system of intermittent, curiously staggered elections (two years for the House, six years for the Senate, and four years for the presidency) precisely to discourage sweeping and focused electoral rebellions by the majority.

[b🎩 It created an 🎩 elite Supreme Court[/b] appointed for life with veto power over legislation or executive actions that might too strongly bear the imprint of the dangerous masses.

It sanctified the epic un-freedom and anti-democracy of black chattel slavery, permitting slave states to count their savagely disenfranchised and incapacitated chattel towards their Congressional apportionment in the House of Representatives. The Constitution’s curious Electoral College provision guaranteed that the popular majority would not directly select the U.S. president —even on the limited basis of one vote for each propertied white male.

It is true that the Constitution’s Article V provided a mechanism technically permitting “We the People” to make critical amendments to the nation’s charter document. But the established process for seriously amending the U.S. Constitution is absurdly difficult, short of revolutionary and civil wars (and of course the U.S. War led to the Constitutional abolition of slavery and the formal introduction of Black voting rights, not actually achieved in durably practice until won by the Civil Rights Movement during the middle 1960s).

As the progressive Constitution critic Daniel Lazare observes, “Moments after establishing the people as the omnipotent makers and breakers of constitutions, [the 1787 U.S. Constitution] announced that they would henceforth be subject to the severest of constraints. Changing so much as a comma in the Constitution would require the approval of two-thirds of each house of Congress plus three-fourths of the states.”

At the end of the 18th century, that means that 4 of the 13 states representing less than 10 percent of total U.S population could forbid any change sought by the rest. Today, 13 of the nation’s 50 states can disallow constitutional changes while containing just more than 4 percent of the nation’s population.

“The people,” Lazare remarks, “did not assert their sovereignty in Philadelphia in 1787. Rather, the 🎩 founders 😈 invoked it. Once they uttered the magic incantation, moreover, they hastened to put the genie back in the bottle by declaring the people all but powerless to alter their own plan of government.” This harsh reality defies both the Constitution’s preamble and the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s determination that governments “derive[e]…their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It negates popular sovereignty, as intended.

As Lazare and other Constitutional scholars have shown, we are still dealing on numerous levels with the purposefully authoritarian consequences of the nation’s practically deified founding charter. Democratic politics are gravely crippled in the U.S. by numerous factors and forces (not the least of which is the development of a modern corporate and financial capitalism of epic national and global reach) that have developed and emerged over the last 22-plus decades, but the democracy-deadening procedural grip of the revered U.S. Constitution continues to play a critical role in that disablement.

U.S. progressives have long advocated constitutional amendments meant to more properly align U.S. politics and policy with public opinion, which stands well to the left of both of the nation’s reigning, business-captive political organizations.

Among the changes proposed through the amendment route: abolition of the anti-majoritarian Electoral College and the introduction of direct national popular election and majority choice either in a first multi-party round or (if no candidate obtains a majority in the first round) a runoff race between the top two presidential candidates; reversal of the Supreme Court’s equation of political money and “free speech”; the full public financing of campaigns (eliminating private money from public elections); undoing the special legal “personhood” protections enjoyed by corporations and reversing the plutocratic Citizens United decision; the introduction of proportional representation (whereby seats are awarded to parties in accord with their share of the vote, opening the door for significant third, and fourth parties) into Congressional elections; the elimination of partisan gerrymandering in the drawing of electoral districts; an economic democracy amendment requiring (among other things) that economic institutions incorporate internal democracy, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability; the mandating of well-funded and genuinely public and non-profit, non-commercial media.

But chances are slight for winning real socially progressive and democratic changes in the nation’s economy, society, and polity through constitutional amendments when alteration in the nation’s political and government rulebook require the support of super-majorities among plutocratically selected politicians who sit in the US Congress and in the nation’s 50 state legislatures largely at the behest of the nation’s unelected dictatorship of wealth. The same corporate and financial largesse that plays such a critical role in tilting the nation’s elections towards the business-friendly right would also come into play in powerful ways in fighting efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to further the causes of social justice, equality, democracy, and environmental sustainability.

Around the planet, “constitutions do not last very long.” As the U.S. academicians Thomas Ginsburg, Zachary Elkins, and James Melton note in their book The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), “The mean lifespan [of national constitutions] across the world since 1789 is 17 years. …the mean lifespan in Latin America and Africa is 12.4 and 10.2 years, respectively…Constitutions in Western Europe and Asia typically endure 32 and 19 years, respectively… [Since] World War I, the average lifespan of a constitution …[is] 12 years.” 

The U.S. is different. Its absurdly venerated founding constitution has remained in place with occasional substantive amendments over more than 220 years. The absurdly long endurance of this 😈 purposefully 🦍 authoritarian, 🎩 wealth- and property-protecting document is nothing to be proud of.

Those who advance progressive amendments to the U.S. Constitution are right to sense the importance of a nation’s rule-making political and governmental charter. Still, given the intentionally remarkable difficulty of amending the US Constitution in progressive ways and the profoundly and purposefully undemocratic nature of the Constitution more broadly, it really makes more sense for Left (and other) U.S. democracy activists to think of constitutional change in terms of a total re-write. Pardon my sacrilege, but it’s long past time to stop standing in awe of the framers’ explicitly authoritarian document and to think about designing and creating a new governmental structure appropriate to social and democratic values in the 21st century.

Serious advocates of popular sovereignty should call for – imagine – a new U.S. Constitutional Convention dedicated to building and empowering popular democracy, not checkmating and containing it[2].

Other countries hold such constituent assemblies (for example, Venezuela in 1999, Bolivia in 2006-7, and Ecuador in 2007-2008) and so should the U.S.  Certainly, it’s absurd to think that a document crafted by wealthy slave-owners, merchants, and other vast property-holders with the explicit purpose of keeping the “wicked” popular majority and its “secret sigh for redistribution” at bay can function in meaningful service to popular self-rule in the 21st (or any other) century.

Paul Street is the author of They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).

1 .Foreword to John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney’s important book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013),

2. So argues the highly respected legal scholar and professor Sanford Levinson. See his books Our Undemocratic Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2006 and Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2012).
https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Enough-with-the-Holy-Founders-Undemocratic-Constitution-20150531-0025.html

More Relevant articles by Paul Street:

The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution

“The Envy of the World”: Still No Functioning Democracy Here

« Last Edit: November 01, 2022, 01:37:05 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Why The US Is Not A Democracy – Second Thought
« Reply #2 on: July 10, 2023, 03:31:13 pm »
THE CLASS STRUGGLE

Friday, July 7, 2023

People often assume that capitalism and democracy are synonyms, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Why is that? And what prevents the United States from being the democracy it claims to be? Why The US Is Not A Democracy – Second Thought

BC
At the time of your "revolution", the consensus amongst the bourgeosie in both the colonies and Europe was that democracy was foolish because the uneducated and unwashed majority would vote for the wealth of the wise and hard working elite to be transferred to them. Thus, not only would the diligent and virtuous be deprived of the fruits of their labours, but it would all be frittered away in an o r g y of drunken debauchery.

Unfortunately, this is still the prevailing view amongst a sizable and powerful section of your ruling class and your constitution seems to be designed to keep them in power.

AGelbert > BC
"..., this is still the prevailing view amongst a sizable and powerful section of your ruling class and your constitution seems to be designed to keep them in power."
BINGO!

July 07, 2023 by MICHAEL HUDSON

SNIPPETS:
The effect of the corporate capture of Congress as well as the Supreme Court as the ultimate oligarchic backstop is to block Congressional politics as a vehicle to update laws, taxes and public regulation in keeping with what voters recognize to be modern needs. The Supreme Court imposes the straitjacket of what America’s  👿 18th-century slaveowners and other  😈🎩 property owners are supposed to have wanted at the time they wrote the Constitution.

James Madison and his fellow Federalists were explicit about their aim. They wanted to block what they feared was the threat of democracy by populists, abolitionists and other reformers threatening to check their property “rights” as if these were natural and inherent. The subsequent 19th century’s flowering of classical political economists explaining the logic for checking rentier oligarchies was far beyond what they wanted. Yet today’s Supreme Court’s point of reference is still, “What would the authors of the U.S. Constitution, slaveowners fearful of democracy, have intended?” That logic is applied anachronistically to limit every democratic modernization from the right of unionized labor to go on strike, to abortion rights for women, cancellation of student debt and the right of government to tax wealth. ... ...

A nation’s constitution should have the flexibility to modernize laws, taxes and government regulatory power to remove barriers to broadly-based progress, living standards and productivity. But these barriers have been 🦍 supported by 😈🎩  oligarchies through the ages.

Read more:  🕯️
Should There be a Supreme Court? Its Role Has Always Been Anti-Democratic
« Last Edit: July 10, 2023, 03:35:00 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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I am convinced by empirical evidence and objective observation that the American Experiment with democracy has failed.

I am convinced by empirical evidence and objective observation the 🐍 worm in that Constitutional 🌟 Apple promising a Golden Age of ✨ Egalitarian Democracy that caused the failure was the NATIONAL EMBRACE of Social Darwinism. 100's of millions of Americans, most who cannot define Social Darwinisim without looking it up on their cell phone, have, for all practical purposes, embraced this socially destructive ideology spawned by Darwin's Capitalist followers.
 
Thomas Jefferson is not my hero, but I agree 100% with this quote of his, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Social Darwinian 🦍 Ideology Pushes:
Quote
"I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality... Nature [has] implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses... The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule." --Thomas Jefferson to T. Law, 1814.

FAST FORWARD TO 1947:

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY TO 2001

GOING OVER THE CLIFF AFTER 9/11:

larrymotuz  > AGelbert
I agree with Jefferson about the boundary for what society broadly terms socially moral behavior. It is indisputable that ethical behavior towards others must always and without exception constitute the boundary for any behavior towards others to be considered moral.

Any social morality not based upon ethical behavior towards others is either amoral or immoral in my eyes. I've said this in the past and repeat it now. Indeed, to me the test of what is or is not moral is whether it helps or hinders our ability to live peacefully with others.

And, yes, I agree that there's more to 9/11 than any official accounts of it have provided.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2023, 10:58:14 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Absolutely any claim that the US is a "democracy"a logical fallacy
« Reply #4 on: November 01, 2023, 08:11:36 pm »
Absolutely any claim that the US is a "democracy" in any way, shape or form, INCLUDING the "lesser evil" BALONEY, is, to put it as charitably as I can, a logical fallacy.

If a person labors under the FANTASY that a nation where 2% of the assets are owned by the bottom half of the population and 73% are owned by the top 10% is NOT an OLIGARCHY, but a "democracy", psychiatric counseling is recommended. IOW, if 10% of the population of a country TOTALLY RUN THE PLACE, the FACT that they VOTE among themselves on what to dictate to their bought and paid for TOOLS in Government is  the "democracy" of an OLIGARCHY. THAT IS NOT A DEMOCRACY, PERIOD!!!


I'm not sure exactly when our Representative Democracy in the USA became totally irrelevant as encroaching post-FDR Capitalist corruption pushed us towards Inverted Totalitarianism (i.e. Fascism with a sophisticated Orwellian Propaganda modus operandi/vivendi), but September 11, 2001 was when Pandora's "Patriot" Act finalized OLIGARCHS 'R' US RULE.






We-the-people are, for all practical purposes, as capable of "voting out" the corrupted tools of the Oligarchs, now DOMINATING every single Branch of the US Oligarchs 'R' US government, as Wiley Coyote has of countering gravity.


No, it isn't OVER. NO, I am not "giving up". Those judgemental AND slanderously pejorative verbal attacks on anyone who recognizes the futility of "voting", and the utility of sending a clear message to the Oligarchs 'R' US that their morally bankrupt Social Darwinist "Paradise" is worthy of Opprobrium and Disdain by People of Good Will, are par for the DUOPOLY PROPAGANDA Course (i.e. "You don't count if you don't vote and will be held responsible for all the baddies that stay or are elected. Move to Russia or Venalzuela, you undemocratic traitor!").

« Last Edit: November 01, 2023, 08:23:05 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The Class Struggle

Wednesday, November 1, 2023


AGelbert
I used to think that voting mattered somewhat, as in "It's better than nothing". I haven't voted since 1980, so many would say I am part of those asleep at the wheel.

Well, I WAS "asleep" when I voted, not when I didn't vote.
For the last 30 years or so I have watched with interest, hope, and then dismay, as every single time the will of the people appears to make itself felt in Congress (or the White House or the Supremely corrupt Court), "something" STOPS IT.

The Press always portays it as a "surprise". Remember Newt Gingrich's "Contract (to trash Welfare) for America?

How about Pelosi and the "VOTE" in Congress AGAINST the Wall Street Bailout in 2008 that the SENATE then flipped (according to that obsolete piece of paper known as the Constitution, which they are NEVER supposed to do!)?

Remember that Senate "Gang of Eight" the Repukians INVENTED out of anger at having a Senate that could stop Shrub from going nuts with Wars here, there and everwhere? A Senator from Vermont stopped caucasing with the Repukians and that drove Cheney up a wall. So, since they couldn't FAKE the US being "democratic", they just went full autocratic Gang of Eight in the Senate, and let the media BS the public about it.

I did not fall for the media Senate sanitizing legerdemain.

Here's some more: EVERY SINGLE TIME, from the time Pelosi first got to be "Speaker" of the House (never mind when the Gingrich, or the other "Speakers" from the Repukian Party that played door stop to anything the people wanted and booster to anything fascist ), EVERY single bill put forward by a Democratic Party Congress person to improve Social Security followed EXACTLY the same Pelosi DEMONCRAT "pattern". That is, Pelosi would say it sounded like a great idea and she loved democracy and the people and poor and so on. She would then ENSURE that the bill was "tabled" (i.e. NOT come to floor for a vote before that Congress ended all its sessions, thus forcing the Bill to be resubmitted next term. OVER AND OVER AGAIN this has gone on with ALL the Bills that actually addressed reducing inequality, corporate criminal behavior and eliminating polluter handouts ("subsidies") were STOPPED by NEVER reaching the FLOOR UNLESS Pelosi and her demoncrat pals KNEW the Bill DID NOT have the votes.

My point with all this quixotic rambling is that there are several levels of oligarch tool placed anti-democratic administrative and legislative STOP GAPS placed there to DEFEND the Social Darwinist Capitalist People Impoverishing Modus Operandi from ANY REFORM that reduces inequality, PERIOD. That IS a CONSPIRACY. That is why the media works overtime to keep people from connecting the dots by calling anyone that DOES see the PATTERN as a "Conspiracy Theorist". 

Are you with me here? Did you get that about the VOTES?
WE-THE-PEOPLE DO NOT VOTE. It is those in Congress that VOTE. And when their VOTE could COUNT, even THEY ARE NOT GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO VOTE!!!

And that is why I am certain that the only way these fascists running this Oligarchy consider that they are in real trouble of being overthrown is if "voter" participation is LESS THAN 15% (we know the wealthy 10% that own 73% of the US will continue to vote) . I will not vote. I recommend all who read this to completely withdraw from registering to vote or voting. We have ZERO chance of changing things for the better by voting for a third party. The Oligarchs must be convinced that they have lost the support of the public. ONLY with a 15% or less voter turnout will they get THAT MESSAGE. If they do not get that message, things will get more autocratic and more in-our-face Police State.

Collectivist Action > AGelbert
Hmmm . . .

My dear friend and cyberspatial correspondent, I FEEL YA!

Even though I principally disagree on the utility of electoral politics.

Of course, I TOTALLY agree that, what you identified as the 'Social Darwinist Capitalist People" will never allow real reform, let alone fundamental transformation.
Many of us on the left maintain that, in particular in the U.S., the nation state was founded (behind the French 'enlightment' veil of liberty) as a capitalist slaveocracy. It could also be described as a settler colony, especially from the perspective of indigenous communities. The African captives, working in small and large slave labor camps throughout the 13 colonies, originally, were living under a virtual dictatorship. When the U.S. constitution was ratified only rich white men could vote.

My point with all of this is that: the PEOPLE were never meant to have power.
And voting won't change that.

I agree.
Old news, to intelligent people.

However, the 'good news', imo, is that there is plenty of historical evidence that, PRINCIPLED, RADICAL participation in electoral politics (where elections haven't been banned,) can often, profoundly, objectively, ADVANCE struggles for social change*. . .if not ignite revolutions.
Strange, huh?

When we review the history of the Civil/Human Rights Movement of the 20th century- which actually had its origins, not in the 1950s, but at the turn of the century - we see a powerful, multicultural, mostly working class-led* NATIONAL movement, IN LARGE PART, organized around electoral campaigns.

Moreover, based on my own experiences in Movements, MOST people who become politically active, start out in electoral politics.*

(The far right(ists) appears to understand this MORE than a lotta leftists.)

I still maintain that: if voting is useless, why do the efforts, by the ruling class, to SUPPRESS the franchise of the POOREST people, continue, unabated. . . ?

*Wherever these efforts fell short, they were mostly sold-out by the 'leadership'.
**I was one of a bunch of exceptions

AGelbert > Collectivist Action
The French 'enlightment' veil of liberty as a capitalist slaveocracy is IMHO, spot on.

The VOTING  suppression is ongoing, but the fact that it exists does not mean TPTB are overly concerned. This is part of their MO. It has inertia. That does not translate to them feeling "threatened" if we all go out and vote. See my other post about all their stop gaps. It is part of their evil GAME.

I just cannot see any difference in basic human nature from WAY BACK before hunting and gathering fell out of fashion in favor of herded game (see: shooting ducks in a barrel) and land with crops that are better eatin' than that wild stuff.

There is no "new man". We are just as tempted to lie, cheat and steal (for starters), as when Pontius Pilate said, something like, "TRUTH?, you're kidding, right?".


All the philosopher Voltaire horses and all of Marx's Men (and women), though they gave it the old college try, could not, can not, and will never alter that SIN IS BAD FOR HUMANS equation. Pretending EVIL "AIN'T THERE" is step one in social destruction. Humanity has collectively decided that God "ain't there", along with an absolute standard of morality.

So, our civilization is going, like every Prophet in the Old Testament predicted woud GO when you tell God that he "ain't there", to Earthly Hell in an 'anything goes if you can get away with it' "civilization" handbasket that only Nietzsche might be surprised at.

No doctorate in philosophy is required to understand that when you 💩 s-h-i-t where you eat, the consequences are cummulatively 😖 defecatory.

Rejection of an absolute standard of morality is the basic problem here, bro.

I find it amazing that people can long for voting in an "honest" politician when those very same people tie themselves into thirty knots defining what "honest" means.

I know you have other views. but I continue to ask you to ponder exactly WHY ANYBODY should NOT accept "donations" from a billionaire looking for a tax break or something? What is to stop the hitherto "honest" politician from thinking about that new Tesla he or she could get or maybe rationalizing the "donation" by doing the "at the end of the day" routine?

We are done without FIRM, FIXED Moral standards. No we don't have them any more. I have them but I'm considered a nut case in this "Brave New World" Huxley would love. And no, I do not see them coming back any time soon.

It is a free-for-all out there. Most people told God to beat feet. They don't need Him no more... That is an old story.

It always ends VERY BADLY for any nation and any people that refuse to worship anyone or anything but themselves.

So much suffering. All because of our PRIDE, COVETOUSNESS, and REBELLION against the Creator. And yet, it is "RELIGION" that supposedly "caused" all this HELL we humans are putting other humans through...

ISAIAH was quite a  Prophet; he knew this was coming and warned that the consequences are DIRE:

« Last Edit: November 01, 2023, 11:28:03 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Re: The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the USA
« Reply #6 on: January 08, 2024, 04:36:04 pm »
Yes, I am posting snippets from the Heather Cox Richardson article in The Anti-Democratic Elite Fix Was IN From The Very Start of the USA topic.

No, it isn't because of Heather Cox Richardson's accurate information about George Washington's soldiers. The American History she recounts is true, though she has always ben careful to leave out how the Senate control of the House of Representatives was a deliberate UNDEMOCRATIC RULE BY OLIGARCHS set up from the start (and still is), never mind the UNDEMOCRATIC CAPITALIST TYRANNY FACT of how Land Owning Founding Fathers defined "we-the-voting-eligible-people".     

No, it isn't about Heather Cox Richardson's accurate description of the January 6, 2021 rioters as Insurrectionists. I post this here because Democratic Party Apologist Heather Cox Richardson, not only flat refuses to see the oligarchic tyranny embedded in the Constitution FROM THE START, but even more BLATANTLY refuses to see how Biden's Corrupt Corporate DUOPOLY pleasing actions (completely ignoring the needs of we-the-people) FUEL the anger of ALL Americans, not just the right wing Pseudo-Christian Trumpers. The US has gone full Weimar. The DemocraticParty is ENABLING TRUMP, the "new and improved version of HITLER", to retake the Presidency and become our ANTI-CHRIST wannabe DICTATOR.

As usual, all graphics are my doing.

Letters from and American

January 7, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson

January 6, 2024

SNIPPETS:

Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral ballots that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three fugitives wanted in connection with that attack.

Siblings Jonathan and Olivia Pollock, whose family owns Rapture Guns and Knives, described on its Facebook page as a christian owned Gun and Knife store” in Lakeland, Florida, and Joseph Hutchinson III, who once worked there, are suspected of some of the worst violence of January 6. The FBI had offered a $30,000 reward for “Jonny” Pollock, while the other two had been arrested but removed their ankle bracelets in March 2023 and 😈 fled.

Family members of the fugitives and of other Lakeland residents arrested for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol insist their relatives are innocent , framed by a government eager to undermine their way of life .  The Pollock family has gone so far as to erect a monument “in honor of the ones who lost their lives on January 6, 2021.” 🤦‍♂️

But it does not honor the law enforcement officers who were killed or injured. It honors the insurrectionists: Ashli Babbitt, shot by a law enforcement officer as she tried to break into the House Chamber through a smashed window (her family today sued the government for $30 million for wrongful death), and three others, one who died of a stroke; one of a heart attack, and one of an amphetamine overdose.

The 🐘🐍🦍 monument in Lakeland, Florida, is a stark contrast to the one President Biden visited yesterday in Pennsylvania. Valley Forge National Park is the site of the six-month winter encampment of the Continental Army in the hard winter of 1777–1778. After the British army captured the city of Philadelphia in September 1777, General George Washington settled 12,000 people of his army about 18 miles to the northwest.

There the army almost fell apart. Supply chains were broken as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant the Continental Congress did not appropriate enough money for food and clothing. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny.

Even if they didn’t quit, they weren’t very well organized for an army charged with resisting one of the greatest military forces on the globe. The different units had been trained with different field manuals, making it hard to coordinate movements, and a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war. 

By February 1778, though, things were falling into place. A delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and understood that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, and they set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. When the soldiers broke camp in June, they marched out ready to take on the British at the Battle of Monmouth, where their new training paid off as they held their own against the British soldiers.

The January 6 insurrectionists were fond of claiming they were echoing these American revolutionaries who created the new nation in the 1770s. The right-wing Proud Boys’ strategic plan for taking over buildings in the Capitol complex on January 6 was titled: “1776 Returns,” and even more famously, newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6, she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

Trump has repeatedly called those January 6 insurrectionists “patriots.” ... ...

Commemorating them as heroes is the 21st century’s version of erecting Confederate statues.

The January 6th insurrectionists were nothing like the community at Valley Forge, made up of people who had offered up their lives to support a government pledged, however imperfectly in that era, to expanding that right. When faced with hunger, disease, and discord, that community—which was made up not just of a remarkably diverse set of soldiers from all 13 colonies, including Black and Indigenous men, but also of their families and the workers, enslaved and free, who came with them—worked together to build a force that could establish a nation based in the idea of freedom. 

The people at the Capitol on January 6 who followed in the footsteps of those who were living in the Valley Forge encampment 246 years ago were not the rioters. They were the people who defended our right to live under a government in which we have a say: those like the staffers who delayed their evacuation of the Capitol to save the endangered electoral ballots, and like U.S. Capitol Police officers Eugene Goodman, Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, and Aquilino Gonell and Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, along with the more than 140 officers injured that day.

Fanone 👍, whom rioters beat and tasered, giving him a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, yesterday told Emily Ngo, Jeff Coltin, and Nick Reisman of Politico: “I think it’s important that every institution in this country, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that
a.) Donald Trump does not succeed and
b.) the MAGA movement is extinguished.”

Unlike the violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, the experience of the people at Valley Forge is etched deep into our national identity as a symbol of the sacrifice and struggle Americans have made to preserve and renew democracy. It is so central to who we are that we have commemorated it in myths and monuments and have projected into the future that its meaning will always remain at the heart of America. According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Federation Excelsior-class starship USS Valley Forge will still be fighting in the 24th century… against the Dominion empire.

Full article:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-6-2024

For the Graphics Challenged, the reality based interview below explains the present MIC/AIPAC/WALL STREET CORRUPTED POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION IN THE US OLIGARCHY:

Useless and Meaningless Gesture 


Dialogue works 76.7K subscribers 4.2K 62,075 views  Jan 7, 2024  Interviews

Larry C. Johnson is a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He is the founder and managing partner of BERG Associates, which was established in 1998. Larry provided training to the US Military’s Special Operations community for 24 years. He has been vilified by the right and the left, which means he must be doing something right. You can also follow him on telegram (t.me/sonar_21 (https://t.me/sonar_21) and https://sonar21.com.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2024, 06:25:22 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The PRO-SLAVERY Elite PATHOLOGY Was IN From The Very Start of the USA
« Reply #7 on: February 14, 2024, 02:26:52 pm »

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Pathology of America: Dehumanization, Greed, and the Decline of Empire


AGelbert COMMENT:
It's the Social Darwinism!

The ELEPHANT in the morally bankrupt American Empire Dystopia Room is SOCIAL DARWINISM. Social Darwinists believe that the dictum “survival of the fittest” (a term coined not by Charles Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer) means that only the "fittest" should survive.

Darwin's book published later ("Descent of Man") made it clear that Darwin completely supported the morally bankrupt views of Spencer. Enthusiastic converts to Social Darwinism have, to this day, used the language of evolution to frame an understanding of the growing gulf between the rich and the poor, as well as the many differences between cultures all over the world.

The explanation they arrived at, and continue to use to justify biosphere trashing profit over people and planet, regardless of any alligator tear filled mendacious claims to the contrary, is that businessmen and others who are economically and socially successful are so because they are biologically and socially “naturally” the fittest.

Conversely, they reason that the poor are “naturally” weak and unfit and it would be an error to allow the weak of the species to continue to breed. The money lenders have played a key role in funding this deceit propagated in high schools and universities, where it is passed off as "the Capitalist fiduciary duty of corporations to make a profit above ANY OTHER CONSIDERATION, be it the health and wellbeing of employees or the environment".

It is, and always was, legerdemain formulated by the monied elite to dress up selfish, abusive, exploitative and cruel behavior towards "less important" humans and/or animals experimented upon in research labs, as "scientifically justified".

The wealthy, privileged whites served by the dominant political class are a small minority of the population. That’s the ongoing legacy of conquest, colonialism and proletarianization. Seen in this light, the unnecessary human suffering and death during the current environmental and social catastrophe — whose full effects are only now beginning to be felt — connect every community in the WORLD where short-term economic and political expediency have combined with racist, classist and ableist dehumanization to render mass populations disposable before, during, and after natural and human-induced disasters.

As humans are subject to the brutal impacts of inevitable climate change, we face a clear choice: strong government intervention to save our lives, or a “survival of the fittest” dystopia that TPTB relentlessly advocate.

IT'S THE SOCIAL DARWINISM, STUPID! The Social Darwinist Oligarchs hate you. They want you to be slaves on their plantation. They want you to have no rights, no freedom, and no future. TPTB are there to turn your energy state into fear and anger and sorrow.

Whether he realized it or not at the time, when Sinclair Lewis wrote this in 1935, he was describing the Social Darwinist worldview: “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.” -- Sinclair Lewis

The celebrated social theorist and geographer David Harvey explains that neoliberal ideology serves the following principle: "There shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective: Those possessed of money shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion, not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative capacities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable."

If that isn't Social Darwinism, I don't know what is.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2024, 02:43:16 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12