Jack Rabbit
Jack Rabbit's JournalMr. Hedges says what needs to be said
The system is broken. The patient is in critical condition, in a coma, and beyond the point where she can heal herself.
The only rational path is to take to the streets and push back against the oligarchs who are the dictators of America. Never mind their political stooges, who putatively represent us, but only fool would think more than a handful of elected representatives really do.
Go ahead and vote for Hilary Clinton if she is the Democratic Party's nominee. You can say she is better than any Republican, but if that left-handed compliment is the best that can be said of her, then we should expect nothing more than a continuation of the corporate state that must be killed and buried with a stake through its heart. Mrs. Clinton really is better than a generic Republican: she supports civil rights for gays and other minorities, but not civil liberties, such as the right not to spied on by the NSA; she believes that climate change is a real crisis, but she won't oppose fracking; she bemoans income inequality, but she won't oppose "free" trade deals that enhance corporate tyranny and exacerbate the problems of social inequality and environmental degradation. She'll talk of human rights, but will she go so far as to say that all human beings are made of flesh and blood? I may vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016, but, as things stand, I cannot in good conscience do any more than that.
Civil disobedience and defiance of corporate "authority" is the order of the day. Bankrupting the oligarchy is the goal. If the oligarchs can be separated from the wealth that they wield as a weapon against us, then we will have done the preliminary work necessary to creating the other world that is possible.
K/R for Chris Hedges.
To all the third way purgies
Response to wyldwolf.
It makes precious little difference whether the President who deals with Congress to sell out American sovereignty to an unelected body of corporate lawyers with the power to fine elected governments for regulating businesses under the TPP or TTIP, to start another Middle Eastern war (or perhaps more than one) in order to keep the oil corporations on life support, to enact "entitlement reform" that will result in retirees starving in the streets, who fails to prosecute too big for their breeches Wall Street bankers for fraud and enact badly need financial reform and re-regulation or who fails to act on climate change is a Republican like Ted Cruz or a third-way Democrat like she who shall not be named for the fear of offending any one.
It isn't in the spirit of Henry Wallace in which this missive is written. Henry Wallace still had a functioning political system in which he could operate. That no longer seems to be the case.
This is rather a warning: What do we do when the political system becomes so dysfunctional that the only viable candidates being offered in what only vaguely resembles a free and fair election are those who conspire with the wolves to sell out us sheep? If the political system is so corrupt and rigged that it will not protect citizens from criminals like the Koch brothers or Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd, then it becomes irrelevant and the fallacy that needs to be identified is a red herring, also called the irrelevant thesis.
That logical fallacy is your lesson for today.
It won't matter who is president passing pioneering civil liberties for homosexuals if the oligarchs starve us to death, kill our children in wars that benefits only them, make our water flammable or put our homes literally underwater as sea level rise and that same president doesn't do anything to stop them.
The power to fix the political system and make it work for the many may already be beyond the power of the ballot box. Direct action in the streets may be required.
The Republicans did not win last Tuesday's election. They were boosted to power a low voter turnout, voter suppression and the unfair advantage of corporate money drowning out popular sentiment. To address the first point, I recall that Lenin, who was at least admirable in the respect that he was a hard nosed realist (except when he was writing the fanciful nonsense called State and Revolution), was once asked who voted for the Bolsheviks to take power. "The Soldiers did," he replied. "They voted with their feet when they deserted."
So who voted for direct action against the oligarchs? The people did. They voted with their asses by sitting on them on election day. They did not participate in an election that offered nothing relevant except some ballot initiatives about raising the minimum wage, which they passed while tea baggers took over the US Senate.
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