American Business: Giving you less for more

 We learned years ago we were shifting from a make things economy to a do it yourself economy.  

The digital age has quickly brought us to this dark place.  Remember the automat restaurants?  They tanked.  Remember the hardware store that did everything including putting together and delivering?  They spawned the Angi's of the world because we didn't /or in my case, couldn't do it ourselves.   Remember when you could take your radio or t.v. to a repair shop?  Or call a company to solve a problem with their product?  Or a department store where a clerk asked you  "can I help you"?  Or when you could call a company and get a live person on the phone for help with their product?  Those days are gone.  You are on your own.  

American business has abandoned us, its customers for what?  Fewer employees and more profit and a screw you attitude. And what do we get?  Long, highly legalized warranty statements that in the end say, screw you, you are on you own.  Many companies are no longer taking checks......you have to figure out often complex, un-user friendly digital/internet payment methods.  And now, we have the added worrying about our accounts/credit cards being hacked or identities being stolen and often with no recovery recourse.  

America has taken the concept of rugged individualism to a frightening new level and is abandoning the concept of cooperation/community required to maintain a democracy.  Who is leading that movement?  American industry/corporatization for the sake of unfettered free market capitalism.  With less and less accountability for fraud and theft.  And who has led us to that place?  Mostly Republicans under Ronald Reagan and those who governed after him.  

I for one DISSENT.  I enjoy our freedom but freedom without cooperation is destroying our hard fought for democracy as is also making life more difficult except for the very wealthy, who don't give a shit about the rest of us.  Rise Up America.  Most of us won't and don't because democracy takes more work than just voting, which many of us also do not do. These unengaged want a free ride and they are getting one to hell on earth.

REPUBLICANS HAVE MORPHED INTO A FASCIST PARTY.

 Some combination of greed and racism has allowed  the formerly formidable Republican Party to turn to fascism as its answer to its loss of power, appeal  and influence.  We liberals and Democrats need a productive two party system.

The party that once promoted the idea of freedom of the individual over the idea of freedom of the person within the collective is now gone.  They had some good ideas and influence on good governance, especially as related to keeping restraints on government to oppress through excessive control and taxation.  

Republicanism was also adamantly anti-communism.  Communist has two major characteristics-l. Governing is autocratic/totalitarian.  2. It is anti-capitalistic in its economic policy. It is hugely hypocritical of them that now they embrace autocracy and want to ally with autocratic nations while retaining their support for unrestrained free market capitalism.  

They also claimed to be the party of law and order.  Now they are the party of order as applied by an authoritarian ruler, but law?   Not so much.  They are now trying to demolish our justice system by corrupting the Supreme Court and attacking sitting judges, juries and prosecutors and eroding public confidence in our judicial system and nominating a convicted criminal as their choice to lead our country.

Their conservative idea of celebrating individualism and doing your own thing lawfully is now replaced with an ideology that promotes  heterosexual male dominance, Christian religion, superiority of Anglo-European ethnicity and nationalism over collective/cooperative laws/norms to better both society and the lives of individuals of all kinds of identities.  This is fascism with authoritarian governance as opposed to participatory democracy.

This is our choice in November 2024.  Pure and simple.  And they are deadly serious. 

AMERICA NEEDS TO FIGURE OUT MEMORIAL DAY

America sends its best and brightest off to kill  foreign authoritarians trying to destroy democracy yet here we are, considering electing our own predatory authoritarian MAGA movement dedicated to killing our democracy.  

Ok, which is it  you want congressional members, Supremes and the largely uninformed, unengaged or unhappy citizens who support these insurrectionists?

We are approaching your moment of truth in November, 2024.  Which is it?  The freedom to go to the beach, enjoy backyard cookouts and  holiday parades memorializing those who died so you could have this, or a country depriving women of their rights, rounding up immigrants wanting what we have into camps, forcing your twisted interpretation of religion on those of us not wanting it and depriving your neighbors of their voting rights who mourn their military family who gave it all up for you?  

You decide. 

See America In Zone of Interest Movie

 You simply must see the Academy Award film Zone of Interest.  It is a story about a German family living their best lives on the other side of a fence from Auschwitz.  Those of you who do not know what Auschwitz is and represents because you were not given history or civics classes in school .....it was a concentration camp in Poland run by fascist Nazi's where Jews were encamped and slaughtered in one of the most inhumane acts in history in the 1940's.  Many of your grandfathers served in our military to destroy the Nazi system, now reemerging in your own country. 

The story centers on the German Hoss family whose patriarch was the commandant of the slaughter camp.  You saw the Hoss family playing in the river, at their pool, in their beautiful garden and sleeping soundly in their lovely bedrooms.  Jonathan Glazer directed the film based on a novel documenting the lives of  the Hoss family, just mostly ordinary people. 

Julie and I watched this film on 4/6/2024.  It had so much symbolism, visual, auditory and storywise I had to go to Colossus movie club for a more complete understanding of it.  I highly recommend you do this too.

Essentially, it is a film about the human condition and how seemingly nice, ordinary people can live on the other side of a wall shielding horrific human acts of brutality and evil while living seemingly normal, very ordinary lives.  

Our Auschwitz acts in America are like the acclaimed screening of Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, ignoring the horrors of slavery.  Or in the current era, Texas Governor Abbott stringing barbed wire across the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering our country.  Or, the shipping of migrants to sanctuary cities without notice to "own the liberals." Or, the treatment of those who are transgender and their families.  Or the denial of women their right to healthcare and family planning.  Or former presidents promising retribution against those who have attempted to restrain his criminality.  Or white resentment against those they believe are in some way denying them their superiority by just existing and trying to fulfill their human needs and the needs of their families.

Those of us who are part of the resistance against the fascism emerging again are given to understand by this movie that we all are capable of inhumanity and need this film as a reminder that the resistance is totally required of us.  

Those living in the oblivion of the Hoss family may never get it.  Rudolf Hoss finally got it as he faced his execution when he was tried and convicted of .....yes, being very human.  He lamented his actions at the end, a bit late after slaughtering thousands of Jews. 

TRUMP IS A PARASITE LIKENED TO A COCKROACH

 

Republicans, you have gifted your country with a parasite who is asking for MORE TIME to pay the judgement for his fraud against the people of his state. 

 He has gone to people with little money and fewer brains on Go Fund Me for help to pay is legal bills.  He has leeched on your Party for money for those fees intended to fund campaigns for your fellow fascists. 

He has grifted his way to recover lost wealth through lousy business management to cheat his vendors and people to pay taxes he doesn't pay.  

He has sexually abused women for his own parasitic sexual gratification and display of non-existent power.

He caused an armed rebellion by really stupid people he convinced others stole an election from them and let them pay the price of legal consequence for killing and maiming police officers, defiling their own Capital building with their own excrement  while he sat watching these fools on TV munching burgers to satisfy his own hunger for crap food.

Now he wants you to make him President again in order to grift his way to a self-pardon from the crimes he parasitically covets to escape accountability for his predatory crimes.  He is a cockroach and so are you for empowering him.

 

AMERICANS HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE HOW THEY LIVE

 

 

Endowed by both nature and the Constitution created by their fellow Americans, Americans have the right to decide what kind of life we wish to live.  This unique social contract is the envy of much of the world without such rights in the societies in which they live.  It is unique also to the history of humans.   Let me enumerate those rights we all enjoy:

The right to govern ourselves:  Our Constitution and nature both grant us the right to decide how we govern ourselves and who governs us.  Not some privileged, grievance ridden despot who decides for us.  That has been tried throughout history and those governments and despots failed because their interests were served but not the interests of those they governed.  We also have the right to freely and peacefully dissent from the policies and leadership of our elected government. This right includes electing our leaders, providing a secure vote to do so and the ability to amend the laws protecting our rights and our Constitution and changing that leadership through our vote.

The right to decide whom we choose to love and what kind of family we wish to create together.  That right has recently been removed from us through  the interference of a despotic Supreme Court  giving government the power to decide if, when  and how we wish to create our family.   We can take that right back with laws we create and amend and our vote.

The right to a fair unabusive economic system through which we support our families.   We decide through our vote what is a fair price for our food, housing and transportation and how fairly we are paid compared to our fellow working citizens.  And the right to fairly share in the tax contributions we make with our fellow citizens in order to receive the public services necessary to have a good life.  This includes services to help elderly, disabled, unemployed and retired older persons with whom we share this country.

The right to justice and equality in a free society.   Our Constitution guarantees a right to seek fair treatment from our peers when we are accused to violating the laws of our country.  This is called due process.  And we are guaranteed the right to be protected from the violation of our rights  and physical security by fellow citizens and their organizations which are required to treat us all as equal human beings.  This includes the right to freely socialize in public through our public and private spaces, including our educational institutions without fear of physical harm from anti-social citizens and to have protection from such harm and remove those persons from society until they reform their behavior.

The right to education and  health.   These are rights all humans should enjoy from a society to which they contribute because education and health are necessities to a just and well-functioning social order.   Uneducated and poorly educated citizens are not able to make adequate contributions to society.  Citizens with health problems that can be mitigated by science and good care are in a better position to fully contribute to that society.

The right to not be a white Christian.  Many of us citizens and many more in the future are non-white.  And many of us are neither Christian nor religious.  We have a right to be that way because that is how we are born into life  without a choice.  Our ethnicity makes us no less equal in our human rights and as history and science has proven, no less capable as citizens that white persons.   Some of us decided we were created by a deity and chose to pay homage to them.  Some of us decided otherwise and choose not to pay homage to a deity.  That makes us no less human or a good, productive citizen.  This social diversity makes all our lives much more interesting.

The right to an unspoiled environment.  We need clean air, water, and a climate that we can exist in.  We have the tools and knowledge about how to provide these to a livable society and how to prevent fellow citizens from fouling them for their own selfish benefit to the detriment of fellow citizens.

The right to peace and the absence of destructive conflict.  This is with both external societies and factions within our own society that threaten our physical safety.   Humans have the mental capacity to resolve conflict through negotiation and forgiveness for wrongs done to us rather than physical harm and destruction.

In America, these rights provide us the freedom to prosper and enjoy a productive and satisfying life.  All of us.  Not just a few of us.   It is called democracy.

 

 

AMERICA IS ASLEEP TO ITS DEEP FASCIST HISTORY REPEATING

 Liz Cheney has warned us.  So has Rachel Maddow in her latest book PREQUEL.  How many Thanksgiving dinner table conversations this year centered on our alarming Fascist movement organizing to end our democracy, even among well read, informed and democracy supporting families?  I think very few.  Our mainstream media seems to be sleepwalking on the adoption of the Republican party of the MAGA movement which is clearly fascist, because it will help them retain power.

Read Rachel's amazing historical account of the pervasive fascist organizing in America, all across the land, in part funded by the Third Reich in the 30's and 40's.  It was supported by power hungry elected officials who even used the  government funded Franking Privilege to disseminate Nazi propaganda. numerous grassroots organizations met and launched support for Fascist Germany and Adolph Hitler, held meetings, staged events, recruited and raised money in tandem with racist and anti-Semitic organizations with longer-standing histories of hate in our country.  Are you and your family members familiar with this history?  Likely not as it is not taught in our elementary and secondary schools.  And as a political science major in college,  I can attest to its absence in much of academia. 

Much like the chaos the MAGA movement has initiated, or disruption as Steve Bannon characterizes, the attempts to legally restrain these actors was largely sabotaged by lawyers both in courts and through legislation, with anti-democratic fascist organizers characterized as just "good Americans."    Much of this movement  then was driven by white nationalist Anglos trying to preserve the whiteness and ethnic purity of our country.  The same motivation drives the MAGA movement today which also includes a desire to establish a "Christian" character to our society. 

America, we are repeating our history which we neither study nor learn from.  If pro-democracy patriots do not mobilize now against this threat to our magnificent experiment, we are about to lose it in 2024.  

Making our neighbors aware of the very real loss of our freedoms to a totalitarian future that will be very hard to reverse and mobilizing a vote in 2024 for democracy is the only solution to stopping a society transformation that limits the rights and participation of women, minority persons and non-"Christians" and dooms us to a dark, limiting future for both us and our children and grandchildren. Wake UP America.