[thurs AM update: go to antiwar.com (not otherwise endorsed) to find stories on the US/Venezuela/Ecuador/Colombia saber rattling (remembering that Colombia is a US client state and recently received 400 main battle tanks), and also note the article on the US naval buildup opposite Lebanon....]
I’ve noticed that all the discussions about the Presidential candidates are done with chains on brains. That is, the context in which these people seek political power is not to be discussed. So naturally I would like to bring out some of that context.
The fascist coup which destroyed Constitutional rule in this nation took place in the Supreme Court; five justices selected a dictator against the expressed will of the people. Although there was protest at the time it was not nationally organized. I admit I did not recognize the coup for what it was, since at the time an unreformed Al Gore, the one who sneered at the Congressional Black Caucus as they pled for Constitutional rule, had run for president with Joe Lieberman, now revealed to be the Republican representative for Israel. Indeed I think had the Supremes not shredded the Constitution in that way, the fascists would have found some other way to implement rule by fiat, perhaps in some variation of the empty Cessna which reminded the former President Clinton that he had gone to far. The corporate press keeps the issues shallow, and roars with rage when anyone points out that the World Trade Centers were obviously detonated, as the Vice President illegally directed military air traffic on that day in 2001.
The Presidential vote fraud of 2004 is not mentioned, either, so that the millions are encouraged to believe that a vote is still a vote in this country.
All unacceptable discussion has been purged from the Primaries, through the icy rejection by the corporate-controlled cameras. We may gingerly discuss how long to carry out our wars, but we dare not speak of withdrawal and war reparations. Impeachment is off the table. Prosecutions for torture and war crimes are off the table. Single payer health care has been skillfully excluded.
Given these circumstances, I would like to present an unhampered exhibition of what I would like to see as a change. The remaining campaigns all talk about change, but by that they mean superficial change.
I would like to limit wealth to one million dollars income annually, and two million dollars property. This would be a substantial change for multi-billionaires like Warren Buffet, but he would be guided through the shock by the free single-payer health care that we could thereby afford. I want a restoral of the dynasty tax, wrongly called the death tax; we need no dynasties, and the Constitution writers were right to take steps against them. We should also confiscate the wealth of repeat-offender corporations and take away their human status. So Exxon-Mobil, and Archer Daniels Midland and hundreds of others could cough up their wealth, even and especially the trillions hidden in semilegal tax dodge accounts in the Caribbean. This might require a show of force in Barbados and Aruba, but I’m okay with that. It could be fun, we could run a Jolly Roger flag up the masts of the big missile ships and aircraft carriers.
Oh yeah, and I would tax churches and force them to open their books. Repeat child offender churches would be disbanded as a menace to society.
My campaign platform, then, is total destruction of corporate rule, seizure of their assets, and movement towards a just society. I would free all nonviolent criminals from our astonishing, record-breaking, racist, three-million-strong prison state, and repeal all minimum-sentence rules. Since we would have plenty of money from the long-overdue confiscations, we could use the liberated labor to perform useful green infrastructure rebuilding—at family wages, of course. There is much to be done, including emergency weather remediation efforts to save the North Pole ice and the Greenland ice cap and of course out precious inland glaciers. No time like the present.
Naturally my Administration demands immediate withdrawal from invaded countries and the payment of substantial war reparations. This would traumatize our soldiers who have been lied into committing terrible acts of violence, but as I said, after confiscating criminal corporate wealth, we can afford to restore their sanity.
If this seems whimsical I would remind you that all freedoms and reforms seem like fairy tales until someone actually thinks the concepts true, and then takes steps to make it reality. The defiance of the idea is the groundbreaking start. If we agree to confine our thoughts and words to meek acceptance, then all we can hope for is mercy from the oppressors. I propose we overthrow the state instead.
I’ll give you an example of this paradigm from my own experience this week. I was driving my municipal bus through an area where three or four young men keep a sort of bus-riding tradition going. I had not driven the route for years and was surprised to see the same guys; I recognized them when they recognized me, and engaged in their time-honored tradition of fingering their genitalia while glaring at me. Since I am a transwoman and they have expressed their violent contempt in the past, their message is clear enough. It is a rapist gesture, intended to get under my skin. It works. I haven’t asked these guys what they do for a living, but it evidently has to do with prison-walking, cell phones, swift package exchanges in the back of the bus, and women who walk three steps behind them with their heads down.
So what to do? Nothing? I’m not Supertrans. There’s only so much I can do. So I got a marker pen, and wrote on the outside of my right arm the phrase “death to rapists.”
This put an immediate end to the crotch-feeling. Instead, two young men read the phrase out loud as they stepped on the bus. I smiled and nodded. Who wants to stand up for rapists? But the funny thing was, as I drove on through the morning, how many men were shaken by the phrase. One young man said, and I quote, “Bor-uh-buh--…as he pointed to my arm, and then recovering, said “two zones please.” I gave him his ticket with a warm smile. It seems a lot of young (and not so young) men have an unconscious or at least unexamined identification with the concept “rapist.”
As a pitiful aside, I also remember that several women spoke to me with real gratitude. Are we --as a society--sick, or what? And yes, I was raped at the age of twelve, by –of course—a Boy Scout leader.
Back to the larger political point, we have to be able to think in terms of what we want, and we have to be able to accept that what we want is legitimate. We have to be able to say “Capitalist” and “Imperialist” or equivalent words. We have to acknowledge that a society ruled by signing statements, manufactured fear, militarization of air and rail terminals, unprecedented prison-packing, and endless pointless war is a fascist society. Say it. Say “I live in a fascist society.” Now I ask you, what sort of society would you like to live in?
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2 comments:
Theresa, so glad you are here. This has much potent potential by 'cross-marketing,' reinforcing, this blog presence together with your KBOO reach. Look upside, that view sees large things.
This particular post, which you read on-air this morning, (and I thought at that time, too), could be so much stronger, more ferocious, matching back vicious for vicious done us. I think you are pulling your punches.
Respecting the thread title, ("she said what?"), but tangenting off-topic, if I may show-and-tell this most powerful, moving, 'Letter from an Oregon Mother.'
Just, it's the fullest thought in my mind for all the hours since it came news to me. It is a statement thoroughly and decidedly representative of the majority thought in Oregon, the majority position in Oregonians' thoughts ... and quite anti-Kulongoski.
It is a recantation, a retraction, of the 'Marines hymn,' by a one-time proponent. It is an out-and-out denunciation and damnation of Bushbutchery dictatorship.
It is what should have been the top news item in Oregon broadcasted news, TV and radio, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is what the corporate massmedia is covering up, and censoring, and propagandizing over the top of -- and how Governor K. is deluded, (because he listens to that broadcast crap, and believes it, and believes it is representative, of Oregonians' thinking).
NO, Gov. Kulongoski. THIS is WHAT OREGONIANS THINK:
Open Letter to Three Iraqi Women from an Oregon Mother, From a Marine Mom , March 3rd, 2008.
The steam has long since dissipated from my coffee cup as I strain to write this letter to the three of you. You don’t know me, and one of you will never have an opportunity to read this letter, but you have each left your mark upon my soul. Though I do not know your names you will recognize who you are and I speak to you woman to woman and mother to mother and mother to child.
Before I begin, if you don’t already know it, the US military can train a man to kill but cannot train that man how to handle it when he does. For this reason amongst many others my Marine son, John, who touched your lives in Iraq, (and through him, so did I), is in treatment along with other veterans ...
So I am reaching out to you three Iraqi women because, while we didn’t realize it at the time, our paths have crossed, tragically and we are connected now. This connection has provided me with certain details about your lives that I feel I have to share if only that some small light may be shed on dark places.
There was a firefight in Baghdad, a 360 degree battle with the Marines taking fire from Blackwater all around and overhead. You were there, not as a participant, just a civilian, and you are my first connection though I learned of you last because my son couldn’t tell me about you until recently.
Training had the Marines firing back reflexively at anything that moved, vehicles, stray dogs a blur of a shirtsleeve. The Marine who fired upon your husband and two children was almost 100 yards away and he jerked his weapon up in horror at the end of the burst and watched your family fall.
You didn’t know it at the time but he watched you run out to your family. He saw you in your light blue wrap as you went from one body to the other. He tried to avert his eyes as you picked up your dead child and then the other and wailed in your grief. He tried to look away but that light blue color was always in his peripheral vision, pulling at him drawing him back.
It might have been five, seven even ten minutes when, in what John described as the coldest thing he’d ever seen, that young Marine could bear your grief no more and killed you. So you see, we are connected because my son saw you die.
Does it matter to you ....
Governor, you are allowing the authority which Oregonians have vested and entrusted in you, to be suborned and desecrated by this illegitimate despot, Bush -- himself in person of the Guard a military deserter, with no statute of limitations on that subversive dereliction -- and by your complicity, Governor, not standing as you have standing and charging indictment against his ruination, and his destruction of all that is the heart and goodness of Oregon, of Marines, and of America, Governor you are joined in the despised fascism.
The 'war' is a lie. The proud few, and fine humans, are dying, murdered, in Bush's crimes and criminality, and Governor you stand in that damnation, which our Oregonians' media and letters now report, as the hypnotic sway of the narcotic massmedia is dispelled and your false shield from shame is but illusion.
Comes soon visiting our State, Senator Hillary Clinton. And for your endorsement of her, and her candidacy, and by our disgust and dispatch of you, Governor, require that she read aloud in a massmedia Audio Op, here and this Open Letter to Three Iraqi Women, of our world and Earth and humankind, from an Oregon Mother.
And explain why Marines now stand for and defend Bush lies and liars. Governor Kulongoski LOOK AT your defamation of Oregon, and us.
Senator Clinton, warmongeress, be awfully damned too.
thanks anonymous--a powerful comment. I don't really want to be vicious, though; I just want to be effective.
theresa
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