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Man, DU has gotten pretty cranky lately. It's more than just the seemingly eternal battle between those who prefer one candidate over another (but ye Gawds, THAT'S starting to get old). But there's so much more than that going on.
This Chavez shit? Puh-leeze. Personally I'm reserving judgment. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me that he's an asshole, but I don't know the guy. I like to think there's at least one leader in the Americas that has the best interests of his people at heart, but who knows?
I don't like ANY of the fucking Republican candidates. I can agree with Ron Paul about the Iraq War, and, if he's a Libertarian-type, probably about the War On Drugs. But NOTHING else. I know the whole Libertarian spiel backwards and forwards and I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of it was the same fucked-up economic bullshit that the Republicans espouse. Fuck them and fuck him too. They spend most of their time figuring out how the rich and powerful can more easily steal everything of value from the rest of us without getting in trouble for it.
And while we're talking about stealing everything of value, lets wander for a moment into "moderate" territory. You know, the Democrats who call themselves "moderate" or "centrist" when they're really trying not to say "corporate fucking whores." A REAL "moderate" Democrat, in my mind, is someone who believes in a more gradual change rather than a sudden shift, not someone whose position is only "moderate" when compared to a full-scale nazi asshole who thinks that everyone left of Bush Senior is a radical communist wingnut. You know, the kind of people who think the Shrub is "just too liberal."
To ME, a true moderate is one who still believes that reasonable, rational regulation makes a whole lot of sense. That positive change is necessary, but radical change is something to be avoided whenever possible. Someone who believes that certain things should be held in public trust, not handed over to the corporations to do with as they will. Not wild-eyed revolutionaries by any measure, but not complacent, complicit yes-men (and women) for the dominant economic engines of industry either.
For a long time I considered MYSELF a moderate, but then I realized that what I meant by the word had nothing to do with what the politicians seemed to mean by it. To them it meant they agreed with the Republicans on some pretty basic levels about far too many things for MY comfort. I don't agree with them on social issues AT ALL. I don't think they have the right to decide how other people live their lives unless it causing real harm to someone. Not "possible" subjective harm, but real measurable harm. I also think their economic ideology is a crock of shit. Supply-side economics is fancy talk for "let the rich fuck everyone else and throw an occasional bone out to keep the peasants from storming the castle with torches and pitchforks."
It wasn't until I heard Thom Hartmann talk about the "radical middle" that I understood where I was, and why THEIR definition of "moderate" or "centrist" made no fucking sense at all. I don't think anyone deconstructs the right's economic models better than Hartmann does. The reverse Robin Hood shit is just too much to take. Taking our money in taxes so they can squander it by giving it to their corporate buddies in exchange for shoddy workmanship and bargain-basement services for us is fucking ludicrous. Anyone with any sense at all has to realize that the way they're funneling money from our treasury--from our taxes--to their war profiteering cronies in Iraq is WAY beyond tolerable.
Just like giving companies tax breaks and economic advantages by allowing them to ship our jobs to foreign lands to sell us crappy goods at cut-rate prices sure as shit isn't something a real "moderate" should buy into. People here rise up to defend the DLC, saying that it's just another "far left boogeyman" really gets my goat. "Al Gore helped create the DLC," they say.
Wow. I don't give a shit. Decisions that help corporations at the expense of average citizens and small businesses aren't good for America. Maybe they look good in the short run, but look where that shit has gotten us. Far too much of our everyday goods are made in China. And it's not just the cheap junk you can buy at Target or Wal-Mart. About sixty to seventy percent of the stuff in the average hospital supply room is ALSO made in China. For example.
"It's a global economy," they say. "It's helping other countries."
Well, it's sure as shit helping the RICH motherfuckers in other countries. The average people? Not so much.
I'd like to see some rational, reasonable discussion on a national level about what this shit is doing to us all. How most of our well-paying jobs are heading elsewhere, while the workers are scrambling to find jobs in the service sector that don't pay nearly what their old ones did. How re-training is severely under-funded because no one really gives a rat's ass as long as the "lazy bastards" aren't sitting on their asses collecting unemployment (unemployment that pays about as well as any job they can find anymore).
Dislocated workers are the new "welfare queens," don't you know? Can't get a job making what you used to make? Too bad. It's been outsourced to a Chinese labor camp and we don't need you anymore. What--are you too proud to flip hamburgers? That's why we need that cheap immigrant labor, don't you know? To do the jobs Americans are "too proud" to do. Meaning, "you'll take what we offer you and like it, you pathetic losers. Or we'll find someone who will."
And people wonder why I support Edwards. At least he's talking about some of this shit. This matters to me one HELL of a lot more than some damned video game, sex in the movies, or the failed and still-touted "War On Drugs." I don't like it that he's not saying anything about THAT, but I'll take what I can get about now. The people need to hear how corporate and industry lobbyists are manipulating our laws for their benefit, and to our detriment. They need to grasp how fucked up it is that CEOs are making hundreds of times more than their lowest paid workers, and yet are still finding ways to eliminate the best-paying jobs to increase the disparity.
So, yeah, some of the arguments here lately have struck me as pretty petty. We've got storms that are looking a lot like hurricanes slamming into the Pacific Coast, rising sea levels, really weird weather all over the place, and auto manufacturers and energy companies who're willing to spend any amount of money to keep from being regulated into trying to help slow down the climate change.
Just about everything we face as a nation and as a species boils down to letting industry and multi-national corporations run the table for FAR too long. A pro-corporate "moderate" ANYTHING is just another bought-and-paid-for weasel as far as I'm concerned. We're long past the time we should tolerate that sort of semantic double-speak.
With all due apologies to weasels. Compared to some of these fuckers, they're saintly little critters.
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