Cartoon: What Trump wants

by Joe Kandra, Pat Daniel, Kathie Malley-Morrison

Voting in 2020 is at risk. If you value freedom and democracy, act now, while you still can.

Starting gate question: Are you registered to vote?

Even if you think you’re registered, double check–things may not be what you assume. For example,

1. Voter rolls have been and are still being purged in many states; see here or here .

2. If you moved recently, your polling place is likely to have changed and you may need to register again in your current community. See here and here .

3. If you are not registered yet, get a move on. Deadlines are rapidly approaching for voter registration. Check them out in your state here and now and do it.

Followup question: Do you know how to outfox voter suppression efforts by the power mongers?

As you may have heard, in order to suppress voting by people who aren’t part of the current power structure–particularly poor people and people of color–illegal politically-based efforts are being made to interfere with the popular vote. 

Solution: Fight back by voting early. Mail-in voting (and depositing ballots in official drop boxes) has already begun in some states. Take advantage of these opportunities and vote early—but, please, please, please, not often. Disregard any evil advice to vote twice. (That’s a violation of federal law and another effort at destroying our democratic system.) For more about early voting, see here and here .

The biggest question: Do you want what Trump wants? You know what that is–the death of democracy. If you’re not in the market for authoritarianism and facism, exercise your Constitutional rights.

DEMOCRACY WANTS YOU to do everything you need to do to vote–and have it count!

Why We saved Private Ryan

by Kathie MM

In our troubled times, where do you turn to escape from the depressing and frightening corporate media news? Many people turn to alcohol; increasing numbers turn to other deadly drugs. Indeed, problems of addiction are multiplying relentlessly. 

You probably know about the toll both legal and illegal drugs are taking on society but did you ever think about  one of the less obvious addictions readily available to anyone with a television?  I’m talking about an addiction that captures people across race, age, social class, and politics, the  addiction so readily provided by Hollywood—that is, violent films, including war films, wherein violence is glorified (despite pseudo-messages purporting to condemn it).  Along with military industrial profiteers, we have film profiteers, the ones who exploit the fact that for many people, engagement in violence—in person or by proxy– is one of the cheaper thrills they can obtain. And believe me, all those profiteers are in cahoots with each other.

Think of the “Blockbuster films” you’ve seen (if indeed you’re a movie-goer and have been seduced into going to a blockbuster). How many of them portrayed violence, glorified violence, in gory detail? In how many did the “good guys” use just as much violence as the “bad guys”? How often could you differentiate between good guys and bad guys based on how much violence they used? In how many was violence applauded as good, honorable, justified when done by the “right side”? And even if there were frightening scenes, how often did those scenes leave you feeling excited?  Let’s face it, many films awash in violence have “good guys” providing multiple justifications for their violence while revving up your endorphins and making you just itch to do something–all for big bucks to the producers.

Fortunately all tools, including words and images, can be used to promote peace as well as violence and to educate as well as anesthetize,  as illustrated in our fourth example today of one of Jonny Lewis’s short comedy antiwar films.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says,  Don’t miss the text at the end of the film.  Eat it up. Food for thought.

She also asks, Did you see Saving Private Ryan? If so, what did you feel and think about it? Please let us know your response to Spielberg’s movie as well as your response to Jonnie’s video here on this site.

A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

to the earth with love
KMM

Part One: Resurrecting the Wisdom and Spirit of Tom Paine, Mark Twain, Emerson, and Kurt Vonnegut

Future historians will write that, with all too few exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.  They will show that America’s self-destruction was caused primarily by three factors.  1) A lack of viable multi-party pluralism.  2) A lack of authentic education.  3) The failure of the mainstream news media to inform, edify, enlighten.

Almost all mainstream news media in the USA exemplify “fake news,” and this has long been the case.  Their primary function is to ignorate, not educate.  That’s precisely why, for example, Americans ended up with such viciously criminal presidents as Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Cheney-Bush, and Trump, and why most American citizens remain equally oblivious of the war crimes of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

There is nothing in American history as unpatriotic as the USA Patriot Act.  And there is nothing in recent American history as self-defeating as the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the passing of the Citizens United Act.  Yet most Americans could neither date nor explain these democracy-shredding events.

Americans are the most historically illiterate citizens in the advanced industrial Western world.  They are products of an educational system almost wholly devoted to ignoration.  Right-wing religious and neo-conservative radio and television have in recent decades made the problem infinitely worse.  Newt Gingrich and his beloved bastard Rupert Murdoch institutionalized the postmodern quantum leap into the vortex of political and news-media sophistry and lies.

Insofar as most teachers, politicians, journalists, intellectuals and scientists fail to emphasize these points, they embody what a modern philosopher calls “bullshit.”  A kind of intellectual masturbation which, along with omnipresent advertising, is the curse of the modern world.  A self-imposed alienation from the catastrophic lack of relevant insight that dominates what currently passes for “civilization.”

We face a quaternity from hell.  Economic apartheid, another Great Depression, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust.  What is to be done?

Commit to a life of voluntary simplicity and lifelong self-education.  Demand an end to the American empire.  Bring the troops home and have them engage in ecological cleanup, reforestation, infrastructure repair, and the nation-wide building of solar panels, windmills, and recycling centers.

Promote discussion of universal health care and progressive taxation.  Challenge the Pentagon budget.  Support authentically progressive people and causes.  Institute comprehensive and forceful regulation of the banking system.  Educate about the nation-wide Savings and Loan institutions destroyed during the Reagan Administration.  Become historically informed. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Vote in local as well as national elections, not least in order to preserve sanity and virtue in local school boards.

Monitor your children’s education and teach them what they are not learning in school, especially about modern American history and imperialism since World War Two, and most especially about the wholly unconstitutional and morally depraved House and Senate Un-American Activities Committees in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the not-so-surreptitious efforts of the Republican Party to bring them back to life.

And meanwhile spread the word: What we do to others and the earth we do to ourselves.