BREAK THEM UP- RAISE US UP!
I wonder how the rest of the world’s democracies would react if we informed them that they were only permitted to have two parties to choose from. We have a rigged Duopoly. Two extremely powerful political parties rule this country and many would observe they do so to the overwhelming benefit of the wealthy investor class over the struggling working class. They serve the rich and powerful and what they serve them is all of us, all of us and Mother Earth on a silver platter.
Bernie’s campaign raised more money than any other insurgent campaign of its kind, however hes trying to use it to paint inside the lines, or think inside the box the same box he urges all of us to think outside of.
With the 2016 presidential primary almost complete, we’ve just seen the reality of how power works to preserve itself. We cannot use a rigged duopoly system to control or defeat that very rigged system of entrenched wealth & power. Not unless we ourselves utilize our wealth and power to first create the political & economic revolution Bernie Sanders is calling for. A political revolution is much more and calls for much more than thousands of people attending speeches or a year or so of scattered protests.
A political revolution is an awakening of public conscience! It is a decision to resists oppression and inequities. It is years of building inter-sectional coalitions whose members come to each others aid in times of peril. It requires free thinkers, radical goals and long term planning. It requires a
can-do spirit and inspirational leaders and people willing to sacrifice for the greater good. It requires planting a tree you know you won’t live long enough to enjoy the shade of.
People who have power, get to make the rules.
They use that power to make rules that first and foremost make it impossible for anyone else to take their power.
They can limit the number of debates, see that they take place when few are watching, they can invent something called “super delegates” giving entrenched establishment allies electoral veto power over the will of the “grassroots”.
They can stack the order of the primary races to front load the Southern traditionally more conservative states to ensure nobody too progressive gets early momentum in primaries. This particular tactic was developed in 1992 by the DLC Democratic Leadership Council to produce conditions to elect a Southern centrist by the name of Bill Clinton and now has done the same for Hillary Clinton.
They can manipulate the number of polling places open and purge thousands of voters from the voting roles coincidentally in the very city Brooklyn NY, where a populist insurgent candidate like Bernie Sanders was born.
They can close primaries off from Independent or no party preference voters who might vote for a Democrat who is not entangled with big money’s corrupting influences.
They can play on the greedy self interests of the corporate controlled mass “news” media to give twice as much air time to a candidate friendly to their corporate interests.
They wield the levers of power. They created these levers of power! And they push and pull all of them to make sure that nobody like a Bernie Sanders can threaten their hold on power.
As to the Democratic Party, the brilliant and progressive journalist Thom Hartmann of RT & Free Speech TV’s The Big Picture likes to say “it’s open!” as if there’s a big open door with sign above it saying must remain open during business hours and all we working folk need do is step inside to take it over. But what good does it do to have an open door if people are kept ignorant thereby unable to know it exists, where it is, what to do once they enter it, and are too weak, poor, and cynical to do any of that?
The Democratic Party has produced a supposedly progressive President who has not backed Card Check to make it easier to collectively bargain and raise workers wages, who proposed but hardly fought for a $10.10 minimum wage which is not a real living wage not by half! A President who stayed silent while Governor Scott Walker devastated organized labor in Wisconsin and one who now travels Europe to promote yet another so-called Free Trade agreement that will further unravel the remaining threads of our blue collar working middle class tattered fabric leaving too many of us out in the cold of this new “global economy”. The Democratic party establishment has abandoned the labor movement and ignored the priorities of workers seeking growth through trade and stock market gains instead.
The Democratic party establishment has abandoned the labor movement and ignored the priorities of workers seeking growth through trade and stock market gains instead.
As a result of the Democratic Party not fighting for a fair and moral economy for the working class, making compromises, proposing Heritage Fund conservative policies to try to appease Republicans instead of pro-worker pro environmental policies, we are all too tired, too stressed out, too poor, and too ignorant of how things work to walk through any open door to takeover the Democratic Party or any party.
Knowing how rigged this system is we can go one of two ways. We can become cynical and obedient to the soul crushing status quo resolved to accept our dismal lot in life or we can choose proactively engage in solutions that build a more sustainable moral system.
To do the latter, we must build strength, hope, courage and tenacity into our ranks if we are to survive and end our slavery. Cynicism has an inertia that is very powerful! People fight against their own interests fearing change. Even the great abolitionist and liberator of slaves Harriett Tubman carried a revolver with her to discourage the slaves she lead through the Underground Railway to freedom from giving up halfway and turning back to their horrid lives of slavery. She understood that many people fear the unknown experiences of liberty more at times than they do the known inhumanity and humiliations of slavery. I think of that every time I hear Democrats echoing conservative talking points about “people wanting free stuff”.
Why did the Party of FDR allow this to happen? Because the DNC and Democratic party took the Big Banks’s money. Probably some considered it “how the game is played”, a necessary evil. Some good Democrats thought at least they can do “some” good for “some” people once in power, but without Big Bank/Wall St money they could do no good for anyone. I strongly disagree! I don’t think it’s how the game is played, I think it is how our democracy is lost! But that is likely how some of them including President Obama saw it. He often says its a compromise help a few now then a few more later.
I think before we can work within the system to have our priorities and voices raised up over the wealthy and powerful, we need to wake up and economically empower enough people to challenge the status quo of what is or is not possible, we need to challenge the notion of what is or is not acceptable.
In my view if the Democratic Party is to be saved and all of us with it, before it can be run by and for the working people, all of its current leadership must be ousted, resign and be replaced with new grassroots party activists. We must break up the big political parties in the same way we must break up the financial institutions that control them! In the same way we must break up all of the monopolies that crush open truly free markets of ideas of and goods.
Here are a few thoughts on how we can do this.
1-Bernie Sanders can become the new head of the DNC and implement sweeping reforms creating grassroots 50 state organizations that give every person a voice, accurate information, allows open primaries in every race, demands adherence to clean money elections, overturning citizens united, and putting the health of people and planet first and with the utmost urgency. He can oversee the training, funding and staffing of thousands of grassroots candidates who share our principles and priorities and his courage and tenacity.
2-We must all do our part at the same time work in all of our precincts and states to stand up a Shadow Democratic Party to run our candidates with a D by their name but following BernieCrat/Green principles to PRIMARY ANY Corporate Dem who betrays us and our planet. NO elected official will fear us or heed us unless we threaten their jobs by way of primary elections.
3-We must get out in the streets and protest regularly making a hella lot of noise, not just in Washington DC, but everywhere and especially in the congressional town halls too! Protests don’t just frighten the electeds, they wake up the electorate that there is a real problem we should all know about. And we have to be prepared to strike and support others who strike.
4-We must stop being wage slaves working for the very corporate monopolies who poison our planet, corrupt our government systems, send our kids to wars for them and sell us cancer causing products so they can make more money they’ll never have enough years to actually spend.
We must create a directory of every Worker Owned company in the country provide it by app and booklet and promote it as buying our way out of slavery.
We create our own worker -owned Fair Trade business, and worker owned business support networks while making it easy for anyone to startup a new business with neighbors or friends and extract themselves from the corporate slavery machine. It must be made easy!
Write a book? Make it worker-owned by letting your readers share in profits and editing decisions!
Create jewelry? Make it worker-owned by letting your customers share in profits by sharing links to your store with their friends & sharing decisions about the designs you offer.
Making a business worker-owned needs to become the default. It’s way too complex and mysterious right now.
Until WE OWN as Worker Owners the businesses we invest our labor into we will just be beggars and any new political regime can be bought out and reverse minimum wage laws we fight for.
With respect and in solidarity,
Joe Segal
