War is here… now

Here’s my answer to a reader about Donald Trump and all that he represents:

Besides Donald Trump being a dangerous horrible idiot he’s also a narcissistic egomaniac. I think he really believes he could win the presidency because he’s a dangerously delusion person. Of course he would completely ruin this country if he were elected into office because he is about as diplomatic as a live grenade. Do I think he could win? Well all I have to say is Arnold Schwarzenegger. People seem to be in love with celebrity – we have replaced the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses with morons, narcissists and idiots. Perhaps we need the old religion which had more examples and pathways to the Great Spirit. Perhaps we yearn for connection through those who mirror us. Unfortunately if this is true we are in a very sad state.

We are currently in a class war – one that dates back to the blowing open of the gates – the Watergate era, followed by the first truly corporate president Ronald Reagan. I’m not sure Reagan knew the damage he was doing. I like to believe that he was hoodwinked by the right to be the spokesman of their (internal in terms of doing it inside the government) coo without really knowing he was. His son, whom I greatly respect, is primarily the reason I believe Ronald senior was most likely a descent man used (as so many middle and lower-income people are being used now) by the wealthy to advance a truly amoral agenda.

I always scoffed at the notion of “trickle down economics” firstly because I grew up in a very affluent neighborhood (that we didn’t belong in – we lived in a townhouse on social security checks and life insurance my father had bought years before his passing when I was 10). I knew the hearts and minds of the very wealthy in ways very few are privileged to know. I knew their children who espoused their values without the crust of age and experience to keep their real feelings and philosophies covered. I heard some of the most unimaginably amoral, immoral and hideous things said as common truths – social Darwinism was a given in the most extreme sense of that statement. There was no empathy for the underprivileged, only a social club that went into the ghetto to teach illiterate children as a sort of bait and switch to their true value system which was the belief that the wealthy are better – they deserve more, they are supreme and the poor are lazy, stupid and deserve what they get even if that means suffering and death. Hideous but absolutely true – many probably won’t believe me. In fact I know people won’t believe me because I’ve been telling people, friends, descent human beings this since I was entrenched in this bizarre world where people went to church on Sunday and then sucked the earth dry of every resource in order to hoard it for themselves. Yes, it is easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a wealthy man into heaven. I saw this first hand.

The first stage of the war against the poor and middle class was to dismantle the unions. Sure some were bloated, some were corrupt but lest we forget what life was like before they existed – just pick up a book by Dickens and you’ll see clearly the way the rich like it. The civil war – a rich man’s war to keep their slaves, using the poor southerners via their racism and pride as a tool against their interest (living) to fight a war that only the wealthy truly had a stake in and only the wealthy benefited from – this is a perfect example of the way many of the wealthiest one percent would like to see our country go – if they could have slaves again, they’d do it in a heartbeat, hence the dismantling of the minimum wage, next it will be age restrictions for working if they get momentum on the wage issue.

There are two kinds of rich – old money or the idle rich as I like to call them, who do nothing but live off the achievement of some great, great, great, great, grandparent who actually contributed something to the world during their time and then invested the family money for generations to inherit. These idle rich hate the “Nuevo riche” the people who newly acquire money – meaning the people who actually earned the money they became wealthy from, the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs of this world. You know the people who actually really produce jobs for regular folks, not the people who live off the fat left over from their (once common low to middle-class) ancestors. Those “old money” people spend their days taking care of themselves and their money, buying influence, protecting their interests and making sure they can make more money in the market. It’s interesting that they are usually the very same people who accuse poor people of being lazy when truly they have no purpose on this planet and are more akin to tics than human beings. They live off all of us who actually work and keep their world moving forward. The biggest way they contribute to the economy is through buying things, fancy furniture, fine art, clothing, etc.

Now here’s the thing. The 1960s was a very scary time for them, coming off the heels of the most financial growth of anytime during American history. The middle class grew to enormous proportions, the rich got richer as did everyone. You’d think that the wealthy would look upon the economy booming and love it because it means more money in their coffers. But with more money, more education came and people started asking questions. Why do we have to fight the communists in Vietnam? Isn’t that a sovereign nation with the right to decide its own fate? Riots took place, the left became extremely radicalized and the wealthy started to become the target of the growing understanding that a capitalist culture is antithetical to democracy as it stood. Money buys influence and effects legislation. The tying together of corporate interests with the government is fascism and as we all know corporate interests are generally not in line with what’s good for the average person, such as toxic dumping, air pollution, and endless problems associated with industry. Not to mention the corporate bottom line is biggest when they have low overhead, cheap labor and don’t have to pay taxes. Break up the unions, you break up people’s collective bargaining power, work on the congress – lobby for tax breaks for corporations and pay less taxes you get the idea.

All of this has been going on – this war began after FDR put in place regulations to control monopolies (the original source of the world financial crisis that plunged us into the Great Depression as well as Europe, especially Germany). It was those regulations or laws, which were based on the same sort of laws we as ordinary citizens would have to follow (in principle) that kept capitalism on a relatively even playing field. The breakdown of which over the past 30 years we are now seeing the results of.

Forget the history lesson above, here’s the point I want to make invention, intellectual leaps, progress and solutions don’t come from the rich, even jobs don’t, only a very small minority of jobs come directly from those newly rich people who actually are contributing members of society. Invention and intellectual leaps come from the middle-class, the class of people educated enough to want to reach upward and grab the golden ring not people sipping Manhattans while tanning themselves in Tahiti. The wealthiest one percent don’t have an incentive to solve anything, for them everything is solved, they are taken care of. Sure there are those rare individuals who want to contribute and who I salute like the young documentary film maker who exposed his world in “The One Percent,” an excellent entrance into the way people are indoctrinated into this bizarre entitled ideology and also a revelation on many other fronts.

If we lose the middle-class we become a third world country. And we also lose any chance we have of solving Global Warming, of advancing civilization or developing space travel. The rich will own us (as they wish to) and we will eventually be pushed into fighting or dying or both. They have successfully used racism/sexism/homophobia and fear to divide us. They have so confused the average person that he/she often votes against their own interest.

It is not a coincidence that the world is literally being flooded, deluged with tornadoes, earthquakes and soon hurricanes at unprecedented levels. It’s a wake up call: we must come together and fix what is broken.

I ask those who have the power and money to actually make a difference in this world these simple questions: What will it be worth when you have everything and there is nothing and no one left to lord it over or give it to? Are you that insecure you need to feel better than other people, is that what blinds you to the suffering and pain surrounding you? Do you love your family? If you answered yes to that, then what the hell are you doing to preserve this world for them?

Many blessings to the good and may the greedy find the world as wicked as they are,

Denise

Obama & Flu Be Gone

I didn’t want to be too hard on Obama. But I really don’t think keeping the statis quo as it has been for the past 30 years is the right way to go. We are in this horrible mess because we need to truly change, destroy and rebuild our system. There are too many old bones rattling around slowing down the wheels of progress, too much power that corporations have and too much reliance on corporate self-policing.

Obama just needs to get in there and do some serious butt kicking the way old FDR did it back in the day. Granted Obama has more hurdles and a country ill informed, and the vast majority of Americans who don’t even understand the basics of the economy well enough to know they are being swindled and lied to by FOX news inc. and as someone mentioned the big start of all this happened during the Reagan administration, when double speak and calling the conservative corporate media “the liberal media” started and all kinds of saying the opposite of the truth to cover the truth began.

Obama has a huge (and rather terrifying) job of reforming a dying beast in front of him. He is an amazing and erudite man, gentile and compassionate. These are all great qualities which I respect in him. I just want him to feel free to be a warrior on behalf of our country and do what needs to be done by disassembling the corporatocracy and re-instating the democracy we are supposed to be.

Hey, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’m finally over the flu despite being barfed on twice this weekend by my lovely little daughter.

Many blessings to all you kind and good hearted people,

Denise

In Memory of Duane Jarvis & Our Broken Health Care System

On April 1^st we learned a 51 year old friend, Duane Jarvis, died of colon cancer. I knew him for years before his girlfriend told me he had a terrible, painful case of scoliosis and had spent much of his life in bad health and in pain. Yet, he was a gentle and sweet spirit who relished life and took every opportunity to be and do what his heart dictated. About eighteen months ago he was diagnosed with colon cancer. We found this out because his ex-wife in an effort to help him sent out e-mails to all his friends to help him with his mounting medical bills.

Now this man was no slouch. He worked all his life as a professional musician. But of course being a musician is not like working at Starbucks, there are no 401k plans with health and dental added. Yet, he contributed to the lineage of art so many of us love. He was Lucinda Williams guitar player and co-wrote some songs with her, played with Frank Black, Dwight Yoakam, Dave Alvin, John Prine, Michelle Shocked and many more. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/03/duane-jarvis-in.html  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/04/duane-jarvis-dies-at-51-la-roots-music-singersongwriter-and-guitarist.html  One could say he made his mark in the music world and on all who knew him. Yet because the life of an artist is feast or famine, up, down and a hustle, he did not have adequate health care. And I’m sure with his medical history even if he wanted to purchase it, it would have been out of his ability to pay for it.

His friends pitched in to help save his life. But he lost his battle at 1:30 in the morning at a hospice with an ocean view, with a smile on his face. He never complained about his pain, his disease or his troubles.

Not only was this poor man fighting a horrible, painful, aggressive form of cancer, he had to worry about the financial cost to him and the loved ones he knew he would leave behind. It has been proven that cancer is made worse by stress and chances are good that if he had good medical care to begin with his colon cancer never would have gotten so out of control, claiming his life at the early age of 51.

For all out there who still believe each one of us should think only of ourselves, and not come together as a nation and take care of each other through a universal healthcare system, I ask do you listen to music? Do you read books, enjoy art, read magazines, watch movies or enjoy any form of art as a release, a way to wind down to reflect on your life in a different way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then I’d like to burst your illusion that those in the arts, even the people you on the outside would deem successful, have the financial stability to pay for their healthcare. Yet we all enjoy the fruits of their work. Art attunes us with our soul, the universe, God, our spirit and each other. It aides compassion, encourages self-reflection and produces self-discovery. It is actually one of the only things we as Americans still make and export. Yet for more than 90% of professional artists of all kinds there is no safety net in this country (unlike other democratic, civilized places.)

Republicans will belly ache about personal responsibility, yet it costs more for us to foot the bill for radical treatment that could have been avoided due to prevention then footing the bill for radical treatment when someone cannot afford their care. And is it fair that after years of giving to the world these individuals and their families should be punished with outrageous bills because they don’t work for a corporation that gives them health insurance?

Our health care system is absurd. There is no reason corporations should pay for our health care and there is no reason people who are self-employed, whether in the arts or otherwise, should be punished with outrageous costs they often opt to avoid.

More than half of all Americans walk this tight rope every day, hoping and praying they don’t get sick because they can’t afford a trip to the doctor’s office let alone several hundred dollars a month to an insurance company who will then, often fight to make sure they pay as little as possible.

Our country has the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nations. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html

And our life expectancy is at #50 of all countries in the world, ranking well below all western European countries, Canada, Hong Kong, South Korea and Bosnia for God’s sake.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

How could it possibly be that we are the wealthiest country in the world and yet we let ten percent of our population control about 70 percent of the wealth? How can anyone who is not in that top echelon actually abide this? Why is it that any rational human being who works and pays taxes is not absolutely outraged by this? And how is it that the Republicans have managed to sell us on the idea that our system is fine?

Oh, yeah, the amplified fear of communism (aka more aptly dictatorship) which is actually just faked for the benefit of those who don’t understand why there would literally have to be a civil war in our country for a dictatorship to occur although we did get just about as close as we could with the Bush administration with their tactic of not counting the votes. According to the Limbaugh’s of the world it appears going back to the tax code of 1993 which was a 36 percent tax for the wealthy 10 percent to a 3 percent increase at 39 percent is a communist plot and of course so is universal health care. Hmm, I wonder who benefits most from that position. Oh, yeah the rich like Limbaugh. So he’s basically arguing from an entirely selfish point of view but trying to sell it as some sort of great American ideal when it’s nothing but more money for his private planes, which by the way he has, I know someone who was picked up and taken to his mansion in Florida by one of them. (Yes, I do have all kinds of friends.)

As I pointed out in an earlier post, communism is not the same as democratic socialism. In communist countries where they took Marx & Lennon’s ideas and ran with them they all ultimately turned into dictatorships because there was no accountability written into their ideology. The notion that a group of people would take everyone’s stuff and then divide it up among all the people evenly is insane and of course was an open invitation for graft, power hungry dictators, and greedy buerocrats. This was beyond psychologically naive, it was ideologically irrational, unsound and irresponsible. No checks and balances, no elections, hell, with all of Marx’s good intentions of lifting up the poor, he may as well have slapped a “rape the people of this country here” sticker on whatever flag adopted those ideas.

As out of whack as the US has gotten with capitalism swallowing our Democracy through corporate lobbyists and special tax laws and loopholes for the wealthy who could pay their way into the halls of power, we still have the power to pull back the reigns on this out of control buggy. And as a people we obviously have started yelling, “whoa!” by ousting the Republicans who have for the past 30 years aligned themselves with corporations, big money and lobbyists in a much more extreme way than Democrats. 

But Democrats have to start really pulling the reigns back before we leap off the mountain here. And let’s get real; they aren’t all that much better than Republicans. They take money from special interests, lobbyists and play all the same games. There is just a bigger percentage of people who identify with the working/middle class in the Democratic party but that’s been drifting away over the past 20 years as well. Which is why Obama was and is such a breath of fresh air. He actually seems like he has, can you believe it, IDEALS! It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that in a politician.

In my humble opinion this form of out of control corporate capitalism is at odds with Democracy at this point in our history. There are laws that need to be put into place, such as, if you are an American company, your product should have to be made in America. As a private citizen if I wanted to go live in France I couldn’t because I’m not French. I’m American. So why is it that corporations started by Americans and incorporated here, can make their crap in China, and then put an office in Guam and avoid paying American taxes? If you ask me this behavior is anti-American and one of the big dark roots of the economic disaster America is finding itself in. All that talk about how unemployment wasn’t that bad during the Bush administration was B.S. Besides changing the rules on how unemployment statistics were reported to only reporting people on the unemployment rolls in the unemployed statistics and cutting unemployment benefits back to 6 months, I hardly think working part-time at Wal-Mart for the minimum wage while being taught how to get food stamps and welfare by the corporate douche bags at Wal-Mart qualifies as the kind of good manufacturing jobs we shipped overseas. You know, the ones where people actually got paid a living wage, one they could feed and clothe their families on.

Another point I’d like to make here is the big mistake of the 1970s when women entered the work force and ERA was not passed. What people didn’t get was paying women 70 cents to the dollar a man would make for the same job drove down wages to the point where now both parents have to work in order to support a family.

It’s the very same principle Lou Dobbs complains about with the Mexicans driving down wages and taking away jobs because they are willing to work for less. Well, guess who relaxed the boarder laws for this very reason? The Reagan administration. Yes, that’s right folks. Allowing illegal people to stream across the boarders was a way to modernize indentured servitude. Again the goal was to make the rich, richer without any consideration of the other 90% of Americans. I’m in no way blaming the Mexican people who have come here in search of a better life. Our country is a hodge-podge of people from all over the world who came here for the very same reason. As a matter of fact the way the Mexican people have been exploited and then demonized is very much akin to what happened to the Irish who came here as indentured servants. Their pay was a ticket on a ship to America and they spent years as slaves until working this off only to find there was tremendous animosity for them because they were poor, and often in desperate straights.

Enough of my blabbing. I just want to point out that history repeats itself. It mutates and grows new claws, but there are patterns. Unfortunately, these facts are not pointed out or even noted for people to consider. I hope to at least try to illuminate those who have been seeing things through the lens of FOX news. By the way I want to note here that numerologicaly FOX = 666 for those who are of the Christian faith.

Here’s how that works:

1    2  3  4   5  6   7  8  9

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I

J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R

S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

This is standard western numerology. As you can see FOX is spelled out under the number 6. Each letter has the value of 6.

I always wondered if Rupert Murdoch knew that and thought it was ironic or funny or if he saw himself as being in league with Mr. Satan. Or perhaps it’s all of the above. All I know is it’s dang ironic.

Best wishes and many blessings,

Denise