ROADSIDE WISDOM: A Homemade Sign Strikes To The Heart Of Our Political Reality

The best we can expect in political dialog in such a silly, cantankerous, nasty, brain-numb end stage of empire.

Both photos by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

As Biden’s bumbling brain-dead debate debacle proves, the President isn’t in charge of crap. He’s just a glorified version of your local Walmart manager.

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (6/29/24)

This lone, hand-painted sign alongside a highway just north of Green Bay, Wisconsin neatly sums up the nasty, squabbling, irrelevant state of American politics as epitomized by this week’s presidential “debate”. The crudely elegant sign has been up for months, accurately affirming each week’s spiraling collapse of American status, credibility, common sense and humanity.

“Genocide” Joe Biden’s disastrous and completely avoidable war in Ukraine continues to crunch through thousands of Ukrainian and Russian young men at the same time we rush illegal cluster, white phosphorus and 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to drop on innocent starving children in Gazan refugee camps while effectively putting us to war with Russia.

Biden and Trump are not the problem. They are odious products of the problem: a completely corrupted corporate political system in it’s final transformation to full-on fascism. The debate wasn’t a disaster, it was a gift to the tiny percentage of the population willing to see and understand just how empty the American political system is.

FJB, indeed!

“FJB” is the best we can expect in political dialog in such a silly, cantankerous, nasty, brain-numb end stage of empire. Who needs a ten-point plan to bring healthcare to millions who can’t get care or a legislative proposal to address an accelerating climate catastrophe baking millions across the country or a runaway Supreme Court coup handing even more of the nation over to Wall Street sociopaths when a nasty little acronym with do?

Grandma Learns What FJB Means…

Who will win in November?

C’mon, do you really think it matters? Despite days of prep, Biden’s bumbling brain-dead debate debacle proves, the President isn’t in charge of crap. He’s just a glorified version of your local Walmart manager. The job is not to lead or think or set policy. The job is to obediently carry out orders from corporate HQ.

Here’s another campaign sign, from a nearby neighborhood…

The top line is where most of us are at these days: WTF!

The demand in the middle can never be achieved in our current electoral system.

The bottom line is half of the corporate uniparty disaster that has led to the top line.

FJB?

FUs.

Our only way out

The fall election will do nothing more than perpetuate the corporate machine crunching through our lives. Journalist Chris Hedges points to the only way we can rescue ourselves from the coming corporate gulag:

"Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up — which is what the corporate state is counting on — will see us enslaved and the earth’s ecosystem become inhospitable to human habitation. Let us take a lesson from the courageous men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it is done."

— Chris Hedges, The Chris Hedges Report, "You Saved Julian Assange” (6/26/24)

Speaking of Julian Assange, when he was hauled from the Ecuadorean embassy in London he was holding a copy of Gore Vidal’s book History of the National Security State, one of the best summaries of how we have come to the grim point we are at. It was a last warning to the world before he was slammed into the hellhole darkness of Bellmarsh prison.

This short 26-minute documentary on Vidal’s History of the National Security State is an excellent summary of how we have come to the point we are at.

Truly, as Hedges notes, civil disobedience is our only hope.

Resist.

26-minute video

---

The Question Isn’t Whether Trump Or Biden Is Declining Faster: It’s Why The US Has Withered To Such A Pitiful Choice

The more depressing fact about all of this is that out of a population of more than 330 million, this is the choice we face.

By Emma Brockes
The Guardian (6/19/24)

No election involving Donald Trump can be considered normal, but, in among all the breaches and oddities of this uniquely strange presidential race, one stands out as stranger than others. That is: speculation as to which of the two presidential candidates is showing the greater and more alarming rate of mental decline.

Until recently, this topic was considered at best unsporting, at worst dangerous – particularly on the left, where it is assumed that discussions around age will hurt Biden more than Trump. Even Trump, however, has benefited from certain delicacies governing the subject of impairment. During his first run for president, when the words “narcissist” and “borderline personality” first started to be bandied about, plenty of mental health professionals popped up to steeple their fingers and point out it is neither polite nor judicious to diagnose others based on zero clinical information.

Since then, all standards have lowered, cognitive impairment has become a major part of Trump’s campaign to undermine Biden, and both men – 78 and 81 respectively – have behaved in ways that might give even the most cautious observer pause.

These are two of the oldest people ever to run for president, at a time of unprecedented video documentation and manipulation, and in a race in which the stakes are so high you would have to be superhuman not to suffer the occasional lapse. Meanwhile, both are folksy, unorthodox communicators, with none of Obama-the-lawyer’s facility for pitch-perfect off-the-cuff eloquence.

Still, the evidence of decline on both sides is compelling…

Read the rest

---

Following Orders Of Republican Party, Milwaukee Officials Push Protest Sites Far From Convention Center

By Isiah Holmes
Wisconsin Examiner (6/21/24)

Milwaukee residents planning to protest outside the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July denounced the plan for parade routes and “free speech zones” announced Friday by the U.S. Secret Service. The plan adopts the requests of Republican leaders who said that a proposed protest site at Pere Marquette Park was too close to where RNC events would be held.

A parade route starting at Zeidler Union Square Park would take marchers southeast of the convention grounds. Tightly controlled “speakers platforms” had been established in the park and on the north side of the convention area, just across from the Fiserv Forum. The credentialed zone was expanded after Republicans made a last-minute rental of a venue. A group of local organizations collectively known as the Coalition to March on the RNC have denounced the city’s preparations for months. They said the latest plan suggests Republican officials can use such tactics to push the security zone out at will.

Republican demands

When the RNC was first announced, the coalition applied for a permit to march within sight and sound of the convention. Months passed without the permit being approved, with Republican leaders demanding the city and Secret Service push the protests as far away from the convention as possible.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the city for violating the free speech rights of the coalition. “We are surprised and disappointed to see how many blocks of Downtown Milwaukee the Secret Service has declared off limits to anyone but the convention attendees,” said ACLU staff attorney Tim Muth in a statement. “The large size of this zone makes it more critical than ever that the City take steps to allow for effective opportunities for expression and assembly by those with differing viewpoints.”

Both the ACLU and the Coalition to March on the RNC attempted to negotiate terms with the city. Those talks collapsed this week and the  ACLU brought its lawsuit in federal court. …

Read the rest

---

AS THE WEST COLLAPSES: The Irrelevance Of Voting Is Felt In Great Britain As Well

It’s far too easy to write us off as an apathetic demographic when the main parties seem to be trying to lose our vote. We are engaged in politics: we protest, we volunteer, but we don’t vote, because we are offered nothing.

By Shaniya Odulawa
The Guardian (6/21/24)

I’ve had this sinking feeling in my stomach about the direction of British politics since I was 15. Silence overtook our geography classroom, in a multicultural school in south-east London, as we watched the results of the Brexit referendum. Before then, I believed everyone thought as I did: sure, there were a few racists in the country, but immigrants were needed in this country, right? Brexit shook that. Overt racism and abuse grew, and for the first time I felt unsafe in my own country.

I’m part of the generation whose first vote happened after Brexit. It’s no secret that people my age vote less than others – a growing trend since the 1990s. A few of my friends don’t know who to vote for, or will begrudgingly vote Labour simply to get the Tories out this election. One proudly proclaimed she hadn’t voted since Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and is planning to abstain. I would like to berate her, but I can’t. What options do we have? With Rishi Sunak threatening national service and Keir Starmer having a go in the Express about “yobs terrorising our town centres”, it feels as if my age group is not just forgotten but actively vilified. And it’s not just young people: this election is set to be the most unequal in 60 years, with those in the poorest areas, ethnic minorities and people who don’t own their homes forecast to turn out in the lowest numbers.

I never thought I would consider abstaining in a national election. I’m not ignorant – I’ve studied politics since I was 16. I’ve been taught voting is one of the easiest ways to express your opinions in a democracy, and I believe that. I’m definitely not lazy – I worked as a carer and a cleaner alongside studying for my politics degree, hoping eventually to make my way into journalism. The hours were long, the pay was meagre and the work was hard. Now I realise those conditions might not be temporary. Despite growing up under politicians like Tony Blair and David Cameron promising university would make ours a less unequal society, it’s hard to feel that way when tuition fees have rocketed and much of my degree was spent learning online.

Killing off hope

I was once hopeful about politics. Under Corbyn, I believed a better Britain was possible. As a person who grew up working class, I found that his desire to scrap tuition fees really spoke to me: I would love the financial worry that I have around my university debt – now about £60,000 – not to be a constant distraction from my actual education. Nationalised railways would have meant I could afford the commute to work. What’s more, he had a clear stance on Gaza.

With Starmer, I haven’t felt remotely the same. I’ve lost count of how many times he has backtracked, sat on the fence or mentioned his mum was a nurse (we get it already). His faux relatability as a working-class person does nothing for me when he won’t commit to raising NHS worker pay above the measly £12 an hour he has promised. …

Read the rest

“The political scientist Timur Kuran writes that often revolutions take everyone by surprise, even those who participate in them. With all this political passion bubbling up in young people but with nowhere for it to go, I feel one is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re desperate for something to vote for – we just need an option.”