Tag Archives: american politicians

October 18, 2017

What Should Rich People Do About Trump?

By wise sloth

If Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promise to deregulate business, he’ll make a lot of rich people richer. Warren Buffett believes Trump will, which is why “the oracle of Omaha” said he’s 100% optimistic about the next four years. I doubt Buffett will ever see that the cost/benefit analysis of economic oppression and growth don’t add up, but there are others sitting in ivory towers watching America turn into a burning sweatshop. Some of them will have to wake up and realize it doesn’t matter if you die rich if the world dies too.

 

Cartoon of a man eating another man. The cannibal is labeled "Wall St.," and he's saying, "Who says I need regulation?"

 

Poor people understand this, but it doesn’t matter what they think, because in a capitalist economy, money is power, and poverty is powerlessness. The rich have all the power, because they took it from the poor using high prices, low wages, fines, fees and interest. Now the poor have one foot chained to their landlord’s house and the other chained to their job. It’s financially impossible for them to protest long enough to matter, but they need to, now more than ever, because America just chose the least sane member of the 1% to protect Americans from the 1%.

 

Cartoon of a poor person saying, "I'll do anything for you to make a little money," and a rich person saying, "I'll do anything to you to make a lot of money."

 

The rich are the only people with the power save the human race from the rich, and I wouldn’t expect the owners or heirs of Amway or Blackwater to undermine their own business model, but there are other types of rich people who got their money in more humane ways. Some of them would rather invest their fortunes in the future than let it sit in their bank accounts where it serves no purpose other than being a measurement of the owner’s ego and ability to take money from the poor.

Rich philanthropists have been donating to Republican and Democrat campaigns for decades, which has worked great for those expecting a return on their investment. Anyone who wants change should stop giving money and support to the RNC and DNC, because that’s putting gas in the car that drove Godzilla into town.  They’re not the solution. They’re the problem.

Listed below are some ways rich philanthropists can spend between one and ten million dollars to make a meaningful difference during the Trumpocalypse:

 

1: Fund a think tank

If politics and economics isn’t your area of expertise, then the best thing you can do before you give money to anyone, is fund a think tank. Recruit a team of researchers and geniuses and tell them to write a book for you titled, “What’s Wrong With The World, And How To Fix It For Under $10 Million.”

If you have any money left, you can enact the plan. If not, you can pitch it to rich people. Hopefully, you can inspire more of them to use their fortune for good than “The Gospel of Wealth” did.

 

2: Fund a constitutional convention

You could spend a few million hiring your own crack team of geniuses, or you could pool your resources with some friends and spend a few million more to literally hire all the smartest people on Earth, put them in an apartment complex, and tell them to stay there until they’ve created a new social contract or some kind of roadmap to fulfilling humanity’s potential. They could either publish their conclusion as a suggestion, or you could raise donation money for the team to use to enact the plan they come up with.

 

3: Fund a social media platform that organizes grassroots political parties

America’s problems are complicated, but one thing is certain, as long as the RNC and DNC monopolize all the political representation in America, nothing will change. They’re corrupt. Their election system is corrupt, and they don’t represent Americans. None of the third-party political groups are a good fit for most Americans either.

America can’t be divided into Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Parties and Green Parties. That’s not what America is. It’s made of hipsters, gangsters, educators, scientists, Millennials, Baby Boomers, African-Americans, Latinos, white males, Christians, Atheists, Muslims, parents, tradesmen, entertainers, the homeless, entry-level workers, women, INTPs, ENFJs, the mentally ill and experts in fields. These are the kinds of groups people identify with in their daily lives. If people are to be truly represented in politics, they need spokesmen from their groups.

To organize and find their spokesmen, they need a social media network designed to match people according to interest and attributes, like a dating site, except with project management tools.

 

4: Fund free online education

The silver bullet to all the world’s problems is education. If everyone had access to the ultimate free online school, then anyone with an internet connection could become a genius at anything. Then everyone could solve all their own problems, and nobody would be powerless. The more educated people there are, the more impossible it becomes to control the masses with circus acts like the 2016 election.

Free online schools exist, but none of them offer courses in every subject, and they’re so expensively run, it would cost a nation’s fortune to create all the classes. The solution is to crowdsource the job like Youtube and Wikipedia have done. The world could create its own perfect school within 10 years if someone made a website that has a list of every subject and guidelines for submitting content, and allowed users to fill in the blanks. The school could be completed in 4 years if you spent a billion dollars to hire retired school teachers to work full-time uploading content. If Bill Gates and Warren Buffet really wanted to, they could end ignorance in one year. If you know them, you should have a talk with them about their priorities, or at least pick up their slack.

 

5: Build floating cities

Since Trump was elected, panicky Americans crashed the Canadian immigration website. Sales for my book, “Tips on Immigrating to New Zealand” have tripled, and a lot of people are finding out it’s nearly impossible to permanently leave the country you were born in.

Americans would vote with their feet if an unsettled land mass existed to escape to. Unfortunately, the only place left to go is the ocean, but you play the hand you were dealt, not the one you wish you had. Our exodus to sea is long overdue. The technology exists to build floating islands for less money than it costs to buy an acre of land in Honolulu. Build a concrete drum the size of a cruise ship and stock it with beds, gardens, and jobs. Then let settlers move in and enjoy not being in America.

As a bonus, the artificial reefs created by the hulls of the floating villages will revitalize fish populations, and they would be the perfect vessels to collect garbage from the ocean. The more people who live at sea, the fewer people live in the economies that are churning the world’s resources into the garbage being dumped into the ocean.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what I’m talking about, read these:

How to Build a Trailer House Boat

Occupy LOL Street: The Freedom Flotilla

Monk and Punk: Book 2

 

6: Build sustainable mods for suburbia

Humanity won’t survive unless the suburbs are replaced with a better city model, but that will take centuries to accomplish. In the meantime, the poor are still living in pain, fear and debt slavery. This can be eased by modifying suburbia to be more sustainable.

Elon Musk is already doing this with cheap solar roofs. If someone else could invest their fortune into inventing and selling next-generation technology home water collection/filtration units and greenhouses, then everyone could produce their own food, water, and electricity without government assistance.

If we continue building houses, stores and offices using the same designs and materials, property owners will continue being bankrupted by home repairs, and humanity will go extinct from using all its resources to build cheap junk that falls apart and needs to be replaced.

Someone needs to invent a new wall that’s cheaper, stronger, more durable and easier to construct than what we use now. If the perfect wall already exists, then a billionaire real estate tycoon who is obsessed with walls needs to devote their fortune to popularizing it. Simply building a better wall would solve a staggering amount of the world’s problems. Trump would eliminate more illegal immigrants by giving Mexicans a new kind of wall they could use to convert their shanty towns into Hobbitons, than by building a 30-foot-tall concrete scar along the border.

 

7: Build low-cost sustainable cities

If everyone was guaranteed the necessities of life: food, water, clothing, shelter, and utilities, then being broke would be a minor inconvenience and not a life-threatening emergency. Living without savings would be tolerable, and people would have the freedom to be politically active.

Once people have everything necessary to survive, then 99% of their problems are already solved. The only thing left to do is happily fulfill their potential. If everyone had their needs filled by a non-government agency, then they wouldn’t need a president to save them.

Build an intentional community that has a job for every bed and creates/supplies all its working members’ needs in exchange for 20 hours of work per week. Have members who join sign a social contract that’s less oppressive and cultish than the average fast food employment contract, and then let the members work, live, love and learn in leisure.

Design the city to be as space-efficient as possible, and build the infrastructure using earthbags and other low-cost technology. After you’ve saved 250 people from capitalism and started making a profit, expand the community, make new ones, and help other countries copy your success. Once the idea catches on, everyone will be voting with their dollars on new homes instead of new politicians.

After everyone is living sustainably, then recessions, depressions, stock market crashes and all the other economic disaster will become obsolete, and the race for profits won’t drive humanity to extinction by turning the world’s resources into consumer garbage.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what I’m talking about, read these:

Occupy LOL Street: A Brave New Village

Intellectual Monastery Designs

 

8: Vote for The Wise Sloth for president.

Donating money to political parties is more useless than flushing it down the toilet. You’re throwing fuel on the fire. It’d do more good to just give it all away to panhandlers. You shouldn’t do that either though, because it would only temporarily ease one symptom of a systemic disease.

If you’re so desperate for change that every four years, you donate a lot of money to a random maniac you’ve never met and/or heard of, then give it to me.

I don’t have any political experience, but neither does Donald Trump. He has more business experience than me, but I have seven years of military service, which should be required to apply for the job of commander and chief anyway. I’ve already written a series of essays on the systemic flaws within the military system that negatively impact the troops, which civilian politicians never bring up, because they couldn’t know those problems exist.

If you like candidates who advertise themselves as “regular Joe’s,” who are in touch with the working class, then vote with your dollars for me, not another Ivy League simpleton who seems folksy because he has the IQ of Forrest Gump. I’m no Goodwill Hunting, but I’m closer than Donald Trump in intelligence and street cred. I’ve written instructions on how to think, and I’ve lived in ghettos, trailers, tents, suburbs, cities, and farms. I’ve worked the dirtiest, hardest, nastiest jobs alongside illegal immigrants and felons, not as a social experiment, but to make enough money to eat that night. I got on-the-job training in poverty before I learned about it in college. I’m well qualified to represent the poor and understand their problems. Plus, I have a reputation for articulating important ideas using words correctly.

You may not agree with all of my philosophies on ethics or religion, but if you read everything I’ve written on those subjects, you should get the impression I sincerely care about people. I don’t give hate speeches. I advocate equality. Trump’s first book was about how to take money from other people, and mine was about how to achieve the meaning of life by finding and fulfilling your potential. If you had to put your life in the hands of me or Trump based solely on the books we’ve written, I’m clearly the lesser of two evils.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump raised close to $1 billion in campaign contribution each. Obama’s plan was “hope and change.” Clinton’s was to have a vagina and not be Donald Trump, whose 100-day plan reads like a Nazi capitalist conspiracy theorist manifesto. I have a better, more fleshed out plan than any of them came to the table with.

If you’d vote for Godzilla just to wreck shop so we can rebuild, then give me your money. I won’t hunt, kill or destroy anything. I’ll jump straight to the rebuilding. My plan is to not use your campaign donations to buy a landfill of posters and pens, but to invest it in building profitable, expandable, sustainable intentional communities.

If I ran for president of the United States, I’d either get assassinated by an investment firm or stonewalled by Congress. I can succeed as the president of the world’s first viral, sustainable intentional community though. You won’t have to wait four years to see if I keep my word and then wait for another ten to see if it had any longitudinal effects on the world. Give me a million dollars, and I’ll start blowing your mind and raising people’s quality of life in three months.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Donald Trump, Saving the World

October 18, 2017

Why Won’t People Just Give Trump A Chance (The Orphanage Metaphor)

By wise sloth

I’m going to explain why people won’t just give Trump a chance by using an analogy:

Once upon a time, there was an old woman named Amy who ran an orphanage. Amy had the best of intentions for the children under her ward, but she had a bad habit of dating terrible men and allowing them to meddle in the affairs of the orphanage. Inevitably, every one of her boyfriends would come in, abuse the children, steal money and sell the furniture, plumbing, decorations and anything else that wasn’t bolted down.

 

Picture of an evil man bothering an orphan while a woman looks on smiling, from the movie, "Oliver Twist."

 

Of all the children who lived at the orphanage, the two most outspoken were Connie and Libby, both of whom were fed up with Amy’s boyfriends. One day Amy brought home a smooth talking black man who Connie hated immediately, but Libby loved him. Amy dated the black man for eight months, and Connie threw an epic tantrum the entire time. Every day she would scream about how he was going to destroy the orphanage. All the children grew so weary of hearing Connie call him a nigger and accuse him of being an illegal immigrant that eventually they just stopped paying any attention to her.

While this was going on, starry-eyed Libby defended Amy’s boyfriend despite the fact that he acted exactly like all the rest of them- abusing children, stealing money and going as far as selling the children’s medicine to friends he owed favors to.

Eventually, he left, and Amy started courting again. After sifting through the dating pool, she narrowed her love interests down to two people: a bitter old woman with crooked eyes and a racist philandering old man with orange hair. Both of them were professional con artists who made a living stealing from children and exploiting orphanages.

The woman walked around the orphanage with a tape measure, taking inventory of everything she planned to sell while talking to her business partners on her cell phone in a hushed voice. The man was even worse. He grabbed the girls by their pussies and openly bragged about how he was going to kick out the Mexican and Muslim children and not allow any more into the orphanage. For some reason, Libby loved the woman with crooked eyes and hated the man with orange hair. Connie loved the man but hated the woman.

In the end, Amy decided to go steady with the man and end her courtship with the woman. Libby was heartbroken. For weeks she cried and yelled at Amy, “How could you let another con artist into the orphanage? Can’t you see he’s obviously a greedy, creepy, racist lunatic!?”

Indignant, Connie defended Amy by shouting at Libby, “You’re so closed minded and delusional! Why do you keep saying he’s sexist just because he grabs our pussy? Why do you keep saying he’s racist just because he keeps bragging about kicking out minorities? It’s not fair. I want him to be here, which means we all want him to be here. We all owe it to him to give him a chance.”

All of the other children in the orphanage got tired of hearing Connie and Libby arguing before the man even moved in. On the day he finally did, Libby threw a massive tantrum and ran all around the building shouting and breaking things. Connie watched Libby’s tantrum with a mixture of gloating and disgust. When the tantrum was over, Connie said to Libby, “Why can’t you just respect Amy’s decision? This man is practically our father now. So you better grow up and start showing him some respect.”

At that moment, the quietest child, Marjorie, stood up and screamed in Connie’s face, “What are you talking about!? You threw an eight-month tantrum the entire time her last boyfriend was here. You don’t get to play the ‘give him a chance’ card after the way you’ve been acting. And he’s not our dad. We don’t owe him anything. He’s just the latest fox Amy let into the hen house. It blows everyone’s mind you and Libby can’t see how all of Amy’s lovers are completely corrupt.”

Seething with self-righteous anger, Connie sneered at Marjorie, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?”

Marjorie threw her hands in the air and shouted, “We can’t! We’re penniless orphans! Nobody will take us. We’re trapped. We’re not lucky to be here. We’re prisoners. Sure, Amy does some nice things for us when she’s not snooping through our stuff and running the orphanage into the ground. But she makes us do chores until our hands bleed to earn our keep. We’re getting the short end of the stick. So fuck that slave driver and all her shitty boyfriends, especially this one who is the worst of them all.”

Connie stuck her nose up in the air and sauntered back to her dilapidated cot to gloat. Over her shoulder, she said, “You’ll see. He’ll make the orphanage great again.”

Marjorie shook her head in disbelief and muttered, “Whatever. You’ll see, but I have a feeling you won’t admit it when he turns out to be just like all the rest.”

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Donald Trump

October 18, 2017

How To Survive The Trumpocalypse

By wise sloth

how to survive the trumpocalypse

 

I compiled a collection of blogs I’ve written into an E-book entitled “How to Survive the Trumpocalypse,” which is available on Amazon. Below is the introduction and links to all of the blogs:

 

INTRODUCTION

 

This book is a collection of essays I posted my blog, TheWiseSloth.com, between 2010 and 2016. The tagline of the website is, “Enlightenment for the masses,” and its mission statement is, “to provide editorial, philosophical, instructional, inspirational and satirical posts in the form of essays, lists, comics, and fiction, which tend to be irreverent, humorous and controversial.”

I choose the topics I write about by asking myself, “What are the most important questions people need answers to?” So I’ve spent years writing about the root causes of people’s biggest problems, which often boil down to politics and economics.

When major events happen in the world, readers will E-mail me to ask for my perspective, and during the 2016 presidential primaries, I received several requests to explain the candidates and the election in general. In response, I wrote three essays and three comics analyzing the candidates and the political process. In them, I predicted Hillary Clinton would be America’s next president, and I only planned on writing one blog about her victory, because I didn’t have anything to say about her that I hadn’t already said about Barack Obama.

I’d never considered writing a blog about Trump’s presidency, because he was just a bad joke that got taken too far. Then, all of a sudden the joke turned real and wasn’t funny anymore. The internet buzzed for days after the election with people asking what it means that Trump won. How did it happen? What will he do next? What do we do next? Nobody had any idea, myself included. I needed answers to these questions for my own closure.

Initially, I assumed I’d be able to cover the topic in two or three posts, but the end of the rabbit hole turned out to be ten blogs deep. The first four attempted to explain what it means that Trump is president. The last six answered the question, “What should we do about Trump?”

By the time I finished, I realized I had enough content on an important enough topic to make a short book, but after compiling the blogs, I felt the finished product raised more questions than it answered, such as, “How did this happen? What are the stakes? What would happen if we did nothing? Why was I wrong about Hillary Clinton? How far can we question the government? What else can we do?” Since I had already written dozens of posts over the years addressing those questions, I went back and added them to complete the narrative.

The blogs aren’t listed in the chronological order they were written, but each chapter heading includes the date it was originally posted on The Wise Sloth and how many days that was before or after November 9th, 2016, the day of the Trumpocalypse.

Since the essays were originally written to stand alone, some of the information in them is repeated, but it’s presented from different angles in different contexts, which shows how it fits in the bigger picture.

“How to Survive the Trumpocalypse” is divided into seven sections: “Obama’s legacy,” “The root of America’s problem, “What poverty looks and feels like,” “Problems in American culture,” “The Trumpocalypse,” “The moral imperative of civil disobedience” and “What do we do now?”

The book begins with three essays written about/during, Obama’s presidency, because I want to establish immediately that Trump is just a symptom of a bigger problem, which is that America has taken capitalism to its most predatory extreme. All of the essays in the next three sections illustrate how, for the poorest of the poor, living in America has been apocalyptic since 1776.

The “Trumpocalypse” section, which includes all the essays I wrote about/during the 2016 presidential election, leads to the conclusion the reason November 9th, 2016 is such a significant date, is because it was the day America’s economic/political system reached its inevitable conclusion by crowning a corrupt, unqualified, mentally unstable billionaire as its supreme leader. In other words, the system officially endorsed the root of the problem to be the solution.

The government crossed a line allowing Trump to become president. Worst case scenario, the Trumpocalypse was an official declaration of war on the poor. Best case scenario, it was a confession of failure. Either way, now more than ever, every American needs to reassess their perception of reality and start thinking and acting differently, which is why I included the section about civil disobedience.

The solutions I propose in the final section are far-fetched, but I didn’t set the bar so high because I’m naïve. I did it because America has a drastic problem that requires drastic solutions, and lowering the bar isn’t one of them.

My goal isn’t to convince you to believe everything I say. I just want to educate and inspire you. I use a conversational tone and try to inject humor and wit while discussing big topics so you’ll be more likely to read the entire book, think about America’s problems differently and look for solutions nobody has thought of yet.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Donald Trump

October 17, 2017

Everything Wrong With America’s 2016 Presidential Primaries

By wise sloth

"Trying to pick my favorite politician is like trying to decide which STD would be best for me. "

 

The president of the USA is arguably the most powerful person in the world. This person has the power to build, destroy and rebuild nations. The lives of literally everyone on the planet is affected by who the president of the United States is. Your quality of life will be affected by who the next president of the United States is. If that person doesn’t wield their power with great responsibility and wisdom, but continues to behave the way the past two presidents did, then America will go bankrupt and World War 3 will spill out of the Middle East. So it’s vital that the next president of the United States be wiser than King Solomon and stronger than King David.

Understanding the gravity of the situation, the current list of potential candidates for the 2016 presidential election should make you sad and scared.  None of them are up to the task of representing the American people let alone setting foreign policies that treat the rest of the world respectfully and humanely.

At least five of the Republican nominees (notably George Pataki, John Kasich, Jim Gilmore, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson) don’t stand any chance of winning. They don’t have the money, name recognition or leadership skills necessary to win the election let alone run the most powerful country in the world. Any political advisor with a high school diploma knows this. Their political advisors know this, which raises the question, why are they running? The best case scenario is that they’re doing this as a publicity stunt to improve their existing careers. The worst case scenario is that they’re acting like members of a NASCAR team who have no intention of winning the race and are only in the competition to get in the way of their teammate’s competition. Either way, their presence in the race reveals how America’s presidential elections have devolved into a corrupt theatrical performance.

At least six of the Republican nominees (notably, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal) are Christian zealots who want to inject their religious values into law. They believe that since America was founded by Christians, and the majority of Americans today are Christian that means it’s only just that the laws of America reflect Christianity, but this ignores the fact that America is full of non-Christians who don’t want, and shouldn’t have to, live under the Christian equivalent of Sharia law.

Even if America were a Christian nation, there are more important issues that the American people need their president to focus on besides taking America back to the dark ages. Even if there were a reason why the American government should be more Christian, all of the Republican candidates are rich and powerful liars who are serving themselves and paying lip service to their professed faith. The only Christian issues they talk about are a few cherry-picked items that are popular with their voting demographic. These men are a danger to non-Christians, and they lack the integrity to represent real Christians.

With the exception of Donald Trump and Ben Carson, all of the Republican nominees are professional campaigners. They’ve all built their careers on contributions from wealthy donors. They’re all compromised and have long histories of not acting in the best interest of the common man. None of their solutions to the American people’s problems address the root cause of those issues: economic inequality, which should come as no surprise since they’re all indebted to the people who create and sustain economic inequality… people like Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was born to rich parents and inherited the business they built, which he made even more profitable by underpaying his workers, overcharging his customers, bribing politicians and hoarding his profits. In the last 1980’s he made national news for throwing a one-night party that cost $1 million. He exploited bankruptcy laws to avoid paying taxes until those laws were changed, and he has donated at least $100,000 to Hillary Clinton in exchange for undisclosed favors. He has also run for president once already as a publicity stunt to boost ratings for his television show, “The Apprentice.”

Donald Trump has no interest in representing the average Americans, but a lot of poor people like him because he speaks frankly. The reason he speaks frankly though, is because he’s not trying to win the presidency. He’s just trying to stay in the headlines to improve his popularity because it’s good for his business. He’s laughing at his supporters all the way to the bank. I’m sure nobody is more surprised than him that he’s made it this far, but he can’t, won’t and shouldn’t go the distance. He’s a farce of a human being, let alone a presidential candidate, and the fact that he is a presidential candidate just goes to prove how farcical America’s presidential elections have become.

 

"Donald Trump isn't going to win. The system isn't set up that way! He's here to lose so you are satisfied with whoever they put in office."

I was wrong. Turns out the truth is far worse. Our system is just that broken.

 

The only other Republican candidate who would do more to help big business crush the poor than Donald Trump is part-time libertarian, Rand Paul who wants to eliminate as much government as possible. While there’s no doubt that big government is a big problem in America, and we definitely need to eliminate a lot of its overreach, die-hard Libertarians want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They believe that once government regulations are removed then the guiding hand of the free market will stop big businesses from committing human rights abuses. But regulations exist, because before those regulations existed big businesses used every time-tested unethical trick in the book to destroy competition and exploit everyone and everything they could to make more profits. Removing regulations that protect workers, customers and the environment will just cause history to repeat itself. Rand Paul won’t be the next president of the USA, but it still makes me sad and frightened that someone who wants to recreate the America that Upton Sinclair described in The Jungle can get this close to the presidency.

The only two serious Democratic presidential candidates right now are Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton is the quintessential career politician. Some people like her because they say she has the most political experience, but that just means she has the most experience lining her pockets with campaign contributions, playing the system and becoming compromised. She would win the general election hands down if she simply called herself a Republican instead of a Democrat, because she’s the strongest pro-business candidate of all the politicians who are falling over themselves to work for the ultra-rich. If I had to bet money on who is going to win the presidency, I would bet on Hillary Clinton, because she’s spent the most time and effort courting all the people who directly or indirectly choose who the president will be, and that’s not the American people.

The only candidate in the race who seems to genuinely care about the average American and who is talking about the root causes of America’s problems is Bernie Sanders. I would be more excited about him if we didn’t already hear Barack Obama say all the right things and make all the right promises in his campaigns only to completely sell out to big business the moment he got into office. What few things he did try to accomplish for the common man were completely blocked by all the other politicians who work for big businesses. The exact same thing is going to happen to whoever becomes president, even Bernie Sanders, because that’s how the system is designed to work.

There is no way any presidential candidate is going to represent the American people. That’s not pessimistic. It’s simply the depressing reality of American government. That should make everyone in the world sad and scared.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in The 2016 Presidential Elections

October 17, 2017

Why It’s Delusional To Vote In America’s 2016 Presidential Election

By wise sloth

One of the fundamental tenets of American culture is that it has the best political and economic system to ever exist, which is proven by the unparalleled level of freedom and opportunity guaranteed to any citizen, especially those who work the hardest. Everything great about America stems from the Constitution and the electoral system, which gives the people the power to choose who represents them in government.

Americans believe in their election system so deeply they ridicule and shame anyone who chooses not to vote. Ironically, most Americans don’t vote, but they still have faith in the system and criticize anyone who expresses too much distrust in the value of voting.

 

 

Every American needs to ask themselves, how much proof would it take to convince you that your vote doesn’t count? How blatantly rigged and corrupt would a presidential election have to become before you conceded voting is merely an exercise in holding onto a delusion? I believe the 2016 presidential election crossed that line and anyone who still has faith in the system is holding onto an optimistic conspiracy theory that has already been thoroughly debunked.

The evidence for this conclusion started piling up long before 2016 in America’s quality of life statistics. Compared to other countries, America isn’t ranked highest for freedom or lowest for corruption. America has the highest prison population in the world, which is mostly due to America’s war on drugs, which every major academic study done on the subject has determined causes more harm than good, yet the government refuses to change its policies on. Depression, suicide, and homelessness are epidemic, especially among veterans, the people who should be the proudest of their country. Poverty is epidemic. Most Americans have less than 1 month’s salary in savings, which means most Americans don’t have any retirement savings. Rent and mortgages are unaffordable in most cities. College tuition is so inflated it probably won’t pay off even if you could afford it. You can’t blame America’s poverty on laziness, because wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living. The problem is systemic.

By every major quality of life standard, most Americans are economically and politically oppressed. These problems have persisted and gotten worse through every president and Congress in recent history. If America’s electoral system worked as great as Americans say it does, then why has America devolved so badly?

 

 

In 2016 it’s practically hypocritical for Americans to defend the sanctity of voting since Congress has an 11% approval rating, and the top two presidential candidates in 2016 have record low approval ratings. It’s delusional to maintain faith in a system that puts/keeps leaders in power who the majority doesn’t want there.

The problem isn’t that democracy is a failed experiment. The only reason voting doesn’t work in America is because of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC).  These two organizations act like staffing agencies for elected government positions. In order to run for any major political office, you have to become a member of one of these two agencies. Once accepted, they provide money and support to help you manage your election campaign.

Theoretically, anyone can run for office as an independent or third-party candidate, but the DNC and RNC have passed laws that make it virtually impossible to win a major election without being allied to them, which means there’s no chance of any other political party winning a majority of the seats in Congress.

Ultimately, the DNC and RNC control which politicians the voters get to choose between, but it barely matters who wins, because the DNC and RNC let wealthy businessmen decide which laws elected officials pass in exchange for campaign donations. The DNC and RNC even let corporations write laws, which elected officials then sign into effect. If that doesn’t defeat the purpose of an election, then I don’t know what does.

It also defeats the purpose of picking a leader if the candidates you’re given to pick between are the worst people in the country. The DNC and RNC chose some of the most incompetent, corrupt, divisive politicians to run in the 2016 presidential primaries. Americans had no choice who made the short list, and there’s no chance they would have picked the same group if they had a say in the matter. Being forced to pick between the lesser of evils isn’t freedom of choice.

 

Photo of campaign signs for Sanders, Trump and Clinton next to a sign advertising, pinestraw. The photo is caption,ed, "I'M WITH PINESTRAW."

 

The “winner” of the RNC presidential primaries was Donald Trump, a racist, xenophobic, megalomaniac psychopath billionaire with a long track record of corruption, indecency and bad ideas. A number of parallels between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and Adolph Hitler’s is so similar it would be comical if he wasn’t a step away from becoming the leader of the most powerful military in history.

The “winner” of the DNC presidential primaries was Hillary Clinton, a career politician famous for corruption, lying, and meanness. Despite her claims that she’s been working for the people her entire career, she’s been a part of the system that has driven America to ruin. Before and during her presidential campaign, she accepted millions of dollars of donations for speaking to the wealthy corporations who have been hoarding the nation’s wealth by exploiting the common worker. She’s able but unwilling to release transcripts of these speeches, because she knows she promised to keep the 1%’s profits safe from the deserving hands of the poor.

Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the DNC’s presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders, quickly and temporarily earned a cult following because he spoke against corporate corruption in Washington DC. Bernie Sanders lost, but it’s a documented fact that election fraud took place in key states that helped Hillary win. It’s also documented that the DNC took more secret steps to discredit Bernie Sanders and help Hillary Clinton win the nomination.

Even without that, Hillary Clinton already had an unfair advantage by having superdelegates pledge to vote for her. “Superdelegates” are random powerful people who the DNC allows to cast a super vote in the DNC presidential primary race. A superdelegate’s vote is equal to about 700,000 regular votes, and the superdelegate can still cast their regular vote. If that sounds confusing, it’s because superdelegates are legalized election-rigging.

Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have even been in the race to begin with, because she was under criminal investigation by the FBI for mishandling top-secret information when she was Secretary of State. The FBI found her guilty of wrongdoing but cleared her of any criminal offenses, and they were quick to add they wouldn’t treat anyone else who did the exact same thing so leniently.

Guilty or not guilty, anyone actively under investigation by the FBI shouldn’t be allowed to run for president. Not only is Hillary running, but she’s at the front of the race because multiple government agencies bent and broke the law to help her win… despite the fact that most Americans, conservative and liberal alike, despise her. Donald Trump is the only person America reviles more than Hillary Clinton, which is probably the only reason the RNC chose him to run against her.

Even if Trump won the popular vote, like Bernie Sanders probably did, Hillary Clinton will still win, because the popular vote doesn’t determine who wins the presidency. The electoral college makes the final vote, and they’re part of the political machinery that has already proven it’s committed to ramrodding Hillary Clinton into office.

Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, but she won’t be the leader of a democracy, because she wasn’t chosen by the people. She should be arrested and sentenced to life in prison for treason and all her other acts of corruption, but making an example out of her won’t change anything. The root of the problem is the existence of the DNC and RNC.

It’s time to stop waiting for the DNC and RNC to do a better job. That’s like waiting for a serial killer to stop slitting your children’s’ throats in their sleep. They’re the source of America’s apocalyptic problems. Minor political reform won’t achieve lasting change as long as the root of the problem still exists. The only way for America to become great again is for the DNC and RNC to abdicate. Discussing whether Trump can or should beat Hillary in the 2016 presidential election distracts from the only conversation America should be having right now: How can the DNC and RNC abdicate peacefully?

If there was ever a time in America’s history when you shouldn’t vote, 2016 is the year. The first step the American people need to take to bring about real change is to vote against the two corrupt ruling parties by not voting.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in The 2016 Presidential Elections, voting

October 17, 2017

Why Obamacare Made Me Facepalm

By wise sloth

Picture of Captain Picard holding his hand on his face, with the caption, "FACEPALM: Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn't work."

 

Before I begin explaining why I face-palmed at Obamacare, I want to send out a big, sarcastic congratulations to all the professionally paid right-wing, conservative political analysts who spent the past year screaming about how evil and socialist Obamacare is and how it’s going to bankrupt the country and end civilization as we know it.

Yes, there are serious problems with Obamacare, but America never really had a chance to have a logical, objective conversation about what those problems are or how they could be rectified, because the whole debate was hijacked by shock jocks who wound down the clock blindly raging about how Obama is the demon spawn of Hitler and Stalin. All intelligent opposition to Obamacare has been drowned out by white noise that effectively allowed Obamacare to pass without facing any real opposition. The way I see it, Fox News deserves as much credit for passing Obamacare as Obama does. For that, every conservative pundit who has called Obama a socialist in the past year wins a double facepalm.

 

Photo of Captain Picard and Riker holding their hands on their faces, with the caption, "DOUBLE FACEPALM: When the fail is so strong, one facepalm is not enough."

 

The problem with Obamacare is it doesn’t address the root cause of why health care in America is unaffordable, which is health insurance companies inflating health care costs beyond reason. This isn’t a profound secret. Everyone in the world outside of Washington D.C. and the Fox News headquarters already knows it.

Health insurance companies don’t exist to help people. They exist to make a profit, and they try to make as much profit as possible by charging customers as high of prices as they can get away with while paying out as little as possible, the same way auto insurance artificially inflates the cost of car repairs.

If you can’t pay the inflated costs of medical insurance, then you can’t get health care… even though it would have been affordable without the intervention of the insurance companies… who are supposed to exist to help you get healthcare.

 

 

Obamacare says the way to fix the problem created by insurance companies, is to require everyone to buy insurance, which is like telling villagers who keep getting attacked by wolves they can stop the wolves from eating a few people by forcing everyone to line up to have a bite taken out of their leg.

Granted, there are some provisions in the 900+ pages of Obamacare that try to reign in how much profit insurance companies get to keep, but if the Dodd-Frank bill has taught us anything, it’s that wealthy companies can neuter legislation in part or in whole, at will, as it suits them. So I don’t expect any part of Obamacare that stands between insurance companies and their profit margin to last more than two or three election cycles.

Even if I’m just being paranoid, and Obamacare doesn’t turn into a werewolf in sheep’s clothing, it still doesn’t take the consumer out of the wolf’s mouth in the first place. What it does is set another precedent that the government can make up whatever taxes it wants and force everyone to have to pay it whether they like it or not. If we can be punished in any way whatsoever for not buying mandated car or health insurance, then we’ve set a precedent where the American people can be treated like criminals for any arbitrary reason the government decides. Yesterday we were forced to buy car insurance. Today we’re forced to buy health insurance. Who knows what we’ll be forced to pay tomorrow.

Obamacare isn’t the apocalypse, but it’s a step in the direction of a dystopian police state. When you include it with getting fined for jaywalking, having to allow security guards to fondle your genitals at the airport, getting spied on, and all the other little violations of personal liberty the government says you have to put up with, they all add up to a well paved road to a terrible place you don’t want to be.

For all Obama’s campaign promises about hope and change, look what Obamacare has given the American people: A gigantic pile of bureaucratic regulations nobody even understands. Before Obamacare, I wasn’t able to afford to get a wart removed from my hand. Now I need a law degree to figure out how to get a wart removed from my hand. When people said they wanted change they didn’t mean they wanted life to be more complicated.

I don’t want to have to figure out which insurance plan best fits my needs. The insurance plan that best fits my needs is the one that doesn’t confuse me so emasculatingly I don’t realize I’m getting raped.

You don’t need 900 pages to solve the problem of health insurance. Profit is the problem. The best product is the one that costs the least and has the highest return. When insurance companies exist to make a profit, it’s literally impossible for them to offer the cheapest product with the highest return.

 

 

I wish Obama was a socialist. Even if he won’t completely socialize health care, he could at least socialize the health insurance industry. If insurance still costs as much as possible and pays out the lowest return on investment, at least all the profit would go to the government, who could use it to subsidize health care instead of all that money going to an old, fat white guy’s bank account so he can buy a new private island.

However, if America nationalized the health insurance industry, it could charge affordable prices and provide a generous return, as well as subsidize unemployed people’s health care with the profits that used to go to insurance companies. No American would ever have to fill out another health insurance form ever again, and everyone would get health care without bankrupting the country.

But that’s never going to happen as long as big business controls the government. As long as elected politicians’ hands are tied behind their backs by golden handcuffs that their campaign contributors hold the key to, then the only change Americans can ever expect are more taxes, fines, and bureaucracy, just like we got with Obamacare.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in barack obama

October 17, 2017

10 Things Obama Won’t Change In His Second Term

By wise sloth

Photo of Iraqi children standing in rubble, with the caption, "Did you hear? Americans have just voted on whether the person firing the drone missiles at us is a democrat or a republican."

 

Note: This post was originally written on November 7, 2012

Barack Obama just won another four years as president of the United States, and I’d be excited about that, but as we all know, he hasn’t lived up to his 2008 campaign slogan of “hope and change.” Part of the blame lies with Republican politicians and the influence of Fox News for holding the Obama’s administration, the American political system, the American people, and to some extent, the world, hostage with their stubbornness and ignorance. However, Obama didn’t take a strong stance against a great many injustices. In the next four years, he’ll continue standing by idly while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and humanity slides closer to extinction.

Here’s a list of things Obama won’t change in the next four years. In fact, these are all things that no Democrat or Republican candidate would have or will take a strong stance against for the foreseeable future. So remember this list every time you go to the polls.

 

1: Campaign finance reform

The main reason the world can’t expect to see America change or even move forward is because millionaires and billionaires fund politicians’ campaigns. As a result, American politicians are compromised before they even enter office. If they don’t play ball with the big political financiers then that money will go to fund their opponent in the next election cycle.

The rich only want their politicians to do one thing for them: make them richer at the expense of the poor. The richer the rich get, the more political power they can afford. The poorer the poor get, the less political power they can afford. Politicians know this, but they won’t put an end to it, because they’ll lose their career (and possibly their life) if they so much as talk about how important it is to take away rich people’s ability to unofficially buy political power through campaign contributions.

 

2: Holding politicians accountable

Politicians don’t have to take the same competency exams that soldiers have to take before enlisting. They don’t have to pass the same exams foreigners have to take before immigrating to America. They don’t have to take the same drug tests janitors have to take. When politicians prove their incompetency they don’t lose their job like teachers do. When they break laws, they rarely go to jail like voters do. When they go senile with old age, they’re not forced into retirement. They can even get convicted of corruption specifically and still be able to stay in office and run for higher offices. There’s no motivation for them to care, and since no politician is going to instate stricter standards for politicians they’re going to keep not caring about you.

 

3: Crushing protests

It would be hard to send a clearer message to the world that hope will be crushed and change will not be tolerated than ordering police to beat, mace, taze, arrest and disperse protesters. The American government sent that message to the world when the Occupy Wall Street protesters were terrorized by the police and discredited by the media. There’s no reason to expect any American politician will act any differently now.

 

4: The U.C.M.J

The Uniform Code of Military Justice violates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Human Rights. The American public will continue spending trillions of dollars in taxes to support this inhumane document because no American politician will stand up against it.

 

5: Ethnic cleansing in Israel

What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is ethnic cleansing at best. Given enough time it will be genocide, and the Israeli government will have all the time they need to exterminate the few Palestinians who remain in the concentration camps they’ve been corralled into because Israel has the full support of the United States government.

 

6: Predatory lending

Do you know why interest rates on loans are so expensive? Because that’s how bankers get rich. The higher interest rates are set on mortgages and business loans, the more landlords and business owners have to charge their poor customers to cover the cost. Banks are bleeding humanity to death so a few people can get obscenely rich, and they’re going to keep bleeding humanity to death because no American politician will stand up to big banks.

 

7: Manipulation in the media

Fox News argued and won a court case in Florida saying they have no obligation to tell the truth. They’ve been lying through their teeth ever since and have crippled their fans’ ability to think or act rationally. Now insanity is the norm in America.

Even less biased media outlets still bombard their audiences with commercial propaganda that convinces them to act on their base instincts and spend money they don’t have on products they don’t need. The media in America is more Orwellian than even George Orwell could have predicted. Every generation of American children is going to grow up getting mind-fucked because no American politicians will intervene on their behalf.

 

8: Fair wages and prices

The standard business model all around the world is for companies to pay their workers as little, and charge their customers as much, as possible so the owners can keep the lion’s share of the profit. Billions of people don’t live in abject poverty because they’re lazy and stupid. They’re poor because the only way the rich can get richer is to take more money from the poor. The rich are going to keep bleeding the poor to death with the consent of the politicians they’ve bought… politicians like Barack Obama.

 

9: The war on drugs

The war on drugs is a misnomer. It’s really a war on people. It’s an obvious and well-established fact the war on people is hurting more people than it helps. The only people it really helps are criminal kingpins and war profiteers like the gun and prison industries. While the poor live in fear and rot in jail, there are a lot of rich people getting richer, and they’re going to keep getting richer because no president will stand up for what’s right.

 

10: Equal rights for all

It’s still illegal for women to take their shirts off in the same places as men, which makes women second-class citizens. Obama isn’t going to fix that, I guess because equal rights aren’t as important as bailing out predatory lending institutions.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in barack obama

October 17, 2017

Americans, You’re Not Represented In The 2012 Presidential Election

By wise sloth

Note: I fear that if you change the names at dates, everything I say here will apply to every presidential election in the foreseeable future.

Every election season you hear people say, “If you don’t vote you can’t complain.” Anytime you complain about laws you don’t like, people will tell you, “You live in a democracy. If you want to change things then vote or run for office.”

 

 

This brings us to the 2012 presidential election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, neither of whom represent the majority of their political party. Romney has a few die-hard fans, but most conservatives don’t like him, because he’s a big city fat cat pandering to poor country voters, and he doesn’t carry himself with the confident poise of a president. He almost seems terrified to be running for president because he knows he’s not very good at lying on the spot. Plus, he’s a Mormon, which to conservative Christians, means he believes in a false prophet. For a lot of reasons, Republicans just don’t want Mitt Romney to be their president, and they really, really don’t want Barack Obama again. So they’re unrepresented in this presidential election.

Obama also has some fanatical supporters, but most liberals don’t want to spend another four years watching him do everything they hated George Bush for. Obama-mania is over. He had his chance to change things, and he didn’t. He maintained the status quo to the point of standing by silently, consenting to police beating and arresting American citizens for protesting for freedom, justice, and representation in the nation-wide Occupy Wall Street protests.

So in the 2012 election, Americans get to choose between an old white guy who made a fortune in the financial sector squeezing the little guys and an old black guy whose campaign is funded by old white guys who made their fortunes in the financial sector squeezing the little guys. And both candidates are going to staff every government position in their power with old, rich people from the financial sector who made their fortunes squeezing the little guy.

If that’s enough to scare you into voting Libertarian, you’ll just elect an old white guy who wants to remove every safeguard that protects the poor from getting squeezed by the rich. So the 2012 presidential election is merely a charade where the American people get to choose who they want to represent the rich.

At the time I’m writing this, the 2012 election isn’t for another 6 months, but I can already tell you who’s going to win representation in the White House. The rich are, and the poor are going to be told if they don’t like it, they can change who represents the rich in the White House in four more years.

I can see how some people might not have seen this coming in the 2008 presidential election with everyone so excited about George Bush leaving and Obama-mania sweeping the nation, but I don’t know how it could be any more obvious in 2012 that none of the presidential candidates represent the American people. The sub-par choices should be the wakeup call that Americans will never be represented in any presidential election as long as they only get to choose between the puppets the Republican and Democratic parties nominate.

Update: I was right.

 

https://youtu.be/_KUGRhiCBzA

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in barack obama

October 17, 2017

What I Think Of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

By wise sloth

The 2016 presidential primary race is almost over, and it has come down to three hopefuls: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I’ve had a lot of people ask me what I think about the candidates and who I think is going to win. So, by request, this is my theory on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Voters need to understand who these people are and what their platforms are, but that information alone can be misleading if you don’t understand how elections work and how these candidates fit into the greater political system.

Presidential elections are supposed to be a contest between the best and brightest Americans to determine who will act as the will of the citizens in government, but that’s not how elections in America work anymore, if it ever did.

The American people don’t vote for the president. They vote for representatives in the electoral college who have no obligation to vote according to the will of the people. The only reason this system exists is to act as a fail-safe in case the people don’t choose the candidate that the political system wanted to win.

For that reason alone, a vote is just a wish. That’s dystopian already, but the value of a vote is worth less than that, because all the candidates come from a small pool of applicants, not the best and brightest minds from the general population.  There are only two ways to become a presidential candidate. You either have to be a billionaire, or you have to climb the ladder of the Democratic or Republican party. So voters get to pick between the puppet on the right hand, the puppet on the left hand or the guy holding the puppets.

It doesn’t matter if a candidate is a member of the Democratic or Republican party. They’re all professional campaigners who work for the same donors and aren’t allowed into the club, let alone get allowed to run for president, unless they play ball. Even if a politician goes rogue and does things that aren’t in the interest of big business, they still have to work against thousands of powerful people who are playing ball, and those puppets will shut down the government before they let anyone challenge the status quo.

If any of this is true, consider how Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders relationship to the existing power structure:

 

Photo of Donald Trump

 

Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a member of the 1%, the people who are hoarding all the money that the poor can’t use to buy food, health care, a home or an education. Economic inequality is the biggest problem in America today, and Donald Trump is the poster child for inequality.  He made his billions the same way every billionaire did, by exploiting their workers, customers, and investors. He’s not the solution to America’s problems. He’s the embodiment of America’s problems.  The best thing that could happen to him is for economic inequality to keep getting worse.

There’s no reason to believe Donald Trump cares about anyone but himself. That’s why you shouldn’t vote for him, and also why the electoral college will never vote him into office. He’s  a liability to other billionaires.

Donald Trump knows he’s not supposed to win. He’s just there to make Democrats feel more comfortable with having Hillary Clinton as president. So Donald Trump is free to act as dramatic as possible on the campaign trail. The whole ordeal still serves his interests, because the more media coverage he gets, the bigger his celebrity status becomes. That satisfies his narcissism and increases the value of whatever products he sells in the future.

 

Photo of Hillary Clinton

 

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and willing candidate to represent the will of business owners in government, and that’s the first reason why you shouldn’t vote for her, but that’s also why I’d bet money she’ll be the next president.

Hillary has received millions of dollars in donations from the banks that caused the 2008 economic crash, and she’s had time to court every major donor in the business world. Unsurprisingly, her voting record while in office is on par with every other professional campaigner who sold their soul to the party.

If/when elected, Hillary Clinton will be Obama 2.0 or George Bush 4.0. The only difference is she doesn’t have charisma. She has such a reputation for being a lying, heartless robot that her focus groups advised her to do damage control by portraying herself a loving, grandmotherly character.  Nobody believed it, because it doesn’t take a cold reader to tell she doesn’t stand for anything except her career.

The only people who should vote for Hillary Clinton are wealthy business owners and people who believe in trickle-down economics. Even radical feminists who are hell-bent on electing the first woman president should wait this one out. Hillary Clinton isn’t a strong woman struggling to make it in a man’s world. She’s a narcissistic sociopath who will do whatever it takes to secure her own fortune and glory.

 

Photo of Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders

The first and most important reason voters should take a good look at Bernie is because he’s not accepting big money from big businesses. This makes him the least compromised candidate. He’s also the only candidate who isn’t talking in meaningless focus group-generated sound bites, and he’s the only one zeroing in on the source of America’s largest problems: economic inequality.

It doesn’t take a cold reader to tell that when Bernie Sanders talks about the American people, he actually cares, and he means what he’s saying. But a lot of Americans don’t want to hear what he’s saying because he calls himself a democratic socialist, and Americans are raised on pro-capitalist propaganda that demonizes any social or economic movement that threatens the profits of American businesses. Some Americans are so afraid of socialism that they don’t even know what it is and don’t want to know.

Democratic socialism is “a political ideology advocating a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system, involving a combination of political democracy with social ownership of the means of production.”

Bernie Sanders isn’t advocating overthrowing all the business owners, taking away ownership in their companies and redistributing it evenly among the workers. He just wants to reign in the rampant inequality that causes the poor to suffer and stay trapped in a lifetime of wage slavery, and he’ll probably do that by taxing the rich like sort of like President Roosevelt did to fund The New Deal, except not that drastic. If you’re poor, you need this to happen. If it doesn’t, and the economy keeps operating the way it has been, you’re going to keep getting poorer.

The thing that worries me about Bernie Sanders is that he’s made it this far in politics to begin with. I want to assume the best about him, but the skeptic in me has to wonder if he’s really just in the race to get conservatives to feel better about Hillary becoming president or perhaps he’s trying to raise awareness of his ideology the same way Ron Paul ran two doomed presidential campaigns just to raise awareness of Libertarianism.

Americans should still vote for Bernie Sanders. He’s the most genuine, articulate and empathetic candidate. If Hillary Clinton has really already been chosen to be the next president, your vote will at least be a big middle finger to the people who put her in office.

I could be wrong about Hillary Clinton already being chosen, but even if Bernie Sanders beats her in a free election, you can still expect his wave of momentum to crash against the cold, hard reality of Washington the same way Obama-mania did. The rich won’t let Bernie Sanders take away their profits. That’s not how the government works.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but one way or another, Bernie Sanders’ political mission to save the poor from the rich will fail, if not on the campaign trail, then on the floor of Congress.

The only way the 2016 presidential election will raise the quality of life of the average American is if Bernie Sanders’ supporters organize into a stand-alone movement that can enact meaningful change outside of funding politicians’ campaigns.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Barack Obama
The 2016 Presidential Election
Donald Trump
Voting
Corruption and Election Reform
American Laws
My Tweets About Politics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Donald Trump, The 2016 Presidential Elections