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Yesterday, I revisited my pre-election theory that progressives and all non-Republicans will see the greater good of a Republican takeover of the Senate and their increased footprint in the House. And I promised to riff on a few memes to substantiate that soon after. (Part 1 here.)
There’s nothing to fear since these election results are actually bringing about the best time in history to put these special interest jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for who they really are and then respond.
A populist movement is the cure, the only cure. And populism is exactly what radical right-wing conservatives fear the most. These lawmakers and billionaires have made people that aren’t rich and white their enemy, out of fear. Populism is coming, call it our American Spring, because these right-wingnuts are and will remain mentally incapable of solving our most pressing problems.
While all the electioneering goes on and on, populist actions and non-violent civil disobedience are becoming ever more finely tuned to respond to our growing unrest. People are being stirred into action in direct proportion to the growing social and economic injustices wrought by this distinctly American capitalist theocracy entirely dependent on the enslavement of mostly everyone else. We’re not just taking it anymore.
Populists succeed in solving problems by standing up for human rights in spite of the temporal obstacles that haters throw at us. Our successes are in part due to our ability to connect across and learn more from different movements, from the climate and military to immigration and equality rights. We are helping each other make sense of the world. The more goofy the Repubs behave, the sooner we will succeed in making things right for all people throughout the world.
The first two issues the right-wingnuts have no clue whatsoever are matters of life and death: responding to the reality of climate change; and curbing our military, here and abroad. Why are these the first? Well, because there’s not much cause to fight for freedom and human rights if we destroy ourselves and/or this planet before then.
The U.S. military-industrial complex is led by special-interest lobbyists (public and private profiteers). They bring us incursions into dozens of countries, where we have no other business except greed and racism (no wonder Americans are hated), in order to annually justify huge defense spending. Along the way they fill body bags for the most part with unemployed poor people choosing to enlist because there is often no other options.
Likewise, these special interests are militarizing local police forces to control citizen uprisings. And, they stand in the way of police accountability. They are also lobbying lawmakers to harden and lengthen prison sentences to keep the growing number of privatized, for-profit prisons making money for the corporatists while disenfranchising huge swaths of the populace, especially brown and black poor men.
This terrible trend will only end if we stand up with each other and say, “No more gain based on someone else’s pain.” We can do it. We are doing it. Find organizations and people in your community to work with or otherwise support. Maybe start with CodePink and anyone in Ferguson, Missouri, these days.
Climate change, and the physical results which are already with us today, is a chief threat to life on this planet, and something that the well-financed, capitalist theocracy is incapable of dealing with.
These right-wingnuts are not just climate-change-deniers, they are science-deniers. The christianists deny science so much they fight to stay blissfully uninformed of reproductive health so they can still call Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs) “built-in abortion factories.” They don’t know how babies are made but they are determine to have the final say. When it comes to climate change they also fight to stay blissfully in the dark but with even more serious repercussions.
Repubs will always have the handful of scientists they can point to but these are just .001% of all the scientists who are telling us it’s practically too late to put off the degradation the burning of fossil fuels has already caused. Even allowing the science-deniers the luxury of believing that burning fossil fuels aren’t the culprit, everyone must get busy with the results of climate change now upon us: more lightning strikes, hurricane-tornados, lack of clean water, and loss of coastal square miles and assets, increasing exponentially as long as the fossil fuel capitalist elites control our economies. Yes, we have to move to a renewable energy economy but we are already engaged in the mass relocation and economic disruption that will continue to escalate to epic proportions. Consider that rising sea levels caused by the melting ice caps is already causing small island populations to abandon their lives because their fresh water has been compromised by salinization. (If you haven’t already, read Naomi Klein’s new book, a scholarly page-turner, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.)
We are on track to meet the goals the newly-elected President Obama set to reduce the effects of greenhouse gasses by the government, the largest energy consumer by far. Despite the political criticism from the Repubs, Obama used these same benchmarks to the U.S. as a whole this week to prompt China to set its goal, its first, to raise renewable energy sources to 20% by 2030. The recent UN report on climate change, which lays the groundwork for more significant agreements internationally in Copenhagen next year, and a newly invigorated climate movement have the power to curb capitalism in favor of planetary survival.
Make sure you are a part of it. If you can’t become an activist, do things in your local community to make it more earth-friendly, in one step healing us and raising awareness.
There are so many examples of how right-wingnuts will strip themselves bare as they fail these tests of leadership, and I could go on and on, but they will have to wait for a subsequent article. Next up is net neutrality because we cannot allow corporations to silence us and omit us from the debate for their own financial gain.
For now: get busy!
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