January 21, 2016

Thank you for this courageous OP

Right on, brother.

Time and time again we have sat patiently while Rahm Emanuel calls us "retards" or Jon Cowan writes a position stating that there is no evidence that rank-and-file Democrats think the way we do. There seems to be plenty of evidence that we do and that evidence is the success of Bernie's campaign. How do you like that 800-pound gorilla, Mr. Cowan?

Apart from insulting the base of the party or brazenly lying about the base's existence or what the base thinks, Mayor Emanuel and Mr. Cowan are little more than Republicans who support gay rights and equal pay for women; they can even give lip service to Black Lives Matter, but Mayor Emanuel has absolutely no credibility when he does. They are fascists who think the party's rank-and-file should just get in line and vote for the Republican-lite candidate of their choice while they collect bribes generous campaign contributions from Wall Street donors for not sending Wall Street criminals to prison or keeping the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall off the table.

If it makes anyone happy, I will vote for Mrs. Clinton in the general election if she is the nominee of the party, although I may rethink that should she become the nominee through subterfuge after being rejected by primary voters. I will vote for her, but that will say less about what I think of her than it will say about what I think of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or whatever clown is left standing in the GOP. I will vote for her, but I will not give her one minute of my time or one dime of my measly money, Make no mistake about it, I have no confidence in Hillary Clinton or any other neoliberal to be a good or even adequate leader for the American people.

I will vote her in November and then hit the streets starting in January to call for an end to poverty and income inequality, for renewable energy to supplement and eventually supplant fossil fuels, for civil disobedience to ISDS rulings and direct action against any corporate executive who even thinks out loud about taking a case to an unelected board of corporate shysters. We can start with Trans-Canada. I will hit the streets to call for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, the repealing of Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the jailing of Legs Dimon, Pretty Boy Lloyd and rest of the Wall Street criminals. I will hit the streets calling for single payer healthcare. I'll even be willing to call it (gasp!) socialized medicine. Why? Because socialism is no longer a dirty word, and we have today's crooked captains of industry and their corrupt stooges in the Republican Party or the Republican wing of the Democratic Party to thank for that.

I will hit the streets and call for democracy and an abrupt end to oligarchy. I will tolerate no nonsense about how the Founding Fathers, who owned slaves and suppressed the right to vote for the common man and all women, didn't want a democracy and thus created a mere republic. We are going to correct that serious flaw in their otherwise fine work.

I will hit the streets because though I may vote for Mrs. Clinton in November, I will not follow her off the cliff toward which every American president of both parties since Reagan has marched us. She clearly has no plans to change course from the road to that abyss.

January 17, 2016

A prediction for tonight and what to watch for . . .

After the debate, the establishment pundits will declare Hillary Clinton the winner. That judgment, as it has been in the other debates, will be without regard to whether she actually won or not, even when she gave that ridiculous performance about her integrity being impugned for suggesting that she just might be influenced all the money she gets from Wall Street criminals and 911, 911, 911.

I will have my own ideas, based on my own criteria, which can be crudely simple at times.

Let me clue you in on what I think will happen. First, Hillary will talk about how tough she'll get on Iran. She'll say something like "I'll get so tough on them that it will make their turban spin on their heads; now is not the time to let up." Instead of channeling the proto-Nazi with the atrocious comb over running for the GOP nomination, Bernie will say say something like "We are in the wake of a diplomatic triumph; this is no time to engage in threatening rhetoric." He may even lay down specific instance when he would impose sanctions, but it will be more reasonable and measured than Mrs. Clinton's hawk squawk.

Then Mrs. Clinton will tout her new found opposition to single payer healthcare. All Bernie has to say to top that kind od steer manure is "I've got a better idea" and go right into his stump speech.

If that happens, Bernie wins hands down. Game, set and match.

However, the pundits will judge otherwise. Perhaps NBC will be so brazen in their dishonesty to have Chuck Todd, that most tacky of establishment media stooges, deliver the judgment. And tomorrow, Team Weathervane will be all over DU proclaiming that Hillary won because Mr. Toad said so.

I'm going to the store now. Have at it, people.

January 16, 2016

Mrs. Clinton wants us to forget more than that

It isn't just Mrs. Clinton's disastrous record as a war hawk, but her disastrous record as a neoliberal.

Neoliberalism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism.

-- Granny D (Doris Haddock 1910-2010)

The late, great American citizen, Granny D got the formula backward. Full spectrum dominance is the stated goal of the infamous PNAC latter, meaning control of the world's natural resources on behalf of US-based corporation and the military power to seize them from unwilling foreign states. As we know, the Bushies lied the people of the nation into war with Iraq with charges of Saddam's complicity with terrorists and the existence of his secret biochemical arsenal with a capability of striking the US, neither of which had any credible foundation known to the national intelligence community. Even if the Bushies didn't know their case for war was made up of falsehoods, they went to extraordinary lengths, including outing a CIA officer, to maintain the fiction that hey had good reason to believe it was true. The goal was never so much to oust Saddam, but to make sure ExxonMobil could get at their oil laying under the Iraqi people's sand.

Thus, neoconservatism is the enforcement department of neoliberalism.

We must not think that neoliberalism is nothing more than just the colonial occupation of defiant resource-rich nations. like Iraq under Saddam any more that we should mistake Saddam as a wise and benevolent leader. It is the entire regime of deregulation and free trade, rules rewritten for the world's largest corporation and the executives who hide behind the corporate logos, like the con artist hiding behind the curtain in Emerald City. Democracy is a system of government that is supposed to protect the people from shady businessmen and common criminals alike, but democracy is not perfect. When the people, who supposedly consent to be governed by those they choose are lulled to sleep and become lax in the vigilance required to maintain democracy from being undermined by clever men with evil spirits. then it is undermined. A bribe becomes a campaign contribution, and if you think you're not naive enough to think there's any difference, then just to prove it is true in all cases. Sophistry like that leads us to the nonsense of Citizens United v. FEC, where corporations have human rights and money is free speech.

Under the neoliberal regime, co-extensive with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and each of his successors, regardless of party, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act "modernized" the banking industry and made it legal to use the savings of small depositors in commercial banks in risky ventures that were once handled by investment banks, whose depositors were fully aware of the risks and had more to fall back on should the venture fail. Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley, some small savers lost everything they had, including their homes and retirement funds. The obvious answer is to repeal Gramm-Leach-Bliley and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, preventing banks from using Mom-and-Pop's saving in risky ventures until Gramm-Leach-Bliley replaced it in 1999.

Only nine years into the regime of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, reckless behavior by Wall Street banks resulted in the global meltdown of 2008. Congress used taxpayers' money bail out the banks because they had become "too big to fail." Today, those banks are even bigger and still making risky investments using small savings. What happens if their continued reckless behavior caused another global meltdown? They expect another taxpayer bailout so they continue operating on the "modernized" business model. Nevermid that it is an unsustainable business model.

Mrs. Clinton, who gets an awful lot of free speech from Wall Street banks, not only to her political campaign, but in exorbitant speaking fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation, has expressed opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall. Her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, supports reinstating Glass-Steagall. Wall Street doesn't give a lot of money to Senator Sanders; Senator Sanders depends on small contributions from the kind of people who maintain small savings accounts in banks that used to be safe until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act replaced Glass-Steagall.

It isn't just her coziness with Wall Street banks along with her support for foreign policy misadventures like Iraq (when she was in the Senate) and Libya (when she was Secretary of State). She has supported free deals like NAFTA; she supported the TPP until she opposed it, and not because it contains the ISDS provision that threaten the deal crippling fines to any state that passes regulations that a panel of corporate shysters find inhibit expected future corporate profits. We must assume that since she has been silent on the ISDS issue that she's OK with it. I feel differently. Any deal with such a provision in it should be opposed regardless of what else is in it. As Secretary of State, she greased the skids for the fracking industry, an all-around bad idea. And in just the last week, she threw under the bus the concept of universal healthcare, which she championed as First Lady. Senator Sanders, on the other hand, is suspicious of use of military power just because we can, is opposed to free trade on principle, opposed to an environmentally destructive technique which would produce more unhealthy fossil fuels, and has been over the years an unwavering supporter of universal healthcare, unequivocally declaring that access to healthcare is a human right.

Senator Sanders is accused by some on this board of not being a real Democrat and making a career of bad-mouthing Democrats. If he has bad-mouthed Democrats it is because they opened themselves to criticism by supporting corporate interests in a clear betrayal of public trust, from supporting job-killing free trade deals to supporting an unsustainable and anti-consumer banking model to support for destructive environmental policies, like fracking or more oil drilling. As an independent, he's been a better Democrat than those who took those positions. He deserves our support.

Mrs. Clinton, on the hand, would like us to forget about all the past and present stands she's taken on the wrong side of issues important to Democrats.

January 16, 2016

Residents of Flint, stand firm and don't pay for your poisoned water

First, the Michigan emergency manager statute should be challenged in federal court and ruled unconstitutional. An emergency manager appointed by the governor is not consistent with the mandate of US Constitution that guarantees each state a "Republican form of government."

Next, the federal government should march federal troops into Michigan and restore a "Republican form of government." An emergency manager is not consistent with the US Constitution. The federal troops will restore power to elected officials whose power was seized by an emergency manager, including the City of Flint and the Detroit school district.

A criminal racketeering and conspiracy investigation shell be opened by the FBI to determine if any federal laws were broken in the appointment of any or all emergency managers by Governor Snyder starting in 2011 or in the seizure and disposal of public property by emergency manager.

Restitution shall be made to districts harmed under the statute.

Civil suits against Governor Snyder and his emergency managers shall be filed in state or federal court by affected district and residents, seeking damages for harm to public health or private individuals due to actions of the emergency mangers.

Let the American political revolution begin in earnest. Power to the people. America is democracy, not an oligarchy or a mere republic.
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[/center][font size="1"]From Wikipedia Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eugène_Delacroix_-_La_liberté_guidant_le_peuple.jpg)
(Public Domain)
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December 23, 2015

A seasonsal song for all of you: Me, me, me, me, me . . .

Here comes Debbie Wasserman, who says she's never wrong
Here she comes a-singing our Queen's campaign song
Love and joy come to you, and put mistletoe above all doors
Kiss your children before they go to fight her wars.
Kiss your children before they go to fight her wars.

Here comes Debbie Wasserman, Bernie;s clock she shall clean
Bernie's such a traitor to so defy our Queen
All hail to the Queen, on winning we're all Hell bent
Who needs the people when you've got the one percent?
Who needs the people when you've got the one percent?

Here comes Debbie Wasserman. dressed up like a doll
All the world belongs you when you're a bankster's moll
All hail to the Queen, she's the best we've ever seen
She'll shower riches and favors on Mr. Lloyd Blankstein
She'll shower riches and favors on Mr. Lloyd Blankstein.

December 10, 2015

If this holds up, it will be excellent news in February

Don't think that New Hampshire won't have an impact. Although President Johnson technically won the New Hampshire Primary in 1968, the impressive performance of underdog Gene McCarthy set in motion political events that drove LBJ from the race. The primary was held following the Tet offensive, which US combat forces also technically won, but that paled against the fact that it happened at all. If the government had been telling the truth about the situation in Vietnam, it wouldn't have happened.

There is a reason why Bernie should wiin. Anyone who reads between the lines of this piece can see it. It was posted by a Hillary supporter on DU yesterday. The piece, ironically titled Sanders: Why he can't win, was written by notorious neoliberals supporting Mrs. Clinton and her corporate agenda: William Daley, former White Hous Chief od Staff and former executive committeeman at JPMorgan Chase; founder of the neoliberal think tank Third Way and professional wishful thinker Jon Cowan; and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, Vice President of Third Way. The authors of the piece reiterate Cowan's nonsense about the revolution isn't happening, and this after acknowledging that voters are angry and even conceding that voters believe "the system is rigged against them." However, the authors assure their readers that what the voters aren't angry, just anxious. Without mentioning the worldwide economic collapse of 2008 that was caused by the risky behavior of Wall Street banks gambling with their depositors' money, the authors simply explain away job losses and the dwindling numbers of the American middle class by talking about new technology replacing old, and that's a good thing and people accept it because that's the way the world works. It isn't caused by rich guys pulling the strings, like the unmentioned Wall Street Bankers who gambled away your money on mine on risky investments without telling us.

I suppose one should expect an article written by three establishmentarians who would like nothing better than to wish away voters' anxiety and anger to come up with such a heaping pile of steer manure. First of all, they don't seem to realize that anxiety and anger often go together rather then being an exclusive either/or matter. Second, they wouldn't dare suggest that voters are anxious and angry because the system is rigged, would they?

Of course, they would never try to deflect voters' anxiety and anger about the economic situation in America or the world at large away from the candidate of the establishment, Hillary Clinton, would they?

It is all too obvious that voters think the system is rigged because the system is rigged.

It's not far cry from the "voters are angry at the politicians" to "voters are angry at the politicians and the corrupt corporatists who who own them," Mr. Cowan's think tank is the middle man in commerce between corrupt politicians who sell themselves and the corrupt corporations who buy them.

December 1, 2015

Being of the older persuasion, I'll probably vote for Mrs. Clinton

Giving her any time or money is out of the question, but I don't see anything wrong with voting for the lesser of two evils if there's a Plan B.

If the Sanders campaign is the start of a mass movement on left, then there is a Plan B. We can and should merge with other elements of the left with the purpose of undermining the [i\status quo of free trade, an unregulated and crooked financial industry, the curtailing of civil liberties militarized police and resource wars in the Middle East. The goal will be to castrate the oligarchy and establish stronger democracy than ever before. We will have no patience for the democracy is dysfunctional, that's why American is a republic meme. That may have made sense in 1787, when many of the founding fathers owned slaves and most of the others didn't challenge their right to own slaves, but today it is nothing more than an hollow slogan for a decaying aristocracy that is now fooling itself into think they can codify their right to own the planet and ride roughshod over the rest of us with a few free trade deals. To paraphrase one of their own criminal masterminds, a free trade deal is just a piece of paper. There is no reason for us to abide by laws passed by bought congressmen or signed into law by a bought president or reviewed by bought judges. These people have no moral right to govern us.

The very word aristocracy means rule by the best, but throughout history no class that ever claimed that mantle has anything more than a gaggle of corrupt, decadent sonsofbitches looking out for their own self interest at the expense of the common people. No aristocracy ever ended well for the aristocrats. The aristocracy of industrialists and financiers at the end of the age of fossil fuels will fare no better.

Rule by the best? Isn't that a hoot? The best who crashed the world economy, not just in 2008 but multiple times, started one war after another and polluted the entire planet making money on carbon emissions? If they're the best, then I'm a retired kamikaze pilot. I, for one, am convinced that workers on the factory floor in Detroit could design, build and market a better car than the dummies in the penthouse suites at Ford (Found On Road Dead) or GM (Gallons per Mile.

The only legitimate government is democracy. The safety, health and welfare the people as a whole are a government's only legitimate concern. We don't need to complicate the equation any longer by mistaking artificial persons, who are made out of legal documents, with real people who are made out of flesh and blood. The resources of the world belong to all of us. The bounty of the earth belong to all of us. The Earth itself belongs to all of us, every grain of land and drop in the seas and all that is on it and all that is under it and all that flies or blows or shines over it.

This is the new world order by our decree.

November 29, 2015

That's also a Venusian feature

Life evolved a little differently on Venus. Due to the heat of the planet's surface (approx 450° C), the most complex life that evolved is reptilian. A reptile's cold blood takes less time to warm up and but enough energy into the animal to get it mobile at the start of the day, and because of the density of Venus' atmosphere the night aren't too cool, either, warm blooded animals never evolved on that planet.

Venusians also have copper-based hemoglobin. You may be familiar with this from American pop culture in that Vulcanians such as Mr. Spock have green blood because the hemogobin is copper based. As we all know, the planet Vulcan doesn't really exist. The creators of Star Trek simply borrowed the idea from what they knew Venusian biology.

What isn't known to most of us Earthlings is that Venusians have a very unusual color spectrum which causes them to see green as blue, and therefore they think their blood is blue. Venusians raised in what we think of as a right wing ideology think that having blue blood is something special and superior to all other intelligent beings in the solar system. Of course, that's just delusional thinking, but it does explain a of European history, as the royal families of Europe are actually Venusians who see their green blood as blue and think we red-blooded people of Earth should bow down to them. Some witnesses to the execution of Marie Antoinette claimed the guillotine was stained green when her head fell into the basket, but Habsburg relatives in Austria as well as her Bourbon brothers-in-laws, who later ruled as Louis XVIII and Charles X, insisted her blood was blue.

There is also evidence that the Bolshevik executioners of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 were shocked to see the splattering of green blood as the family lay dying. Also executed with the Romanovs were the family doctor and some servants, but their blood was red. Once again, surviving members of the Russian nobility insisted that the spilled blood was blue.

As it turns out. by the end of the nineteenth century, many of the royal families of Europe did not have pure green blood. This is because all English monarchs since 1066 are the descendants of William the Conqueror, who was the illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Herleva of Falaise, the daughter of a common red-blooded tanner. During the nineteenth century, the children of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, a descendant of William, and Prince Albert, who was of more purely Venusian stock, maried into other European royal families, including the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the Romanovs of Russia. Consequently, the proud "blue blooded" ruling monarchs of three of the ruling parties in World War I were the descendants of a French tanner born in the late tenth century, a time when Europe was the mud pit of the world.

Europe's sorry state from the Roman Empire was due largely to the influence of the Venusian nobility. The Roman emperors themselves were Venusians, which explains why the Roman empire was and continues to be overrated as in its governing institutions. Since Venusians are cold blooded and Earth isn't anywhere near as warm as a cold day on Venus, Venusian over generations tend to lose their intellectual capacity. The Roman Empire was built and kept together not by its rulers, who were as inept as they were bloody, but by well trained red-blooded soldiers and by brilliaint engineers, also culled from the common people. The Venusian rulers of Rome, mentally diseased from the lack of heat in their new planetary environment, could only provide the idea of expansion of power through bloody wars; the common people of Rome went along because the Venusians went easier on them as the Venusians got a fresh supply of newly-conquered people to beat, torture and tax. Starting as early as the first century AD, Rome began experiencing the effects of the degeneration of Venusian intellect due to living on a planet to which they were not adapted in the person of such bloody emperors as Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. The empire fell in the West after a string of emperors who were so inept that they couldn't defend the empire from invasions by uncivilized but red-blooded and quick barbarians and adopt a debauched lifestyle at the same time.

November 25, 2015

Dr King died when I was 16 and was already a hero to me

It wasn't unusual for young people in their mid-teens growing up during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement to be more politically aware than they are now. In those days, watching Walter Cronkite every evening for half an hour left one more informed about national and international events than watching CNN all day does now.

Martin Luther King did, in fact, make white people uncomfortable. He had no use for white supremacy and said so. However, he was a man whose life's work was to unite people of good will together to work for justice. Justice is simply not compatible with any system of rigid hierarchy, including white supremacy. White supremacy was the idea underpinning not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but European imperialism through the mid-twentieth century and the neocolonialism of US foreign policy as manifested by the Vietnam War and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq; it goes a long ways to explain why invading Afghanistan morphed from a quest to apprehend Osama bin Laden into America's longest war.

Dr. King had a deceptively calm and comforting manner that didn't scare some white people as much as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver.

I recommend this thread, but please clink on the link in Bravenak's OP and read the entire article, which is quite good and gives a much better understanding of Dr. King in the context of his time and why the author of the article feels Dr. King would take the stands on today's issues that he ascribes to him.

November 24, 2015

A Small Quibble with Killer Mike

Killer Mike, the rapper, introduced Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders by saying "I have no time . . . to relive the Reagan years; I have no desire to elect our own Margaret Thatcher."

The comment comparing Hillary Clinton to Margaret Thatcher can be dismissed as campaign hyperbole, and that's all I'll say about that for now. As for reliving the Reagan years, I have just one small quibble with that.

We should recognize Reagan as a consequential president, but by no means a great one. Even though his predicessor spent four years just trying to get a handle on what he was doing, Jimmy Carter left America in much better shape than Reagan left it. It has gotten steadily worse ever since.

It's not a point of reliving the Reagan years, it's continuing to live them. We've been living the Reagan years since the election of 1980 and it's long past time to put an end to them.

Every president since Reagan has been a Reaganite to a considerable degree. Reagan may have been a wiser Reaganite in the sense that after his first big tax cut in his first year as president he adjusted taxes upward several times, but the economy was structurally weaker as a result of supply-side policies. Income inequality didn't begin with Reagan, but it was badly exacerbated under him and Bush the Preppy, who also had to eat his words and raise taxes. Under Bill Clinton, tax cuts were more judiciously targeted at the middle class, but the foolishness of cutting taxes for the rich was not rolled back. Income inequality slowed, but did not reverse. For that reason, Clinton's tenure in the White House should not be regarding as either a ringing success or an abject failure. Nevertheless, there were several bad marks against Clinton and the Republican Congress with which he was saddled after his first two years in office. The worst of these were welfare reform, financial industry reform and NAFTA. The first of these made the plight of the poor in American even more dire and the second was a means to corrupt both the banking industry and politicians, allowing bankers and politicians to get richer at the expense of the public. The third put a big hit on American manufacturing and cost middle-class Americans well paying jobs which still haven't returned, and probably won't ever without a major change in US trade policy.

What might have seemed like a major event during Clinton's presidency was his impeachment in 1999, but this was merely a distracting side show of no real consequence other than the time and money wasted. Essentially, President Clinton was impeached for getting a blow job in the oval office from a White House intern. Tacky, yes; impeachable, no. The two articles of impeachment were so weak that neither received a simple majority vote in the Senate, let alone the two-thirds vote required to remove him from office.

After Clinton came Bush the Frat Boy. What can be said about him other than he was the worst president ever? Caught napping on September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, Bush invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to bring criminal mastermind Osama bin Laden to justice, but his real intention was to invade Iraq, overthrow the Iraqi government on the pretense that it was complicit in the September 11 attacks, had illegally stockpiled a biochemical arsenal and was building a nuclear weapons. Although there was talk about democratizing Iraq after the invasion, the real purpose was to secure Iraq's oil fields for western oil companies. A Reaganite ideologue with no grounding in reality, Bush would not raise taxes to pay for the war, thus blowing a big hole in future budgets. The initial debts obligated for the war were about $2 trillion. It is estimated that when the last check goes to pay the last benefit to a veteran's surviving spouse, the war will have cost Americans $6 trillion. These expenses, combined with tax cuts for the rich who didn't need them that still haven't been repealed and the cost of a second war in Afghanistan that still hasn't ended, will make it very difficult to recover from from what is now 35 long, long years of Reaganomics. In addition, Bush eroded civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism and instituted a program of torture supported with legal opinions from White House lawyers basically saying that as long the administration refuses to call torture torture then it's perfectly legal. Finally, the Bush administration's laissez-faire approach to Wall Street crime resulted in the crash of the World Economy in the final months of Bush's tenure. Naturally, income inequality grew by leaps and bounds under Bush and in the last year of his term the American economy was hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate.

Many of us, including your most humble hare, thought that wen we voted for Barack Obama we were voting for a new, post-Reagan era of American politics, but were sadly disappointed after President Obama took office. Obama has several feathers in his cap: the Affordable Care Act is an excellent start toward real health care reform, the goal being a single payer system and the elimination of private insurance companies as an unnecessary and inefficient middle man; the end of the Iraq war has stopped a great deal of fiscal bleeding; and President Obama's preference for a diplomatic solution to an international crisis over sending in the Marines with no exit strategy have prevented wars before they start, much to the chagrin of his Republican opposition, saving American taxpayers untold money and saving the lives of an unknown number of combat troops. He also gets kudos for ending the Bush torture program, although with demerits for failing to prosecute Bush war crimes. More seriously, the administration's failure to prosecute crooked Wall Street bankers is without excuse and even worse than the failure to prosecute war criminals, as Wall Street's criminals still continue to commit crimes and acts that should be crimes no different than what they did to crash the world economy in 2008. Obama has put before a Congress a horrible trade deal that not only will further erode what's left of the American middle class through job losses and even provide a strong ISDS that oligarchs can run to any time they think the mean ol' government is regulating them and depriving them of expected profits. Do corporations now have a right to profits? What would Adam Smith say? The other two deals not yet ready to be presented to Congress are apparently worse. TISA, the last of the terrible trio, would deprive formerly sovereign nations of the right to nationalize industries that grow too troublesome in regards to public health or worker safety.

Income inequality continues to plague the American economy at an an unacceptable level. Some of this is the result of the unprecedented and frankly racist opposition from the Republicans toward President Obama, but not all of it. No Republican made Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, pursue Wall Street criminal armed with only kid gloves. There is no escaping the conclusion that such favorable treatment is in return for generous campaign support for some of Wall Street's worst actors, especially Goldman Sachs. No Republican made President Obama negotiate TPP, TTIP or TISA. No Republican made President Obama appoint a Wall Street hack like Tim Geithner Treasury Secretary nor, when Geithner announced he was leaving office, made President Obama think out loud about appointing Larry Summers, Wall Street hack emeritus, as his successor. When Summers asked the President to withdraw his name from consideration for Treasury Secretary, Obama settled on Jack Lew, who isn't really much of an improvement over Summers or Geithner.

The next president will be Hillary Clinton. My disdain for Mrs. Clinton is no secret here. She is beholden to Wall Street and it is naive to think she's going to do what needs to be done, if anything at all, to rein in the excesses of Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. She has received large donations from Wall Street banks on behalf of her campaign organization and the Clinton Foundation; she has received exorbitant six-figure speaking fees from them, and she and some of her supporters expect us to believe that there's no cozy relationship between Mrs. Clinton and Wall Street. I'll believe that there isn't when she nationalizes JPMorganChase or Goldman Sachs.

Meanwhile, I will vote for and give support to Bernie Sanders. He says we need a revolution. And we do. That's what it will take to end the Reagan years.

No matter who wins the election, it will be up to us, the common American people, to put an end to the Reagan years. If the system is so corrupt that we can't end it at the ballot box, then we'll do in the streets. The politicians who beg for our vote but take money from Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance or Big Oil and, once safely elected, change their allegiance from the People to artificial persons. These crooked politicians should not be so naive to think that we will give deference to them, the laws they pass, the judges they appoint, the trade deals they negotiate or the wars they start and tell us it's for our own good because they are smarter than we we are, even if it doesn't always look that way. They have more money. Doesn't that prove that they are smarter?

No. It just proves that they're better at stealing our money, buying our politicians and destroying our democracy.