Terror time
From the NYT:
The Republicans’ effort received a fresh jolt from the release one night earlier of text messages exchanged last year between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, describing the possibility of an election victory by President Trump as “terrifying” and saying that Hillary Clinton “just has to win.” Mr. Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from the Russia investigation as soon as he learned of the texts, a step that Mr. Rosenstein praised.
White workers are pissed off for reasons of class, but Republican propaganda has been able to spin this anger to the very people who feel it as race-hatred and homophobia. White workers want Mr. Moneybags to be terrified! That’s what the Democrats, minus Bernie Sanders, don’t get. The angry want terror and the upending of unjust normalcy.
American political life is a joke. The people know that politicians are opportunists. Would poor whites in Red states vote for conmen only because they broadcast the most racist and homophobic rhetoric if they really had someone to fight for a fair wage and free healthcare?
There is a deficit of promise in American politics, so the desperate vote out of a sense of vengeance rather than rational self-help. This is because our economic system rewards politicians who reproduce the swamp—the status quo of capital dominating labor in every aspect of our lives.
This is shown most vividly in the number of people who are so disgusted with radical options that they’d rather support the Islamic State (ISIS), an organization with no pull whatsoever in these parts, rather than Republicans, who are economically speaking their sworn enemies, or Democrats, who are functionally Republicans, just without the outright sadism. As Rick Roderick used to say, “They both eat at the same restaurants.”
The choices politicians make are based on self-interest, an interest that is almost always opposed to the interests of their alleged constituents.
What would happen if there were a party that actually offered real help and support? Something like a real social-democratic party that actually represented the interests of the people who voted for it? There would be no terrorist bombings, no mass shootings, no helping of an irrelevant and useless ISIS.
Solution:
- Make lobbying illegal. If you give someone who is already a scumbag $1M to screw his constituents, of course he will take it and do it.
- Have the voting results of every issue published online via Google search, either automatically or by Googling a location-aware short string, like MY VOTES or VOTES IN MY DISTRICT, MY CONGRESSMAN RECORD.