Happy New Year! How do you like living under Despotism?

I regret having to start off my first post of the year by sounding so condescending, but...

WE TOLD YOU SO.

Years ago, we of the 'fringe element' warned you that democracy couldn't sustain itself without a loyal opposition and vigilance against a coup d'etat by a small group of powerful, wealthy men and corporations. (coup d'etat: a sudden, decisive exercise of power whereby the existing government is subverted without the consent of the people)

And before you shake your head and leave this thread behind as just another conspiracy theory...consider that this same warning was presented 193 years ago:

"Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power of the individuals and their families selected for the trust." --Thomas Jefferson to M. van der Kemp, 1812. ME 13:136

Jefferson is clearly speaking to us from the grave: government will be perverted and the people oppressed by the wealthy looking to enrich themselves and their families if they're entrusted with power not granted them by the Constitution and the people.

Jefferson again points out what stands between despotism and democracy:

"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." --Thomas Jefferson

It should be evident that America's democracy fell apart when our government used 'communism', 'terrorism' and 'war' to weaken and then eliminate the 'separate but equal' branches of government and the Constitutional checks and balances meant to restrain any one branch of government from having unchecked power over the others. Jefferson and many of the other founders knew of the potential of this happening someday...which is why they set up separate branches of government to keep watch over each other.

When did we finally lose control of our government? It could be said that the final stages of the downfall began in the 60s...and then fell further during the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton administrations. George Bush* reaped the windfall in 2000.

While it could be said that there are many events over the last hundred years that have contributed to our slide into despotism...several specific incidents come to mind that quickened the pace:

The Vietnam War

The 2000 Election

September 11, 2001

The Iraq War

Each of these events were used by what used to be called the 'ruling class' to circumvent the Constitution and move further away from a representative government. And as Jefferson warned nearly 200 years ago: our government has been perverted by the wealthy/corporations and used to oppress us and enrich themselves.

What can we do about it now? We can begin by thinking of ourselves as Americans first and political parties second. Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives and Liberals all have the same thing at stake. We must stop thinking of our two-party system as one sports team playing against another and that winning is everything. We must put an end to the mindset of winning at all costs and to the winner goes all the spoils.

It will be a difficult challenge in a country beset with jingoism and nationalism. But we can and will rise above the labels of Democrat and Republican and demand a return to a Constitutional Government of, by and for the people.

Welcome to this New Year in which we take back our country and reject the siren songs of false patriotism and prophets who wage wrongful wars in the name of God and Country. This is your country too...stand up and be counted among those who love her and the hope of democracy that she brings.

and, speaking of Jefferson, please check out my sig line. In fact, how about re-reading the entire Declaration? (not you ......... because you obviously 'get' it ........... but, others on DU need to do so, IMHO)

I like guns.

...but demanding that each and every politician and public servant honor their duty to the Constitution would be a great beginning.

DU, has it accomplished anything?

The same thing was said when Blacks and Women 'demanded' equal rights and the right to vote.

I can tell you one thing for certain: demand nothing and that's exactly what you'll get.

but if the government won't listen or just does not give a shit what your demands are, then there are times a little "force" might be necessary. I would rather die with a bullet in my chest, blood in my mouth and a gun in my hand than being butcherd like some lamb by an uncaring govt.

...when my main premise is that we need to think of ourselves as Americans instead of Democrats or Republicans. Calls for a return to a Constitutional government will be more successful if we take the party politics out of the equation.

Another thing you seemed to have missed was the issue of making all politicians accountable for their actions instead of just the opposition. How do you make them accountable? The first step is to stop voting for someone simply because they have a (D) or an (R) after their names or they 'might' have a better chance of winning an election.

"The first step is to stop voting for someone simply because they have a (D) or an (R) after their names or they 'might' have a better chance of winning an election."

:)

Demanding won't do anything. Ever. A simple, nasty, ugly, hard-to-face truth exists. Until this truth is faced and accepted, there will be no change, and this truth will NOT be faced and accepted for a LONG time, due to the basic nature of humans in general and Americans in specific.

We do not exist.

That's it. People like you and I do not exist in the minds of the ruling class, not in human terms anyway. We are minor inconveniences at worst, sources of cash at best. We are statistics. When they think about us at all, it's how to best force us to throw more money at them. It's sort of nice if they can trick us into singing their praises as we throw money at them, but it's hardly necessary. Once they've got that cash, we pass back into nonentity state again until we've scraped together a little more money to hand over - then all of a sudden we're best buds again and they CARE SO MUCH!

So demand all you want it will do no good. Demands from nonentities mean nothing, it's just a little bit more noise that's easy to ignore. Cows make a hell of a racket when they're on the killing floor, but the butcher doesn't hear it. That cow can moo and kick and demand all it wants, it will be turned into hamburger just the same. It is not as if the cow could potentially make enough noise that the butcher will say "Okay, fine, I'll let you go!"

Until we get it through our collective thick skulls that this is EXACTLY how we are viewed by the ruling class, there will be no change. What we do if we ever DO comprehend this remains to be seen.

...political force that can't be ignored.

The ruling class depends on your type of attitude to maintain their control over government. Thinking that you're nothing more than a 'cow' and part of a herd emboldens them to take even more.

But this country was founded by revolution. Civil and equal rights were forced into being by Americans who stepped away from the herd and joined with like minds to form a movement that couldn't be ignored by the wealthy class.

There is no way to fight them directly. But we can make them suffer by not buying their products or voting for their figureheads. You can wait until the butcher calls your name...or you can join those who won't be led to the slaughter.

::looks around::

Unfortunately, I don't see millions together as a political force.

I see millions of cows. I see millions who are more concerned with scoring that new plasma television so they can watch Everybody Loves Raymond the way it was meant to be seen. I see millions who are more concerned with praizing Jayzuz. I see millions who think Freddy Got Fingered was the greatest film ever made. I see millions who are too busy hating fags to worry about much else. I see millions who think a little yellow ribbon sticker means they're going to heaven. I see millions who think France took bribes from OBL to oppose the Iraq war. I see millions carrying signs with graphic pictures of abortion trying to generate shock value. I see millions trying to word their disclaimers so they don't get sued. I see millions trying to figure out how the hell our idiotic monetary system works so they have a prayer of seeing retirement. I see millions who are only concerned with how much money they can steal. I see millions who think the UN should be bombed.

Most of all I see millions and millions and millions who trust our Mighty Leaders(tm) and think it couldn't happen here.

You are right about this country being founded by revolution. But that was at a time when gas pumps didn't have signs on them warning you not to drink the gasoline. This is now.

There are just too many cows. Those of us willing to step away from the herd are the tiny minority now. We are painted into the corner and for anything to actually change there now needs to be a massive paradigm shift on a national scale.

Don't hold your breath.

:hi:

the "slaves" or minimum wage workers to the corporations. There is a potential for leverage there. Think about it. The bastard cannot and would not be willing to do the heavy lifting themselves. They must have slaves. The first step for us is to figure out how to survive minimally without resorting to slavery. There are ways. Let's explore them.

100%

The problem is we've built a nation by the dollar, of the dollar, and for the dollar. If you have no money, you have nothing, if you have nothing, you can't get anything.

The days are passed when you could load up the wagon, head out west, and claim yourself a little plot of unoccupied land to homestead; do some hunting, do some dirt farming, pull your water from the river, raise bees for candlewax, and be content.

I DO believe there are ways out of slavery, but a lot of avenues have been closed off in the society we've built for ourselves. It's definitely worth discussing though.

You mentioned homesteading; any others?

There's getting a higher education in the hopes of being able to get a higher paying job. But education is getting more and more expensive, while the jobs you are able to obtain with that education are going down in pay. At best, you move from wage slavery to debt slavery. At worst, you discover that your Bachelor's from the University of Washington puts you in the $1000 a month bracket, you miss student loan payments in favor of rent and food, wind up horrendously in debt with bad credit, and can't get another job or afford car insurance because credit rating affects both of those now.

That's another part of how we're trapped by the way. We are at the mercy of the credit reporting agencies. You have no money=you have bad credit=your chances of moving ahead in this money obsessed society are diminished.

There's starting your own small business and being your own boss. Unfortunately, that takes capital and wage slaves don't have capital or they wouldn't be wage slaves. Again, at best you drop your life savings into a down on a small business loan and wind up a debt slave. Ditto goes for home buying, buying a car to get you TO your job, etc.

Simply put, for most of us our only real option is to stay in slavery and hope that * doesn't reopen the debtor prisons. Every once in awhile one or two of us might stumble into a genuinely good job or get a windfall from one source or the other that allows us a foothold. But most of us are, quite simply, stuck.

Although I'll agree that they're in the process of being closed. Perhaps we (liberals/democrats/progressives) can't stop every avenue from being closed, but that's what most of us are fighting to accomplish. Of course new avenues can always be created.

If it makes me naive to refuse to accept that we should "stay in slavery and hope that * doesn't reopen the debtor prisons," then so be it. :P

Edit: changed "have" to "gave" in the title, and added a missing "to."

Naive would be to say "go get a good job and you won't be poor anymore". :)

And I'm definitely not saying we SHOULD stay in slavery, I'm saying the vast majority of us have no options at the moment. I've been fighting my situation like a rabid badger for over a decade now, and will continue to do so, but it hasn't changed significantly despite my best efforts.

I have done some serious examination of what's important to me, and have concluded my life goal is to minimize to the smallest possible amount my reliance on the society we've built. I'm not QUITE to the point of finding a cave to live in, but talk to me again in four more years...

I'd like to hear examples of the new avenues you mentioned.

perhaps in the same way you said, "I DO believe there are ways out of slavery." I was going to ask you pretty much the same question. I'm in "all ears" mode on this one. :)

Dammit, I was hoping YOU'D have some. :)

Well... I would say the first step is to understand exactly what it is we DO want, being as specific as possible. It's easy to wish for change but when it comes down to actually describing the best case scenario, things get vague - and this is something I'm very guilty of, I'll admit it freely. The REALLY hard part is everything has to be examined and hypothetically taken to ridiculous extremes, because that is what WILL happen.

For example, lets say we set the goal of raising the minimum wage. Companies that are forced to raise their tiny wages will simply protect their precious profit margins by raising their already overbloated prices (Okay, you can see I'm not thrilled with corporate politics - bear with me). So then other companies will raise THEIR prices because that's what the new market will bear, and they'll just pocket the difference. Then property managers and landlords will raise their rents because THEIR cost of living has gone up and they want to protect THEIR incomes. Then small business owners will have to raise their prices because their rent has gone up. So in about 30 days we're back to exactly where we started and those of us on the bottom of the food chain making minimum wage are taking it in the shorts again.

Only one thing actually trickles down, and it AIN'T money.

Honestly, I don't know. Something horrendous may very likely have to happen. We might just have to wait until the fall of the New Roman Empire and see if there's anything worth bothering to pick out of the ashes.

Raising the minimum wage as "trickle down economics." I don't see that argument in progressive circles too often.

You still haven't offered any solutions, other than the resignation to catastrophe. Like I said, I'm all ears on this one.

of slavery. I regret that I don't have any good answers. However, just to recognize that you are in slavery is a good start. I do believe that the first step is to stop toiling for the company. Do some enterprise that you are in charge of. Find something that you are capable of doing that others would pay for your services.
Live as simply as possible, stop paying for your children's expenses after they are old enough to do if for themselves.

With the part where you said to stop paying your children's expenses after they are old enough to take care of themselves. Being the quasi-libertarian that I am, I think that the extended family and the commune is one way to minimize the slavery.

One solution would be group or communal housing. I am a 30-year-old woman with a small child and a boyfriend. I am a poet and soon-to-be part-time poetry instructor at a community college, until I get my first book published, when I have a chance at a real job. So I'm not what you'd call a "go getter" as far as money is concerned, but I live simply. If my boyfriend and I were to break up, I would look for another single woman with a small child to shack up with, or two -- and I think it's something that most people overlook, or don't think about -- the extended family pooling together, the social commune or group house. It can do several things to help improve the quality of life for those who want to live simply, like, get you out of a bad neighborhood, and into a good school district, minimize lots of costs, provide free child care, make it easier to organize so the house can make its own food or shop responsibly.

Then, of course, there is homesteading -- which is what I'll be doing when I get back to Washington State, after I finish grad school. You can make a solar and wind-powered generator system for about $10,000 and it will last 30 years or so.

What I do is pretend that national corporations don't exist, as best I can. All they have to do is make a responsible Internet provider (which could be done with Working Assets, maybe, if enough people joined that they could branch out into other areas of telecomm), and I'd be damn well on my way there.

It's part psychological. The desire to take care of yourself and to want very little. I'm an artist, though, so I can always keep myself occupied without the "toys." But so can anyone else.

There aren't that many solutions. Definitely no simple ones. None that occur to my simple little noggin anyway - I don't pretend to be a political science major. There may not even BE any solutions - as I've been saying, it may take a major paradigm shift. By that I mean some event that occurs that completely destrupts the standard operating procedure and returns everybody to square one.

Believe me, I want other solutions as badly as the next person. If I had any, I'd offer some. Then there's the part of me that feels the single worst thing that ever happened was that the Y2K bug turned out to be nothing.

My point about the minimum wage was just an illustration. It was to show how the money-obsessed society we've built crushes solutions, just by operating as usual. Raise the minimum wage and the wealthy get a little wealthier, the poor stay right where they are, and the middle class just shifts a little closer to the poor end. This is not because raising the minimum wage is a bad idea in and of itself, it's just because that's how this rotten system works. Those in power will simply nudge everything so everyone stays exactly where they are (except they'll vote themselves a pay increase as compensation for the inconvenience). They have that power, they will use that power, and there is just no way to simply take it away from them at this point.

The ruling class LIKES the direction this world is going and has the power to keep it going that way. That is my point.

Oh, and the joke about trickle down economics was a just a jab at our fearless leader.

to this country in the last 4 years, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Financial elitism and class warfare has been building since humans decided to move away from the barter system, but these last few years have really allowed it to grow like the cancer it is. It has exploded to a point that even I'M amazed, and I'm the most cynical person I ever met.

I take comfort in the fact that something has to give soon. What exactly, I don't know.

The rest is the result of a decent though imperfect system that was designed to prevent things like elitism and class warfare. Of course my comment is limited to the history of this democratic republic. Elitism and class warfare are only issues in this country when the Right pushes the right buttons.

Americans are doing their best to define the situation in terms that could become the foundation to resistance and ultimately and overthrow of the despotism. This process is going to take a long time to bear fruit.

your addition of the Clinton administrations to your list of right wing rogues.

Why did the Right work so diligently for 8 years to disgrace President Clinton? Did he deserve it? Was it politics as usual? Perhaps it was just an elaborate act, or a secret quarrel between fascists...

I was alive back then; and I was paying attention. ;)

Happy New Year Everyone,

Ah, despotism lives in much of human history. Work for justice and pray for peace is my thought for now (not my orginal thought, of course). I even put this phrase on a car ribbon.

Justice is the key to the destruction of any despot. And above all we should never, ever become silent.




Best,
Mary

and that pesky war thing is still annoying, but otherwise it's all smiles

...and we all still have our teevees to keep us occupied and our victory gin to sooth our minds. The economy IS good...for the lucky few. And what do we care if people are dying for a lie? If the Dems don't think it's a lie...then why should we care?

It's easy to just sit back and accept the status quo. After all...isn't this what most Americans are doing as they watch the world go by on CNN and think it will never happen here?

So, what's next? How long is it going to take for the rank and file American to realize that while they were having fun flying their flags from the SUV's, with "support the troops" and "W" stickers, that they themselves were doing everything possible to assure that the coup would be permanent?

Those pseudo patriots have turned America over to the vicious thugs who are looting the treasury, burning the Constitution, killing millions and plundering the planet.

Has anyone got any ideas about restoring Democracy to the U.S.? Or is this just it for the next 50 years until some other Country just walks in a confiscates what's left?

...of fascism. One that doesn't need guns or blood or hobnail boots to advance and take root in America. It's a subtle form of fascism that uses modern technology and instant media to establish disinformation. A successful example of this is that many Americans continue to believe that we're in Iraq to bring them freedom and that Saddam had something to do with 9-11.

What exactly IS the truth? The corporate American media won't tell you because they're in on the scam and are profiting from it.

It must be emphasized that the people are complicit in their own control. Every bit as responsible as those who have sought to control them. Who is going to rise up? The brainwashed freepers? They're getting much of what they "think" (I don't believe they really think) that they want -- a right-wing authoritarian government, very powerful, at the federal level, enforcing oppressive and regressive conservative social institutions for everyone.

And worse than the freepers? Ralph Nader's 100 million voters that are too busy oggling Jessica Simpson's tits and watching Fear Factor to get off their dumb assess and give a shit about anything besides matching towel sets and giant cars.

I'm sorry that I'm not as optimistic. If the GOP didn't cheat (which I believe they did), then the masses have spoken. And they've said, loud and clear, that they DO love living under despotism. Or at least, it hasn't affected their consumer pasttimes, so what's the problem?

The fact is that everyone around the world is suffering for the weakness or complicity of millions of Americans in establishing an American Dictatorship.

Which is why we shouldn't complain too loudly about Republicans marching in lockstep when too many Democrats do the same in supporting anyone with a (D) after their name.