"Fair Share" for Billionaires?

There has been a lot of talk lately about getting the oligarchs to pay their "fair share".

But they can't. These fortunes are founded on robbery and crimes on an unimaginable scale. How many lives has each billionaire ruined by sucking wealth upwards from the working class? How many lives have been blighted by loss of funds to education, special needs, the arts, and the sciences?

How many people have killed themselves due to debts and depression from living in a society that is being squeezed to death for every last penny?

How many people have developed cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other "diseases of the poor" due to the pollution that we are all forced to breathe, eat, and drink so that these psychotic billionaires can continue to amass more and more?

The dead can never be made whole. Neither can children with lead poisoning. Or any of the other millions of victims of these monsters.

It's not a matter of them starting to pay their "fair share", although even that is something that the elite would die rather than allow. It's reparations for mass murder and torture. It's making a planet whole that they have set on fire with their unbounded greed.

There is no way that they can repay what they have stolen. There is no punishment severe enough to somehow balance their crimes. They cannot make right the wrongs that they've done. Even death and the death of their families, along with complete confiscation of everything they all have, wouldn't come close.

You can't repay one single baby for a nervous system that suffers from lead contamination. It can't be done.

The only possible action for a just people is that the oligarchs and their servants in politics and the media - all of them - should lose everything of material value that they have, and spend the rest of their lives as the poorest people on Earth. But still with food and shelter; because we aren't like them.

Let them spend the rest of their lives working to try to restore the Earth, and make good a fraction of the damage that they've done.

The DNC Online War Against Bernie

The DNC launched a massive attack online yesterday. All of a sudden posts from strangers appeared in progressive and Bernie groups across Facebook. They proclaimed that that we had to "vote blue no matter who". Their use of phrases like "Bernie Bros" was another giveaway. The whole thing was blatantly coordinated. One day nothing, the next day a flood of David Brock's trolls. It was just like 2016.

Do you remember 2016? I do. Every online group for progressives was hit by wave after wave of trolls, supporting each other and parroting the latest line of attack. Admins were approached to sell control of their groups; the going price was reportedly $10,000 for a healthy group. Many of them DID sell out, and those groups quickly converted to Hillary groups. New mods were brought on, and anyone who protested the new policies were purged without warning. Posting histories were reviewed and used as a basis for purging, too.

In groups where the admin wouldn't sell out, mods would get in somehow and abuse the hell out of their powers. They'd suspect or censor pro-Bernie posts and posters, and protect pro-Hillary and pro-DNC posts. Or new members would appear, post child pornography, and then report the group to Facebook. The groups were usually shut down. It was, frankly, frustrating as hell.

But it was effective. The DNC put at least $10,000,000.00 into online action - probably much more - and they shut down or crippled the vast majority of Bernie groups online. Progressives became refugees, a people without a home.

Today's attack shows that the DNC is sticking with the old playbook. We can expect them to escalate. We can protect ourselves somewhat by reporting DNC trolls to the admins - NOT to Facebook - and by the admins acting vigorously to ban the trolls. It won't be easy. But it has to be done.

Here's the key takeaway: The DNC is doing this for a reason. They want to see if they can shut us down again. *That means that they are planning to cheat us (and Bernie) out of the nomination again.*

We can't let them do that. We have to fight back and stay strong. We need to become good at recognizing enemy action and agents. They're not that good at disguising themselves, so this is something we can all do.

Social media is just one front of our political revolution. But it matters. If we show them that they can't silence us, can't get us to attack each other or accept their sleazy framing of issues, we can win. And that just might make them thing twice about cheating us out of our votes.

We need to make them afraid of us. We need to stand up against them. If we don't, they'll crush us into the dust. And that means the end not just of Bernie's campaign, but almost certainly the end of a future for the human race.

Warren's backdoor screw job

Elizabeth Warren's proposal is actually a back-door way to make working people pay more without realizing it. Right now, for those who get health care through their employer, part of their compensation is their health insurance cost. Say your health insurance costs $15,000, and you make $50,000; your total compensation is actually $65,000. Under Bernie's plan, your employer would have to give that $15,000 to you as part of your salary, once Medicare for All was implemented. You might pay (for example) $4,000 more per year in taxes, but you would be GETTING $15,000 more per year - PLUS full medical, dental, and vision coverage, with no premiums or co-pays. That's a huge increase.

But Warren wants to take that money and use it to pay for her "Medicare for All". That means that you would lose that $15,000! Ordinary workers will be footing the bill, if they happen to have been getting health insurance through their employer. It's a massive screw-job, carefully engineered to avoid "raising taxes" while nonetheless sticking the working people of America with most of the bill.

That Warren is willing to do that shows just how much she's in the pockets of the elite.

Nancy Pelosi Is Very Concerned

Apparently Nancy Pelosi is very concerned that Democratic candidates might have Democratic positions - except for matters of identity politics and talking about workers rights (as opposed to actually doing anything about them, of course).

But that she ridicules the idea of even trying to shut down the fossil fuel industry in 10 years shows that she really doesn't believe that we are facing potential extinction if drastic action isn't taken about the climate.

Or she just doesn't care. Either way, she might as well be a Republican.

Nuclear Power, and why not to use it

The thing about nuclear power is, it's run and monitored by human beings. We know that people can screw up or be corrupted. And the cost of things going wrong with nuclear is a lot worse than it is with renewable: Three Mile Island, Fukishima, Chernobyl...

Democrats for Trump

Here are the 152 House Democrats who voted to fund Trump's concentration camps for children. Is your rep on the list? Please feel free to share this list wherever you like!

• Adams
  
• Aguilar
  
• Allred
  
• Axne
  
• Bass
  
• Beatty
  
• Bera
  
• Bishop (GA)
  
• Boyle, Brendan F.
  
• Brindisi
  
• Bustos
  
• Butterfield
  
• Carbajal
  
• Cárdenas
  
• Carson (IN)
  
• Cartwright
  
• Case
  
• Casten (IL)
  
• Castor (FL)
  
• Clay
  
• Cleaver
  
• Clyburn
  
• Cooper
  
• Correa
  
• Costa
  
• Courtney
  
• Cox (CA)
  
• Craig
  
• Crist
  
• Crow
  
• Cuellar
  
• Cummings
  
• Cunningham
  
• Davids (KS)
  
• Davis (CA)
  
• Davis, Danny K.
  
• Dean
  
• DeLauro
  
• DelBene
  
• Demings
  
• Deutch
  
• Doyle, Michael F.
  
• Engel
  
• Eshoo
  
• Evans
  
• Finkenauer
  
• Fletcher
  
• Foster
  
• Fudge
  
• Garamendi
  
• Golden
  
• Gonzalez (TX)
  
• Gottheimer
  
• Green, Al (TX)
  
• Harder (CA)
  
• Hayes
  
• Heck
  
• Hill (CA)
  
• Himes
  
• Horn, Kendra S.
  
• Horsford
  
• Houlahan
  
• Hoyer
  
• Huffman
  
• Jeffries
  
• Johnson (GA)
  
• Johnson (TX)
  
• Kildee
  
• Kilmer
  
• Kim
  
• Kind
  
• Kirkpatrick
  
• Krishnamoorthi
  
• Kuster (NH)
  
• Lamb
  
• Langevin
  
• Larsen (WA)
  
• Larson (CT)
  
• Lawson (FL)
  
• Lee (NV)
  
• Levin (CA)
  
• Lieu, Ted
  
• Lipinski
  
• Loebsack
  
• Lowey
  
• Luria
  
• Lynch
  
• Maloney, Sean
  
• Matsui
  
• McAdams
  
• McBath
  
• McCollum
  
• McEachin
  
• McGovern
  
• McNerney
  
• Morelle
  
• Murphy
  
• Neal
  
• O'Halleran
  
• Pallone
  
• Panetta
  
• Pappas
  
• Pascrell
  
• Payne
  
• Perlmutter
  
• Peters
  
• Peterson
  
• Phillips
  
• Pingree
  
• Price (NC)
  
• Quigley
  
• Raskin
  
• Rice (NY)
  
• Rose (NY)
  
• Rouda
  
• Roybal-Allard
  
• Ruppersberger
  
• Rush
  
• Sánchez
  
• Sarbanes
  
• Scanlon
  
• Schiff
  
• Schneider
  
• Schrier
  
• Scott (VA)
  
• Scott, David
  
• Serrano
  
• Sewell (AL)
  
• Shalala
  
• Sherman
  
• Sherrill
  
• Sires
  
• Slotkin
  
• Spanberger
  
• Speier
  
• Stanton
  
• Stevens
  
• Suozzi
  
• Thompson (CA)
  
• Thompson (MS)
  
• Torres Small (NM)
  
• Trone
  
• Underwood
  
• Van Drew
  
• Vargas
  
• Veasey
  
• Visclosky
  
• Wasserman Schultz
  
• Waters
  
• Welch
  
• Wexton
  
• Yarmuth
  

Source: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2019/roll426.xml (FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 426)

Echoes in the wilderness

Here's the thing that worries me: I can't see any scenario in which the DNC allows Bernie or Tulsi to get the nomination. None.

The superdelegate "reform" was pure window dressing. No one was punished for the widescale election and registration fraud that the DNC used to falsify the 2016 nomination. It wasn't even acknowledged by the DNC. we have been given no reason to believe that Hillary Clinton has relinquished her control of the DNC. So why should we expect things to be different this time?

The media has covered Bernie and Tulsi as little as possible, and as dismissively as they can. They were the only two candidates to be attacked by the debate moderators.

We are being given every sign that the DNC intends to screw progressives out of our votes and our choice once again. And then they are going to try to beat us into submission with screams about "unity", accusations of racism and/or sexism, browbeating about the evils of Trump (as if we were responsible for him, rather than the DNC itself), and the usual online campaign from David Brock gaslighting us and destroying our subreddits and groups.

I'm not giving up, but I am also not putting my hopes in the electoral process. Even if the DNC's chosen candidate wins, we will not get the massive climate change action which is absolutely necessary for our civilization to have a chance of survival. And we can't afford to wait another four or eight years. We only have 10 years left at most.

We should have other tracks. Other avenues of approach to make the fundamental social, environmental, and economic changes which are critical to human survival. No matter how the coming election turns out, we have to be ready for the fight of our lives. Because it's coming.