Peace and Love Still Rock
A Democratic Party Platform
"What We've Got Here Is Failure To Communicate"
Guns 'N Roses
Civil War
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” Words uttered by Connecticut native Paul Newman’s character, Luke from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke; and reprised wonderfully, after a fashion, by Axl Rose with his rock band’s [Guns N’ Roses] ‘Breakdown’ introduction to their awesome rockin’ anti-war ballad Civil War. This line defines the Democratic Party since 1972, but a luxury we can no longer afford now that the filthy rich have consolidated economic power into the money-grubbing and power-mad hands of the wealthiest one percent. The astounding fact is that the wealthiest 1% of the American population now owns more wealth than the bottom 50%! Globally the fact is that the Republithief party and its billionaire masters who occupy the top 2% of the global wealthy now own as much in assets as the bottom 90% of the global population!
The entire silly crew of Republithief defenders of the billionaires
The one-time or current crop of Presidential "Contenders"
of the Tea Bag variety.
Given the absurd stable of candidates at the top of the Tea Baggin’ heap this year, we actually DO stand a chance and the likelihood to repeat the Presidential landslide record of Nixon in 1972 (when he won 49 states and lost only Mass. and D.C.). But we must do better. We must not only use this opportunity to continue OCCUPYING THE WHITE HOUSE, if we don’t take advantage of our chance to use the Presidential coattails to sweep into record majorities in both houses of Congress (60 in the Senate is not only doable, but required, and at least 20 more seats for the second term of Speaker Nancy Pelosi), and especially to ensure that the candidates seeking to replace incumbent Republithieves are MORE liberal than prior candidates, then we deserve the continued stalemate which will emerge from a “Blue Dog” right-wing Democratic dominated Congress once again.A quick review of the Pachyderms dominating the Tea field might be in order, to prove their vulnerability. Frontrunner of the month is Newt Gingrich; thrice failed in marriage within his personal life, unable to manage his own finances (a half million dollar account at Tiffany’s went unexplained recently), cheater extraordinaire, and ditched by his own party as Speaker. VULNERABLE. LANDSLIDE. Second frontrunner of the month: Herman Cain; sexual harassment charges galore, foot-in-mouth disease, and imagines that mountains pose an obstacle to air raids against nuclear facilities. VULNERABLE. LANDSLIDE. Former frontrunner and still likely nominee Mitt Romney; lost to McCain in a rout for his own party’s nod in 2008 so they won’t vote for him in a general election, looks like a Ken Doll, thinks like a Ken Doll, has the brain of a Ken Doll, and blows with the wind and everyone knows it; will be massacred by Barack Obama in debates. VULNERABLE. LANDSLIDE. Former frontrunner for a day Michele Bachmann; need I say more. VULNERABLE. LANDSLIDE. Former frontrunner for a week Rick Perry; his prior historical talk of Texas secession make him the least formidable potential nominee along with his brain freezes on camera in front of millions, most notably forgetting the third of the three cabinet departments he himself supposedly wants to eliminate, along with his over-the-top New Hampshire am-I-high-or-am-I-drunk-or-am-I-just-crazy performance video which has since gone viral. VULNERABLE. LANDSLIDE.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
And The First Family
And a quick review of our nominee’s major selling points to the general electorate reads as follows:
1) Ending the reign of terror that was Osama Bin Laden.
2) Ending Don't Ask Don't Tell- The official Defense Department policy of legal discrimination against gay and lesbian heroes.
3) Negotiating and passing through the U.S. Senate the START treaty with Russia.
4) Passage of the highly successful $700 billion TARP bill.
5) Passage of the first-step Health Care Reform Act of 2010.
6) Removing 100,000 of our bravest and best from harm's way in Iraq and an end to the Cheney Administration-sponsored US aggression by December of this year.
7) Getting a $20 billion down payment from BP before the spill was even over.
8) Intimidating Tony "Wayward" Hayward into resigning as the immoral head of BP, taking a demotion and hiding out in Putin's Russia to avert prosecution by Attorney General Eric Holder.
9) Naming 2 women in a row to the U.S. Supreme court with brains.
10) Having a brain himself as President, post-George Dubya Bush.
11) Putting an end to Muammar Qaddafi without the loss of the life of a single American military member.
LANDSLIDE. So we win next November. It is important to note that Barack ran as a liberal and hiding it little, having been known to have had the most liberal Senate voting record aside from the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s during his brief two years on Capitol Hill at the time of the primary campaign and election of 2008. The only other overtly liberal nominees, arguably, have been George McGovern in 1972, former Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Mass. Senator John Kerry in 2004. With the exception of Kerry, these were all stunning and landslide losses, and Kerry’s should have been a victory, given public anger at the theft of the 2000 election by George W. Bush and his brother Jeb and the security lapse that was 9/11, the illegal war in Iraq and his inability to pronounce nuclear (he thought it was 'nucular') and his now-obvious stupidity.
Running as a black man, a liberal who couldn’t hide either, and running against a Republithief candidate who was portrayed and always has been by the mainstream media as a war hero, a ‘maverick’ within the party and a ‘moderate’ [that was prior to his pre-Sharrrrron Angle turn to fascism to secure the AZ Senate nod in 2010], Barack Obama’s victory as a liberal was a surprising Electoral College and popular vote landslide. So the general electorate is ready and primed for liberalism. The myth that the Faux News Channel is viewed by the U.S. population as anything more than a competitor to the Comedy Channel is just that, a myth.
Zager and Evans had only one hit:
In The Year 2525
So what’s to be the Democratic platform? We’ve been lacking long-term vision for decades. What we need is a vision that spans decades, not electoral cycles. How ‘bout a twenty year plan? Here we go. A proposed Democratic Party Platform that stretches from 2013 into the mid-2030’s. Maybe we could use the baby-boomers’ anthem from Danny Zager and Rick Evans, their tune In The Year 2525 as a sortofa theme song demonstrating that we CAN think past the next Congressional election.
A Magical Little Blue Marble Wrapped By An Extremely Delicate Thin Layer Of Gas:
EARTH
It’s time to stop viewing economics, military policy, foreign policy, environmental policy, and health policy in separate boxes. Ever since we chose two civilian targets upon which to drop nuclear bombs in the world’s only nuclear war, a first-strike victory by the power that then held a monopoly on nukes, the United States, when it won Nuclear War I in 1945, this government, whether directed at the time by Democrats or Republithieves, has pursued a policy of international military aggression on continents far removed from our safe base in North America, protected by thousands of miles of ocean [the Atlantic and Pacific are still taught at West Point and elsewhere as our primary defense weapons] and bordering only two military midgets in Canada and Mexico. Under one pretext or another, we’ve engaged in military gambits which have made our conventional military look ludicrous, all the while we developed and deployed the largest, most technologically advanced, accurate and deadly nuclear stockpile on earth capable of hitting every world capitol within one hour. We’ve also created an offensive “Defense” Department whose budget exceeds that of the entire rest of the world. The Soviet Union was so disgusted at the American shenanigans and abuse of the UN Security Council in its first true test in the 1950s, that its delegation stormed out of the session, and that’s how this government was able to ram a Security Council resolution through that ‘legitimized’ our Korean peninsula aggression (please dpn't forget that Russia actually shares a border with Korea--the United States does NOT) without the Soviet’s veto. And we fought that war to a stalemate, unable to rout the North Koreans even though we had touted ourselves the solitary heroes of WW II. JFK was a Democrat, but not nearly the liberal his brother Ted became, and he along with his chosen TX political hack Vice President and later President Lyndon Johnson created the Vietnam aggression, expanded illegally by the Agnew/Nixon criminal crew. Johnson botched the aggression so badly, and our inability to defeat the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong proved that our billions spent on the Offense Department were futile, but deadly. Under Agnew/Nixon the temptation of the Presidency to circumvent law and the Constitution because of the huge Offense Dept. budget and imagined capabilities resulted in spreading the Vietnam fiasco illegally to Laos and Cambodia, ultimately providing the Kampuchean people with the “Killing Fields” of genocidal fanatic Pol Pot! Again our conventional forces looked impotent worldwide (in their 1950’s Vietnam aggression, even the French only managed to lose against the Viet Minh and the North, but still kept South Vietnam intact, not losing Laos and Cambodia in the deal as well), while our nukes remained pointed at the remainder of the world.
AMERICA
THE WORLD'S LEADER IN
ICBM'S
SINCE 1945!
In the 1980’s B-movie chimpanzee co-star (Bedtime for Bonzo) Ronald Ray-gun was allowed by the Democrats to win, and then to claim that his species-record breaking arms race brought down the Soviet Union, instead of peace-makers and courageous heroes such as Lech Walesa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin. Now we had a massive conventional killing machine, along with an even bigger and more advanced nuclear system, now armed with multiple independently targeted warheads in order to circumvent and break previously agreed to nuclear arms treaties.So by 2001, with the failure of all of our accumulated trillions of dollars in so-called “Defense” spending, when 19 'lucky' as_holes with plastic box cutters proved the futility of our idiocy on a sunny September 11th in New York City, Washington, D.C. and in the inland woods of Pennsylvania; the population was primed by an ignorant Republithief President Dubya, his leader Dick Cheney, and once-failed Defense Secretary (under Ford) Rumsfeld for lies which made the rag-tag band of thugs under Osama Bin Laden into a national security threat, and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (in Iraq, lying to their own Sec. of State Colin Powell and all the rest of us, telling us that Saddam was about to hurl nuclear, chemical and biological warheads at us somehow—was he gonna do it with one of his silly, ancient, 50 mile-range inaccurate Scud missiles--ifya recall he had already blown that wad, since he had plum run outa Scuds altogether by then, having lobbed so many at Iran and trying to aim at Israel in the preceding years--I wonder?) and our conventional forces have stalemated these two countries—which both lack any Air Force, naval capacity, or any significant military capability except IED’s--which are simply poorly designed and manufactured land mines--and side arms for over a decade now!
If ya read my stuff at all ya knew this one was comin' sooner or later:
John Winston Ono Lennon
aka
Dr. Winston O'Boogie
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE!
The Democratic Party needs to divorce itself from all foreign aggression outside our continent and sign a renewed non-aggression pact for our own hemisphere and to repudiate our past military aggressions. Barack rightly changed U.S. military strategy shortly after taking office via executive order, and for the first time since the success of the Manhattan Project our official policy is that the United States must disarm in a nuclear fashion, along with the rest of the world. He concluded and had the lame-duck Senate last year ratify the first-ever Strategic Arms REDUCTION Treaty with Russia. All are smooth moves by this Administration. This needs to follow with a stated goal of finalizing the START process with the elimination of all nuclear weapons on earth by 2020! Now there’s something to campaign on!
Nukes can and will do more to destroy the thin layer of gas wrapping this lovely little blue marble we call earth within hours than anything else we could do that quickly as a species. Thanks to Dubya and crew, the likelihood of Nuclear War II is greatly enhanced by their intentional policy of allowing General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan at the time to develop a nuclear arsenal, when arch-enemy and much-larger and very threatening in conventional warfare India is packing nuclear weapons right next door! A South Asian Nuclear War II would have devastating ecological consequences of course, but would also make the likelihood of a nuclear free world far less likely.
The Republithieves are complicating the shi_t outa a simple matter.
Global Warming
is caused by fire and smoke, too much combustion and the smoke
is causing the sun's heat to stay inside the atmosphere
causing a greenhouse effect. It really is that simple,
and the consequent climate changes are never heard of
in millions of years of pre-history.
WE JUST HAFTA STOP BURNING SO MUCH CRAP AND MOST OF WHAT WE BURN
IS OIL, COAL AND NATURAL GAS!
AND THE BILLIONAIRES DEPEND ON THESE FOR THEIR BILLIONS,
THUS THE OIL WARS.
That simple.
The other means by which our species is destroying that wondrous thin layer of gas we call the atmosphere is via combustion. Burning things. It’s causing smoke and the smoke is creating a greenhouse effect which is causing climate change and warming the planet at a pace unseen going way back into the pre-history of planet earth going back millions of years. It may be too late already. Policy-wise, our consumerism and endless demand for an ever-expanding economy ever since Ike’s expansion of the Interstate Highway system [under the auspices of which department? You guessed it! The “Defense” Department] and the suburban sprawl he created along with the demand for 3.2 kids and a married set of heterosexual parents, a 5 bedroom house and white picket fence for all, and TV’s, washer/dryers, side-by-side Amana fridges, TWO cars in every garage and such for all has been THE cause of the oil wars. And make no mistake, they are all oil wars. There IS no “War on Terror.” These little bands of thugs pose no threat to our national survival in any sense; our aggressions and meddling in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute are all about oil. PERIOD. And we Democrats can divorce ourselves from this policy.
As liberals and Democrats we need to end our disabling fear of saying the words disabled, poor, disadvantaged, old folks and food-for-the-hungry and defend them loudly again. SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE! Food stamps, education, disability assistance, special education--these are all popular and populist issues for which we liberals and Democrats can claim credit, campaign on and WIN! That worn-out phrase "Middle Class" just doesn't cut it anymore, especially since the One Percenters have effectively eliminated that grouping, if it was ever a useful concept at all. The 99% know it's our obligation to help out those who cannot either temporarily or permanently help themselves without accommodations. And we MUST address the issue of prison reform. Our prisons are sick places where the inmates are used as pawns to mete out brutal punishment against other inmates, and hatred is taught and anger, resentment and recidivism the result. The U.S. system of state prisons is THE primary cause of chronic crime in our nation. We also need to deal with overhauling the courts where copping a plea is the norm if you're impoverished, guilty or not, and skin shading determines the overall population distribution and racial and ethnic animosity within prison walls is not only tolerated, but often sanctified and encouraged. PRISON REFORM is key and an end to state murder with revenge as the motive, what TX and the other states euphemistically call capital punishment. Nobel Prize winners Amnesty International decry the American system of "justice' with every annual report!
Our economy need not endlessly expand, nor can it nor is endless economic ‘expansion’ even desirable. We should advance a vision of our country where people are encouraged to ride scooters if they can, ride bicycles when they can, take good high-speed public transportation and expand its availability on a large scale and to provide money, CASH to those that do. The issue is not a 1% employment rate anymore. The issue is a more equitable distribution of the work that needs to be done, and fairness in employment, including benefit guarantees to workers. FMLA is very popular, and so is the ADA. We need guaranteed paid vacation, sick, maternity, paternity, family leave time for all who work more than 20 hours per week. We need revised minimum wage standards which reflect the varying needs of high school students, and single moms for example. We NEED to build industries which will provide for the manufacture of green products for export to other nations. We need to mandate that automobiles only be purchased in accordance with needs not wants. 8 cylinder 4 by 4’s are not a ‘right’ and utilization of the roads are a privilege. Smaller and one car per family needs to be given financial advantages for our people.
Home farming and vegetable gardens should also be financially incentivized, along with financial inducements for folks to rent rather than own their homes. Coal burning electric plants must end, there is no such thing as “Clean Coal.”
While our consumerism and our economic and foreign policies since WW II have resulted in the viral spread of the demand for Maytag style washer/dryers, Amana fridges, Nike shoes, microwaves, cars and more way beyond our shores, we can stop those policies now and must. We’ve lost control of the carbon footprint worldwide, because our materialistic policies have resulted in filthy industrialization policies and consumer demand in such disparate places as India, the still-Communist Peoples’ Republic of China, and of course Japan which provided us with the world’s first public nuclear power plant melt-down this year (Chernobyl was a much more private affair as was our own Three Mile Island). Nevertheless we can still work at an international economic structure which incentivizes and prioritizes greening the world in a massive way.
In order to create the changes called for, the funding is actually really simple [in general]. Tax those who would strangle us by concentrating power and wealth in a big way. If we can secure the numbers we should next year in Congress with more liberal candidates, then we can not only maintain the current levels on the 99 percent, but perhaps double the taxes paid by the 1%. In times past that wouldn’t amount to much, but don’t forget that the one percent now own what the bottom 50% do given their concentration of assets in the past few decades. So the increase in revenues will be massive and most certainly DOES matter!
Symbolic Oxymorons;
the ever offensive
"Defense" Department's Pentagon
+
a
Rainbow Peace Symbol
On the spending side, cutting the Offensive “Defense” Department budget by half within a 4 year term and then allocating the savings toward greening the economy over the course of the next 20 years as well as using those funds to help create the structure for a more fair distribution of jobs, benefits and resources—coupled with the revenue increases provided by taxing the 1%--will also put the federal fiscal house in order more quickly than the nickel and dime approach both parties have advocated for decades. By the time 2035 rolls around, the Defense Department budget could easily be pared to 25% of its current level and our national security will only be more enhanced than if we were to do anything else. We should call for these revenue increases and Defense cuts.
The profit motive is killing certain sectors of the economy. “Too big to fail” is a myth, and any profit-motived corporation which is in danger of failing should be viewed as a natural outcome of what the Darwinist and Laissez Faire economists at one point, if they were intellectually honest, would have called “natural selection.” The Citicorps, Banks of America, etc. must be allowed to die in the future. That is now obvious.
The first step Health Care Act should be amended to eliminate the profit motive from medicine altogether. Not government option, government medicine is what is required and in the heart of all true Democrats and liberals. Those nations with government medicine and no profit motive ARE the nations which are now outstripping us in terms of life expectancy. I do NOT think anybody in their right mind wants themselves or a loved one to be wheeled unconscious with chest pains into an ER, and have the attending physician who has a private practice as his full-time gig to have a profit motive when he/she makes the decision whether to carve open your chest and grab your heart for a massage. NOBODY in their right mind would want this.
Remember the Hippocratic Oath?
Where did it go?
It got gobbled up by the profit motive and
Corporate Greed.
Debunking the socialism argument is simple. I do believe that the folks I have come in to clean my carpets and upholstery shouldn’t be government employees. I do believe the private sector does rug and sofa cleaning well, and I want the folks who come over to do this having the profit motive. I also want them bonded, and that bond to be regulated by the government in case one of the rug cleaners has sticky fingers while I’m in the bathroom or fixing him some coffee +.So to summarize, our platform should include the following planks:
What We Democrats Truly Stand For:
1) Our platform should stretch for 20 years, a vision to the mid-2030’s.
2) Finalizing the START process, and eliminating all nuclear stockpiles by 2020.
3) Ending U.S. military aggression on all continents, getting out of the Middle Eastern disputes, ending the oil war and negotiating and signing a new non-aggression pact with our North and South American neighbors.
4) Cutting the offensive “Defense” budget in half within 4 years, and by 75% by 2035.
5) Doubling the taxes on the wealthiest 1% and maintaining the current tax levels on the rest at present. Using “Defense” cuts and billionaire tax increases to fund necessary changes.
6) Ending expectations of an endlessly expanding American economy, providing a vision for a more compact and green economy, and the equitable distribution of jobs, benefits, resources and labor guarantees. Planning for economic contractions rather than randomly reacting.
7) Strict limits on car manufacturing and consumer purchases, CASH incentives for bicycling, walking, scooters, and other personal green lifestyle changes.
8) CASH incentives for home farming, for renting rather than home ownership and for new economic thinking.
9) Ending the “Too big to fail” concept, and allowing profit-based firms to be ‘naturally selected’ no matter how huge. Advancing the notion that “Too big” is THE problem with the economy.
10) Ending the profit motive in medicine, from MD’s, to pharmaceutical companies, to providers of all types.
So there it is, for what it’s worth--the Unabashed liberal Democratic party agenda for 2012-2035 or thereabouts. I DO believe we can go forward in 2012 Unabashedly Left, even more so than we did in 2008, and that we will have a mandate for a progressive agenda. This may be our last chance for some time and the backlash could be a genuine resurgence of Tea Party nonsense and the election of a 2016 reactionary.
Re-elect our awesome incumbent President and nominate and work for genuine liberals to the U.S. House and Senate—give the boot to “Blue-Dog” reactionary “Democrats” please. The winning link is:
