How would America survive without our 'war industry'? Even children's video games are brainwashing our kids to continue the war mind-set.
I used to be proud to be an American, but now?

This is exactly what needs to happen. Pull the rug out from under the war machine and bring those resources and people back home where they are desperately needed to create new businesses and new jobs aimed at improving this country.

Right now we are hell bent on destroying ourselves and our children's future with these incessant wars.

Honestly, what do you expect 'progressive Democrats' to do? Honestly, what is the very best you can hope for, in your wildest dreams?

So everyone gives money to the Dems to get Obama elected, and he becomes president. Now they spend all their energy until 2012 typing feverishly about what he 'should' do, what he 'owes the grassroots' etc. Forgetting that Obama, just like anyone who gets a sniff at the Oval Office, doesn't care about anything except being president. What would he get for acting all 'progressive'? The first time he looks like doing something faintly new deal-ish, a small number of very connected, very influential men, who have been doing him favors and making things happen for him over the past two years, will explain that that wasn't the deal. And he will apologize to those men and fuck over every single person who voted for him.

So the "progressive Democrats" will now want even more of your time and money, to make sure that half a generation hence, there can be 'change' in the White House. Pffff.

Marx has been so successfully smeared in America (that didn't just happen, btw, lots of money went into that), that class analysis is just not acceptable. Even on a board like this, where the vibe is quite intelligent, class analysis gets hissed at. No-one says 'ruling class', everyone plays by the rules that have worked so well until now to keep the system stable and the aristocrats hidden, wealthy and safe.

So please go on thinking that politics in this country is somehow different to anywhere else, that it's about race or flag pins or abstract nouns or bowling. The joke's on you. 'Utopian', you say? Utopian is to think that you're going to get change in this country if enough folks rock up at polling stations each November and vote for the 'right' candidate.

I'm not encouraging cynical disengagement from politics, I'm encouraging cynical disengagement from the Democratic Party. As for the 'dirty game of realpolitik', think about who wins when an entire population is split exactly down the middle (the elegance of that!) and fighting dirty games with each other. Upper class liberals and poor blacks on one side, yuppies and poor whites on the other. Each side has its mascots, its cartoonists, its chin-stroking commentators. That game is designed to be endless. And the people engaging in it aren't going to get anything out of it, ever.

Supporting Democrats is a serious political disorder, like alcoholism or returning again & again to an abusive spouse who repeatedly lies to you. It's easy to fall off the wagon, to make excuses & rationalizations for it.

Even many whose views are developed enough to recognize such truths as the fundamental rottenness of the 2-party system & the complicity of Democrats in all of the Republicans' major crimes, are still unable to draw the logical consequences of these insights. (Those so naive that they still conceive of Democrats as being the "opponents" of Republicans are another case altogether.)

The central point is this: capitalist society permits the Democrats to be one of the 2 allowed parties for a very definite reason. It's not because the Democrats "serve the people." It's because in a subtle but effective way, they help the capitalists keep the populace under control by providing them with the illusion of possible change. TPTB don't want the people "served." They want them managed, or controlled.

It is the job, the central social function of the Democrats to always be dangling before the people's noses vague pseudo-hints of possible change, so as to keep them from bolting from bourgeois politics altogether. It is the Democrats' intention to never deliver meaningful change, but rather to keep dangling hints of it alluringly forever. This produces control -- a populace habituated to remain safely within the lines required by ruling class interests.

This is why the Democrats NEVER paint a picture of US history that's the slightest bit accurate -- they want a brainwashed population every bit as much as the Republicans do. This is why they NEVER are willing to set forth an honest socioeconomic analysis of why things are as they are -- they much prefer that people not understand such things.

As long as a large chunk of voters can be deceived by the seemingly "nicer guy" act of the Democrats, there is no hope whatever of coming to grips with the core problems of our society. The most dangerous trends -- a wasteful consumer society, environmental destruction, grotesque social inequality, and an uncontrollable propaganda/war machine -- cannot even be approached within the framework of bourgeois politics, because they all serve ruling class interests. This is what is really being protected, when people opt to support Democrats just because they seem less blatantly cruel on TV.

Remember in your support of the Dems that means you are implicitly supporting their policies which means you are complicit in large-scale atrocities.

The record is long and very public. It is a tremendous leap right over the historical record for anyone to think supporting the Dems is in any way meaningful unless your concept of "getting things done" means rubber stamping Empire Lite.

David Obey gives good speeches, has miserable voting
record on War Funding.

I smell remake perfume again, trying to sell to the public
that there really are some "good" democrats.
Election times a comin, ya no.

Grayson's "War is Making You Poor Act" also is an election
time side show.
As Grayson pointed out when he introduced this catchy sounding bill
"I am not against the wars. I am not against funding the wars"