Note:Those who have followed the events of the past month will be relieved to learn that Billy Lee and his illegitimate son, Billy Lee Junior, have reconciled. (Can we all just accept it and move on?)
Billy Lee encouraged Junior to write this newest essay, Segregation Tax, to reassure the little b*****d of his unconditional love and trust. The matter of Junior defacing our offices and almost destroying our web-site is behind us.
No hard feelings, says Billy Lee, no matter what the haters say.
The Editorial Board
We Need a Segregation Tax.
Thank you, Daddy, for letting me publish my essay. And thanks to Fanny Jean who fixed grammar and punctuation.
From now on schools, businesses and homeowners in America will be taxed every year they continue to operate in all-white, non-black settings.
The segregation tax doubles each year until these schools, universities, businesses, corporations, and neighborhoods either integrate or go into default. The revenues from the segregation tax will be ear-marked to reduce national debt and fund programs for the poor.
The number of black people needed by businesses, schools, and neighborhoods to trigger avoidance of the segregation tax will be tied to some agreed-upon fraction of the population of black people in the states where they live.
For practical reasons related to difficulties of implementation, my recommendation is to set the fraction to one-quarter. If black folks are 12% of the population in the particular state where they live, then at least one-fourth of 12% (that is, 3%) of their neighbors, school-mates, and co-workers must be black to permit any who are not African American to dodge tax penalties.
2,500 delegates attended; 18 delegates were African American. Under the formula, the RNC would pay the segregation tax because at minimum 83 of the delegates should have been black. If the number represented their full proportion of the population, 330 black delegates would have participated.
Everyone knows the GOP is racist; especially its new standard bearer, right? Under my proposal, the GOP could remain racist, foolish, and cruel as long as its members fork over the money.
If my proposal (described below) was in effect this year, the GOP would have paid $50 dollars for pigheadedness. But consider this: had the segregation tax been enacted the day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the GOP would owe—due to the tax law’s yearly doubling—$22,500 TRILLION dollars. The tax would pay the national debt one-thousand times over.
The sooner the United States passes a Segregation Tax, the better.
If we get it right with the folks we abused the most, maybe other minority groups can follow and everyone will be treated fairly—once everyone understands they don’t have a choice.
We have to start with black people because they were brought to America in chains; they’ve been abused by slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, state-terrorism, and a system of regulations both written and unwritten known collectively as systemic-racism. They are the one minority least able to conceal their ethnicity by dress, hairstyle, or make-up. They cannot hide like other minorities sometimes do.
Freedom to discriminate against others based on the circumstances of their birth is not freedom; it is a vile attack on freedom and not only freedom but also the dignity of every human being who, according to the sages of old, is created in the image of God—a cosmic force of truth and love who is alleged by some to have ignited the Big Bang.
Shunning and abusing an entire race or group of people is national suicide. No country that does it survives, right? History is proof. Racism has to end sometime. Why not now? Why not right now while we still have time left to save ourselves?
Maybe start with a tax of $50 dollars the first year. It won’t stop discrimination but it will get people’s attention because everyone will be put on notice that the tax exists and is certain to double to $100 the following year and keep doubling year after year. By year 10, the tax will rise to $25,000 per year per household, business, and school. By year 15, the tax will affect the wealthy; it will by then be nearly one-million dollars.
At year 20, the tax on businesses that operate with the help of less than, say, 3% black people; or the tax on a family who chooses to live in gated-community with less than 3% black people; or the tax on private and public schools with less than 3% in their faculty and student bodies will rise to 30 million dollars.
If America continues to remain as segregated in year twenty as it is now, our national debt can be paid-off by the collection of the segregation tax; our government will at last be profitable; it will accumulate surpluses to enable the funding of social-programs-on-steroids.
A segregation tax spent reducing debt and funding programs for the poor is a win-win for everyone. After integrating and diversifying neighborhoods, businesses, and schools we become a more righteous nation worthy of less derision than we now receive from a world watching everything we say and do.
The benefit of righteous living is that we avoid revolution; we avoid chaos in our streets from humiliated people who have nothing left to lose. Of course, some haters may choose to live with this risk.
Some haters might continue to choose segregation. They might choose to pay the segregation tax, which by year 26 will be 1.7 billion dollars per year per family, per school, per corporation, per business, per university, per club, per political party, per whatever institution or organization haters choose to join.
If some refuse to integrate and diversify, the segregated poor will have showered on them by the tax code all the wealth of the nation’s haters. They will no longer need them. The world will witness the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of humankind.
One more thing: a segregation tax has to benefit African Americans only; otherwise other discriminated-against minorities will muscle their way in; blacks will find themselves standing at the end of the line one more time as they have under other programs such as the infamous “affirmative action” programs of old.
Some may remember how unfairly applied these ancient programs were. Everyone but blacks benefitted. People substituted white foreign-nationals to gain advantages. They pushed black folks to the back of the bus like they always do.
When I grow up, I’m going to need a safe place to live with people who love and respect me. I’m going to need a good job, and police to protect me. How about it, America?
The process of discrimination against blacks under affirmative action became so institutionalized and ingrained that the Supreme Court of Michigan banned affirmative action programs in their state colleges and universities last year.
Statistics proved them right. Blacks were being admitted to colleges at the lowest rate of any minority group based on their population. (Read daddy’s article on the Speedos page, anyone who doesn’t believe it.)
Every other minority group benefitted from affirmative action except black people, who the legislators intended to be the primary beneficiaries.
Uh oh…. Am I imagining readers jumping off sofas, throwing laptops, and wagging fingers in what they think is my gutless-liberal face?
I think I am.
Are you out of your mind? they scream; foam spewing. Black people won’t live in our neighborhoods. They can’t afford it!
Well, maybe some neighborhoods will have to chip-in to set aside a few houses where black families can live for free. What could be the harm in that?
Some neighborhoods might have to take up collections to actually pay families to live in their disagreeable hollows; maybe large sums if the neighborhood is overrun with hillbillies carrying pitchforks and oversized stun-guns.
When people stop to really think about it, I believe they will find that it’s going to be cheaper to hire black people to be their neighbors than to pay the segregation tax.
I think folks can see where I’m going with this. No imagined obstacle is going to be as difficult as paying the segregation tax. People who can’t or won’t pay will go bankrupt; even have their houses and businesses seized.
And that is how it should be. People who malign and exclude African Americans—after all the hell they’ve suffered—are no better than farm animals. Put racists in a pen and let them rot in their own manure. They are fit for nothing. They certainly aren’t fit to live in a modern, civilized country, which the United States of America aspires to be.
Under my proposal, nice homes in integrated neighborhoods everywhere in America (not just in a few hundred or so enlightened districts) could become available to black citizens within a few years. Good jobs and quality education might become available to a people long denied in every state—severely denied in some places, like southern Florida.
Some people might have noticed that I haven’t said a thing about churches. A writer on Wikipedia claims that 37% of Americans attend church every week. No one needs to be reminded that churches are among the most segregated places in America.
I don’t go to church, so I wouldn’t know, but I asked my daddy, Billy Lee, about it, because he goes to church almost every week. It’s mostly because his wife makes him, but still…
Daddy said my proposal won’t work with churches that ostracize minorities because we don’t tax churches in the United States. Churches belong to God. People who persist in sin and resist God’s Will go to Hell, where they are nailed to two-by-fours and hung to bleed until the end of time.
Churches are safe places for raging sinners to hang out until they discover how really evil they are and change more or less voluntarily. My plan, daddy said, is coercive. It forces people to be good.
God doesn’t work that way. He gives people plenty of time to set things right—an entire lifetime for most. Eventually, they or Jesus ends up paying for the bad things they’ve done. It’s a choice, and most folks get a lifetime to make it. That’s daddy’s explanation. It sounds crazy.
Anyway, maybe we could write-in a clause that gives preferential treatment to black veterans and their families—you know, the people who risk their lives so we can live like plantation owners compared to billions of impoverished people in other parts of the world—not to mention tens-of-millions of anonymous poor who rot inside inner-cities and ghettos.
Another idea, which daddy said I should not write about, at least right now: why not charge police unions 100 million dollars for each black citizen they kill? During the past few years we could have raised billions for the poor.
Another forbidden idea: any cop who kills someone, even when justified, loses the right to carry outside their house for 5 years—on duty or not. It might cut down on non-judicial executions.
Another idea: anyone who has contact with a prisoner who dies in custody for any reason loses their right to carry for one year. Think about it. It might encourage law enforcement to take better care of humans, who in the USA are presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of law.
B L Junior
P.S. Thank you, Daddy, for letting me publish my essay. Sorry I fired your editors and messed-up your office during your vacation. It won’t happen again. Promise.
Billy Lee returned from vacation today to find his offices in shambles. It might take a few days to get our high-tech equipment working and to clean-up broken beer bottles in the offices and parking lot.
Apparently, Junior and Fannie Jean seized control of our web-site, fired our staff in absentia, and started publishing rogue articles, while we vacationed unawares at the abandoned Trump Casino in Atlantic City.
Billy LeeFaceTimedJunior on his cell-phone — just to see how he was doing (he was missing him, he said) — only to discover that Junior and his slut-girlfriend were drunk and partying with friends in our offices; celebrating what they thought was their successful takeover of everything Billy Lee has worked so hard to build during the past two years.
Junior seemed unsteady and agitated during the call, according to Billy Lee; he waved his iPhone round and round; he slurred his words; Billy Lee thought he might beseeingin the background an orgy going on; he demanded that Junior cease and desist; that he take his friends and leave the premises.
Junior and his Fannie threw a hissy-fit. Their feral friends trashed pretty much everything, including furniture; they even plugged the toilets.
Billy Lee does not know where Junior and his pals are right now, but he ordered us, his Editorial Board, to find Junior, somehow, and make him understand that he forgives him; that he wants him back — parking cars and emptying trash cans, just like old times. (Billy Lee actually broke-down crying, he misses his Junior that much.)
So, Junior, if you’re reading this, pay attention. The important thing — the most important thing — is that we, theBillyLeePontificator Editorial Board, are back. And we are staying. We’re not going anywhere.
Junior, you can rot right now, wherever you are, for all we care. We don’t share the Pontificator’s misplaced confidence in your non-existent future. Our offices are an esteemed citadel of erudition and edification, not a sanctuary for your neurotic drive for drama and discord. You are a bozo-head. We hate you.
Yes, it’s true. Billy Lee told us not to delete your essay; and to leave Fannie Jean’s intro in place. We didn’t believe it at first; we didn’t want to — you shamed us, Junior; can’t you see that?You and your putain malodorante humiliated us; you discredited the family; our organization; our equipe de freres-–yet Billy Lee summoned the grace to say he liked your styles.
That’s what he said. He liked your styles. Everyone knows you type with one finger and can’t spell your own name. If it wasn’t for your Fannie, you’d be useless. At least she can spell and type.
So how about this idea, Junior?
We’re leaving you and your girlfriend’s know-it-all, trash-talking essays in place. Billy Lee said so and unlike you, we do what he says because we’re loyal; we’re professionals; we’re team-players with skills and standards and values and born-in-the-USA work-ethic.
We type with all fingers. We understand spell-check. The mysteries of punctuation don’t intimidate us.
No, Junior, we aren’t going to kill you.
Your punishment is knowing that your essays will never be deleted; your essays are going to stand as permanent, unread, embarrassing reminders to every wanna-be; to every bonehead who lusts like you and your Fannie to control a famous blog-site.
Plots really do go awry; especially those directed against hyper-alert pontificators like Billy Lee.
The Editorial Board
My Very First Official Notification: (June 28, 2016)
Actually, Billy Lee — his writers and editors — are all on vacation right now until July 15. They left Junior in charge. He’s never been in charge of anything. He parks cars most mornings and empties waste baskets afternoons.
I’m Fannie Jean. My girlfriend and me hang with Junior, because we’re both hoping to get jobs at the Pontificator. Junior knows Billy Lee pretty good.
Yesterday, Junior asked me to kiss him for good luck and spell-check his stuff; he wants me to be his editor, sort of, because he trusts me, he says. Billy Lee never lets him write anything. He can’t spell, for one thing, but I respect him because he always tells the truth most of the time — at least to me and sometimes to my girlfriend.
With Billy Lee and the staff gone on vacation, Junior decided to publish something. Why not? What’s the worst that can happen? Get fired? He already makes exactly $0 per hour so it isn’t like he’ll starve or anything. He lives free in Billy Lee’s basement and eats his food all the time so no worries. No worries at all.
We both have high school diplomas by the way but I used to crush Junior in spelling bees when we were in grade school together. Also, I twirled baton in high school marching band. So I’m completely qualified. So is Junior. He told me to spell-check his post so I did. It was pretty simple. I think he liked it. I’m an Editor now, he told me. It’s a dream come true.
Junior is a swell guy. He’s bona-fide. It don’t matter that he’s ugly and everybody hates him. My girlfriend is hoping to have the honor of working under him too some day if he’ll have her. Maybe, someday, he will.
We didn’t put any pictures in. No one trained us on how to do that. Junior’s dumb when it comes to hi-tech stuff. Anyhow, we published Junior’s very first essay with no one’s help below this note. Amazing, agreed? Junior said to warn readers that any spelling mistakes are totally my fault.
Fannie Jean
FREE TRADE
People wonder why Republicans control so much of the government when the majority of folks seem to dislike them. The most recent New Yorker Magazine contains an article, Drawing the Line, which explains how the process works.
The essay reminds us: in 2012 Republicans carried 3/4 of the congressional districts in Pennsylvania — though Obama carried the state by 300,000 votes and the Democratic congressional candidates garnered 100,000 more votes than the GOP.
During that same election cycle the Democratic candidate for senator in Michigan won his statewide race by more than 20 percentage points — Obama won by 10 points — but brazen redistricting by GOP Governor Snyder (famous for poisoning Flint City water) enabled GOP congressmen to win 2/3 of the state’s congressional seats.
Governor Dick Snyder put his newly acquired political clout to work by seizing control of nine cities — all having by some crazy coincidence black-majority populations; he in fact disenfranchised a million black voters. He then switched the source of drinking water for Flint city without voter consent and lead-poisoned thousands of residents, many of them children. But that’s another story for another time.
Violating basic constitutional rights of citizens never ends well. Throwing elections, like the Republicans did in Florida to deny Al Gore the presidency in 2000, or what they did in Michigan to redistrict voters and seize city governments that favored Democrats — pranks like these aren’t good for democracy. The melt-down of the Middle-East and the poisoning of infants are two concrete examples out of many where paranoia and disrespect for democracy and freedom ended in disaster for ordinary folks.
This un-democratic pattern is firmly imprinted into the majority of our state election protocols — almost always, it seems to me, by the GOP.
Imagine how big their majority would have been had the GOP received a two-million vote lead instead of the Dems. The Democratic Party might not have survived. Our two party system could have become one of the world’s biggest political jokes.
What does our un-democratic election process — some argue it is a corrupt process — have to do with free trade? Here’s a question to ponder: Is anyone out there who thinks it is kind of strange that the party that advocates most vociferously for free trade and strict adherence to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights is now promoting a presumptive-nominee who advocates none-of-the-above?
The Republican nominee is an advocate of trade policies that are the exact opposite of free trade. Just a few hours ago (as I construct this essay) he read the seven parts of his trade policy from a teleprompter on CNN. He called it “smart trade.”
Anyone who has taken even a single college level course in macroeconomics knows that “smart trade” is a euphemism for “dumb trade.” Smart trade works really, really well for business owners and oligarchs in the countries who practice it, while it degrades the wages and purchasing power of the vast majority of citizens who don’t own businesses.
It’s important for ordinary people to understand that during this election a fox is running for president of the hen house. We are the hens; the fox is the Donald. He is, he says, a billionaire who promised today in his carefully prepared policy-paper to renege on a number of trade agreements, which have enabled Americans over the last several years to buy inexpensive products built in third-world countries where wages are low.
What Trump plans to do (according to the transcript of his speech) is make it possible for his American billionaire pals to make more money by closing our borders to less-expensive products now being sold to us by overseas competitors. He seems to have forgotten one thing: we don’t have the labor force to make all the replacement products he intends to produce here.
It’s why he is building the wall. Yes it’s counter-intuitive. Readers who don’t understand should now squint their eyes and think really, really hard, until they get it. Trump hasn’t forgotten anything. He intends to use the wall to control the flow of South American labor — lots of it — into and out of the United States. The wall will enable him to keep the flow from getting out of hand; out of his control.
The wall will enable Trump to turn the flow of cheap labor on or off like a water-faucet to keep wages down while preventing our streets from being clogged with undocumented beggars who might otherwise end up stranded with no way home that doesn’t carry the risk of arrest.
Every worker who enters through the wall will have their picture taken and their fingerprints recorded with smart-phone-like ID apps. A swab under the tongue with a sterile Q-tip, and a DNA profile will complete the entry process. The word “undocumented” will disappear from our lexicon.
Trump is counting on what he believes in his heart is a truth about America. Most Americans are uninformed and easily manipulated, he believes. He actually said that Republican voters were stupid a few years back, when he wasn’t running for president.
If Trump tells voters that free trade is taking their jobs — if he tells this lie over and over — he knows that a lot of people might believe it; he might actually win the election. His family immigrated from Germany, where Adolf Hitler perfected the Big Lie technique to seize power. Hitler’s delusional thinking led to Germany’s destruction. Tens-of-millions of people in dozens of countries lost their lives.
It’s never good to be led by delusional liars, no matter how well-intentioned they insist they might be. It’s even worse to believe lies, especially lies that are used to manipulate people by playing on their fear of people who aren’t “us.”
The current trade agreements work very well for the United States, even when other countries cheat to make their products and currencies cheaper, because we can buy things for less. Under Trump’s policies, which he explained today, the cost of products is going to go up; American billionaires are going to become much more powerful than they currently are, because they are going to be better able to direct purchasers to their own (more expensive) products.
Average workers are going to get nothing except a lot of propaganda designed to make them feel better about a bad situation. (That’s where people like Rush Limbaugh come in — they agitate the hens to desperation when the fox is away; once he’s back, when he’s stalking the hen house for a meal, they help create a climate of optimism.)
The chorus of optimism could get loud, because all media outlets are led by people who have a lot in common with the Donald. Money and power make them happy; happiness can be contagious; especially for clucking hens, who have no clue how dangerous a fox can be. Most hens never see the fox that eats them.
Free trade works, both in theory and practice. It’s the first thing college economics courses teach. A typical course goes to great lengths to prove it to any student who is skeptical.
Free trade works even better when the other side cheats to “game” the system. That’s the beauty of it. We actually do better as a country, when competitors in other countries do the stupid and dishonest things they sometimes do to secure advantages for their elites, while they throw their working-poor under the bus. Our side gets to buy a huge array of inexpensive goods we couldn’t possibly produce on our own with our relatively small working population. Math, experience, and common sense prove it’s true.
Trump is advocating “smart trade” which is just another name for a system of tariffs and taxes, which work for individuals who own businesses in the countries where these tactics are used. They don’t work for average people, who must buy the more expensive products that these business-owners will offer under the protections of tariffs and rigged tax policies.
I hope people are smart enough to figure it out. The British are not going to do well in the coming years, and neither will we if we shoot ourselves in both feet like the British just did. Our billionaires will do well, but they always do well (don’t they?) and besides, they don’t live in the world where we live. If they did, we could visit a few of them, which we never will.
The walls that our billionaires live beyond are the very best high-tech-wonders money can buy. While we remain free (sort of), we should make a few tax-policy adjustments. Otherwise we will continue our drift into a world that is beginning to resemble ancient Rome.
It didn’t end well for Rome; it didn’t end well for anyone. Rome was a slave state, like the United States. It provided its common people just enough “bread and circuses” to prevent riots. The common people came to hate their country so much, they refused to defend it. Unwashed barbarians walked into Rome one day, and the world changed.
It took a thousand years to recover from that classical melt-down. The United States (and other industrial countries) have already exhausted Earth’s resources to the point that a quick recovery from a tsunami of military defeats that always follow economic collapse might not be possible; it might take thousands of years to get back to where we once were, if ever.
There is no such thing as a bad trade deal when those deals lead to trust, cooperation, and goodwill among the nations; when they improve the lives of hundreds of millions of suffering people; when they lead toward peace and away from war; when they bring love between peoples and turn aside the destructive burdens of hate.
Hillary Clinton sometimes shares stories with people about her late mother Dorothy Rodham who was born on 4 June 1919 — the same day that the women’s voting rights amendment cleared its final legislative hurdle in the US Congress.
People have a difficult time grasping a simple truth: every time the right of women to vote in national elections has come before the Supreme Court, the Court has voted against it. Despite a national movement that started in 1848 at Seneca Falls and continued with annual meetings of National Women’s Rights Conventions from 1850 onward, courts in America have rarely ruled in favor of women’s rights; the Supreme Court has never ruled in favor of a woman’s right to vote; never.
Even when women were arrested and imprisoned; when they went on hunger strikes and guards force-fed them like modern day prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the courts remained harsh and unforgiving.
It took a constitutional amendment (the 19th) passed by the votes of loving brothers, fathers, grandfathers, husbands, sons, and boyfriends in state legislatures across the country for women to make their successful end-run around the opposition to female voting that infused the Supreme Court; it wasn’t until 1920 that every woman in America secured the right to walk into polling places to vote in national elections. They never looked back.
Voting rights for women became a settled legal matter in 1922 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the procedures demanded by the Constitution were properly followed. The 19th amendment would never be reversed — short of another constitutional amendment. That amendment can never come now that women are voters.
It’s been ninety-six years. There are women walking around today who were alive when their right to vote was granted. It wasn’t that long ago. Hillary Clinton has sometimes reminded us that her late mother was born on June 4, 1919 — the same day the voting amendment passed its final legislative hurdle in the United States Congress.
Before I explain just what it was that Hillary did, here’s some background; a little history, Billy Lee-style:
Union soldier Alfred Stratton lost both arms to cannon fire at age 19. One of every thirteen soldiers lost limbs in the Civil War. After his discharge Sgt. Stratton sold pictures of his wounds to support his family. He died at age 29 leaving behind his wife and two children. For me his eyes convey the heartache of a soldier who won at war and lost everything.
After the end of the Civil War, which traumatized the nation with its toll of 750,000 deaths and millions maimed and wounded — 1 of every 13 soldiers who served became an amputee — something worse happened. The men in America who survived but lost their way of life to war, many of them, became demoralized and angry; they spiraled downward. Some who managed to keep their limbs continued to fight; they went to war against the ”redskins” in genocidal campaigns that decimated our native populations.
But other men — I would say most of the survivors — went on a drinking binge. The binge lasted decades. Some men drank themselves to death. The tranquilizers and antidepressants that might have saved many hadn’t yet been invented.
Opiates were available, yes, and many ex-soldiers purchased them in bottled elixirs sold by traveling salesmen. But alcohol was the remedy of choice for men whose minds and missing limbs exuded the chronic, excruciating pain of amputations and the memories of horrors. Alcoholic spirits were cheap and easy to buy. The excessive use of alcohol and the inevitable abuse of women that always seemed to follow became a national epidemic; a cultural disgrace. It lasted decades; some say it has never really ended.
The bullying of minorities, native people, and women — cruelty often directed against the weak and defenseless — became a way of life for many veterans who suffered post-traumatic-stress-disorder, which no one understood at the time. The vocabulary folks needed to even discuss the dynamics of this personal degradation by war was not available like it is today. For southern soldiers, the trauma of a lost way of life; the shock of watching former slaves ascend to leadership positions once reserved for whites-only became too much to bear.
Violence against women — their vulnerability in the face of drunk husbands and boyfriends — reached a level that women simply couldn’t take anymore. Many women believed that if they could just get their husbands to stop drinking, the abuse they experienced at home might come to an end.
No one understood at the time that the drinking and abuse were symptoms of an underlying psychological distress, not the cause. A hundred-and-fifty years of fear and paranoia was erupting out of the guilt and shame of seizing lands that belonged to others; of kidnapping, enslaving, and vilifying millions of Africans; murdering tens-of-thousands of women and children during wars with the Indians; and blood-letting in the war between north and south where brothers killed their own brothers.
Americans wasted the lives of other Americans in the Civil War at a rate that has never been equaled since by any external enemy or foe. Americans suffered more casualties during the Civil War than in all other wars combined.
All this evil bubbled up out of the badlands of America — America was arguably the world’s largest and most isolated island at the time. The men who witnessed war; who lived it; who perpetuated it and became its victims held onto their minds and emotions by clinging to desperately delicate threads. Many lost their grip — emotionally and physically — and died early; some took their own lives.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, most women had had enough. By 1914 (the start of World War I) they were fed up, vulnerable, and powerless. Their men were going off to fight another senseless war where a third of the dead would expire by poison gas while hiding helpless in the muck of trenches. The government passed the Selective Service Act of 1917 (the draft) because in this war young men, many of them, lost their will to fight.
Women had a big stake in the new war. Most women, despite the abuse, had male friends and relatives. They were mothers; sisters; daughters; grandmothers; even great-grandmothers. They nurtured the men in their lives who weren’t coping well with the nightmare-world into which the USA morphed after terrible decades of slavery, endless war, cruel repression that followed Reconstruction, and the extermination of the native peoples (who they called Indians).
Men, some of them, began to see that women might be right. As a country, what we were doing wasn’t working. People were going to have to change the way they lived and conducted the nation’s affairs.
Most folks know what happened. Women — who couldn’t vote — organized. Men joined them. Everyone seemed to agree on the underlying problem: it wasn’t so much the wars or racial violence or even the rise of robber barons and corrupt governance; what was wrong with America — it was so plain to see for anyone who made the effort to open their eyes — was the alcohol.
Get rid of alcohol, the Devil’s drink, and God would heal our land. God would make right the terrible things we had done. Citizens would all enjoy together at long last the peace of mind that comes with the forgiveness of sin and the love that only Jesus brings to every man who murders and rapes because he can’t stop drinking.
In January 1919 — led by women from the suffrage and temperance movements among others — the 18th amendment passed, which put commercial restrictions on the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The amendment took full effect in January 1920. The public consumption of alcohol — with all its problems — was now in the past.
Emboldened and buoyed by their power to pass almost simultaneously — and in the face of judicial opposition — two constitutional amendments: one that allowed women to participate in the nation’s democracy; the other that corralled the wicked impulses unleashed by alcohol in their war-weary men (World War I ended in November 1918), the women of 1920 felt the stirrings of a new optimism about life in the United States and their future.
With the help of the men who leaned on them for comfort and emotional support, 75% of the states agreed to ratify the two amendments certain to set things right; amendments that would most assuredly lead the way forward to the salvation of America.
Thus began the walk on the pathway toward righteousness. Citizens basked in the light of greatness; they had won the war in Europe; men marched home in the glow of favor that comes to every repentant people by the forgiveness of Almighty God.
The nation was being transformed into a people; a united people, a nation of both men and women who turned their backs on the devil; who put behind them his corrupting spirits and ales.
Americans — all of us together — at last embraced liberty and freedom and voting-rights for women. After all was said and done — campaign posters explained it beautifully — it was women who brought every single voter into the world.
And indeed alcohol related crimes fell fast after 1920.
There was a little problem, though.
Despite widespread support for the right of women to vote and for the prohibition of the public consumption of alcohol, it turned out that not everyone in America wanted to climb on board the choo-choo train of righteous-living.
Again, we know what happened. Men formed gangs from which they drew the power to circumvent Prohibition. They continued manufacturing and distributing alcohol, which they sold in clubs they called speakeasies and blind pigs.
Although the 18th amendment did not forbid drinking by private individuals in their own homes, the Constitution of the United States now forbade the commercial production and sale of spirits and ales in public spaces like clubs and liquor stores.
Like the forbidden fruit of a modern Garden of Eden, blind pigs became the rage in every major city in America. By the 1930s, the revenues generated by illegal clubs were so enormous that the gangs who merchandized alcohol were able to wrest control over whatever businesses or local and state governments they chose.
Inequality is never good. Neither is packing a family into a car with no seat belts.
What happened? Crime cartels took over and basically ran our country into the ground. By 1930 our economy collapsed. The Great Depression began. By 1933 ordinary people had enough. Voters — women and men — repealed Prohibition. Voters hoped repeal would stimulate the economy, emasculate the crime-bosses, and reverse the rot that was infesting like a plague of sewer-rats every city and municipality.
It wasn’t to be. By 1933 the iron grip of organized crime was entrenched and intractable. It wasn’t going to let go. Despite massive government spending, new social programs, and numerous public-works projects, unemployment, poverty, and despair continued to demoralize society. The USA spiraled downward; it seemed to never end; maybe it would last forever.
World War II changed everything. The cartels went into the munitions business. They took control of the factories that built bombers and guns. We’ve been at war ever since. We’ve waged war against one out of every four countries on Earth during the past 75 years. Business has been good.
In the 1980s the cartels decided to try their hand at pharmaceuticals; medical care would come later. It was challenging; pharma was technical; it was hard to understand. What they learned was this: Americans were open, even eager, to try new drugs; to adopt new treatments. The treatments and drugs offered hope. It didn’t seem to matter if they worked all that well.
The drug cartels lobbied Congress for regulatory relief so they could advertise their ”medicines” on television. The rest as they say is history. The people of the United States are now the most drug dependent civilization ever. We may not be that healthy compared to people in a lot of other countries but with the right medications we sort of feel like we might be.
We all know the results. Americans spend more on heath care and drugs than on their houses and food. USA health care is a mess — who will argue with me? But it’s lucrative.
Health care is today the biggest cash cow for the most heartless group of wise-guys ever to take control of American institutions; let’s give this group of con-artists some respect and refer to them as “the medical profession“.
Why not?
Even if folks were able find out the address of their local hospital administrator and a few of his surgeons, they would never be able to visit to drop-off their complaints because these high-rollers live in a hidden world behind gates, most of them. They live like the heads of caliphates, many of them. Yes, these individuals are clever. But Americans are paying too high a price for cleverness.
So… readers who’ve read this far might be asking,
Well… are you going to tell us what Hillary did?
Of course I am. Would I let readers down?
Never!
Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, became president of the United States in January 1993. One of the first things he did was appoint his wife to help create a healthcare plan to cover every American — detractors would come to call it HillaryCare.
First Lady Hillary Clinton testifies for the final day before the Senate Finance Committee on Health Care 30 September 1993. REUTERS/Mike Theiler
The techniques used by the healthcare industry to crush universal health care are a case-study in Evil — for anyone who has the stomach to examine what its leaders did. Anyone can click on links in this essay to learn more if they want.
I don’t really care to get into it; the details, that is. The whole episode disgusts me as it should any fair-minded person who cares about ordinary people and their health.
The bottom-line is this: Hillary walked into a snake pit, then hit a brick wall. The healthcare industry chose to demolish the wife of a sitting president in the first year of his first term. They made an example of her.
People would think twice before pulling a stunt like healthcare reform again. It worked — for 15 years anyway — until the Kenyan usurper with no birth certificate, President Barack Hussein Obama, showed up.
The bad-actors who administer the health delivery system in America today consider Hillary Clinton a clear and present danger to their trillion-dollar cash cow. They intend to regain control of Health Care as soon as the GOP wins the presidency this fall. That’s their plan, anyway.
After defeating Hillary’s efforts in 1993, the industry and their buddies began a CIA-style disinformation campaign against her which has continued for the past 23 years — in case she might rise from the ashes of defeat to come after them one more time.
Guess what? She’s on her way. This time she is not one person — the eager-to-please wife of a new president. This time she is 120 million voters strong and counting. If current polling holds, she will be the next president.
Look at what these yahoos said about President Obama after he tried to fix our casino-style healthcare system during his first term. Does anyone think these folks are not able to discredit others while maximizing their own considerable advantages?
They’ve thrown up roadblock after roadblock. They’ve arranged things so that the new healthcare options can’t be fully implemented until Obama has left the White House. With the election of a Republican president, they plan to dismember and discard ObamaCare — quickly. Most Americans will never fully understand what they missed or what was taken from them.
Before ObamaCare, when people got sick, insurance administrators sometimes kicked them out of the healthcare casino, altogether. People were on their own. Good luck, and God bless.
The people who enforced these heinous policies are the same people who call Obama incompetent and a failed president. These are the people who have inflicted the nightmare of the current Republican contender on America; who are willing to scare the whole world to prove they are serious.
These insurance folks and their allies aren’t the government; they are civilians with the money to hire experts; they believe themselves fully capable of discrediting even the Crucifixion of Jesus should it ever become necessary.
During the next six months they are going to use every technique in the army psyche manual to convince voters that Hillary Clinton is a witch who deserves to be burned on a phallic stake.
Watch and learn. They don’t want ObamaCare fixed. They want it wrecked.
Character assassination is just another way to kill someone, to my way of thinking. It’s murder. The Bible says it is, anyway. I’m intrigued by the possibility that when Jesus said anything at all — even in a Book as discredited by the wealthy and powerful as the Bible apparently is — it might actually be God who is doing the talking.
Our self-described healers of broken bodies (I’m not going to name them because I don’t want them showing up at my house) cooperated with insurance company executives and drug company titans to destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation. Their lavish lifestyles give them away.
People believe crazy stuff because they’ve listened to these creeps — sometimes on Fox News, the GOP propaganda mill. One guy on my Twitter feed called Secretary Clinton, Killary. He wasn’t smart enough to make up this epithet on his own, believe me. If this guy is the Christian he claims to be, Jesus is going to ask him someday why he would say such a thing. It could get awkward.
People on the right seem to believe that if they hate somebody, they can make stuff up to tear them down. It’s the way the game is played.
There is an irony of wickedness here that almost defies explanation. It’s all because when she was young and naive Hillary believed that even the bad guys would do the right things when given the right opportunities; she dared to challenge the way health care is delivered in America — to make it fair and accessible to the 80% of Americans who could not afford it.
She learned the hard lesson many Americans now know is true. It isn’t about health care. It’s about protecting the golden cash-cow.
Who wants to work for $25 per month? they are always telling us about Cuban doctors. People who feel called to help the suffering multitudes will be the only takers in a system like that. People who value money will find something else to occupy their time.
Anyway, with a Hillary Clinton win this fall — should the Democrats take majorities in the House and Senate — our citizens will finally have a government with the right people in place to better defend us against being used for prey by the predators who presently plunder us.
Victims of Sandy Hook massacre Christmas Season 2012. CBS News reported that the shooter’s parents were NRA members because NRA certificates and pamphlets were found in their homes. The NRA forced CBS to retract the story. (Photo by Reuters / Andrees Latif — 2012)
Hillary has also taken on the NRA, in case anyone forgot; it’s another (some would argue) bad-boy organization that scares the daylights out of its opposition because a lot of crazy people with guns seem to be among its members. They defend the Second Amendment, which they think permits them to scare the crap out of people by carrying their guns into churches, hospitals, libraries, and schools.
NRA family members are numbered among the crowd of people who have ”gone postal” during the past few years; people who massacred politicians, children, and theater-goers. Hillary challenged this monster-cult. Its a group of men mostly who intimidate congressional leaders to vote against their own common sense.
Children die every week because the gun-makers sell unsafe firearms to an irresponsible public. It’s not right. It’s not safe. It’s not freedom. It’s manufactured fear, plain and simple.
The right to bear arms described in our Second Amendment was included to keep Americans safe and free, not scared and intimidated. It was written to save time when raising an army should foreigners like France or England choose to invade. The NRA has turned the amendment on its head into a money-making scheme for gun panderers who play to people’s paranoia and hate. It’s that simple, at least to me.
So yes, Hillary is a threat to people who are used to getting their way while they live like the cold-hard oligarchs they have become. Do these bad people have nice smiles? Do they wear beautiful clothes? Of course they do. They are billionaires. Their smiles cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars, some of them. Their clothes cost more.
Hillary is not a billionaire. She never will be. For those readers not good at numbers, let me remind everyone: a billion is 1,000 millions. The man who is running against her; who calls her crookedHillary — claims to possess 14,000 piles of a million dollars each.
Is it possible to earn and keep billions while working honestly and playing fair? I might believe him if someone I trust analyzed his tax returns, his company balance sheets, and income statements. Until he agrees to release them like everyone else who runs for president, I’m more than skeptical; I’m incredulous.
In any event, it is the policy of theBillyLeePontificator.com to advocate for income and estate maximums based on agreed-upon and reasonable ratios tied to the minimum wage. These maximums can be very high and do no harm. Please read my essay, Capitalism and Income Inequality, to learn more.
We at theBillyLeePontificator.com do not believe we need a revolution to achieve simple changes to our tax codes that will impact less than one-hundred thousand privileged people.
We are 324 million people living in a democratic republic. It can’t be that hard to raise taxes on the greedy who are distorting our democracy and driving our country off a cliff to protect their power and privilege. Please read my essay Is Something Wrong With America? to learn more.
Something else Hillary did this week while challenging some of the most powerful people on Earth: she clinched the Democratic nomination for president; she’s the first woman of a major political party to do it.
What Hillary achieved cannot be overstated. It’s pretty darn incredible given the negative attitudes toward women-in-leadership espoused by many church and corporate leaders — behind closed doors, of course.
Here are the election results; they might amaze some readers. The numbers say that mama Clinton has a fighting chance to win this election. My wife prays for her safety and success every single day.
So do I.
Billy Lee
These results are from the 35 states where both parties held a popular vote contest. DC Democrats vote on June 14. Bold black ink indicates the winner. Blue ink indicates a second place finish.
These results are from the 11 states and 4 territories where both parties held caucus contests; and the 5 mixed primaries where one party held a popular vote, the other a caucus.
Editors Note: In the November election of 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in popular votes by nearly 3 million. Third-party candidates polled 8 million more. Donald Trump lost the popular count by 11 million votes — one of the largest popular defeats in the nation’s history. Manipulation of vote counts in Michigan and a few other states secured his win in the Electoral College. All courts everywhere refused to hear a single challenge to the results, which were razor thin in three states.
As of May 4, 2016, 28 states have held popular-vote primaries; nine states and one territory have conducted caucus contests, where both parties participated. Two states held mixed elections, where one party conducted a popular vote; the other a caucus. Thus far, the Democrats have participated in 12 caucus contests; the Republicans, 10.
To summarize: A total of 39 states and one territory have completed their 2016 primary process.
After the Indiana primary, the popular vote totals in the 28 voting primaries are:
Clinton 12,242,884 14 wins / 7 seconds
Trump 10,329,397 6 wins / 11 seconds
Sanders 8,955,271 6 wins / 6 seconds
Cruz 6,673,520 1 win / 4 seconds
Kasich 3,649,845 1 win / 0 seconds
Rubio 3,168,147 0 wins / 0 seconds
Caucus state elections work differently than simple popular vote elections, which makes comparing the performance of GOP vs. Democrats in caucus states a little like comparing apples to oranges; the comparisons are not very useful and can be misleading.
As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life. John Kasich, May 4, 2016
After the Indiana primary yesterday, Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out of the race to make Donald Trump the lone candidate for the GOP nomination. Barring an unusual event, Trump will be the GOP candidate in November. He said today that he will pick a Washington insider with close ties to Congress for VP; he says he wants to be able to move legislation through Congress.
Hillary Clinton has not said who she will choose for VP. It is known that she likes Elizabeth Warren, who our Editorial Board has advocated for and endorsed.
Is Trump going to be president of the United States in January? The results so far say no, because Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she can outperform Trump with those sectors of the electorate essential to victory in past elections.
Some people on the left hope that Bernie Sanders will overtake Clinton and become the nominee, but his numbers show that the electorate is not ready to elect a socialist over a business leader; he can’t win a general election against Donald Trump, not in the United States.
This liability is one reason why 522 of the 561 party-appointed delegates support Clinton. Another, perhaps more important reason, is that Bernie Sanders is a junior senator from a small state (Vermont) who didn’t join the Democratic Party until 2015; he was an independent in Congress, though he tended to vote with Democrats on most issues.
Some party leaders believe he joined the Party for the simple reason that he wanted to run for president; it may have been more personal ambition than love of Party that motivated him. Who knows? He may decide to run as a third party candidate to help Trump defeat Hillary, if he gets angry enough. Then again, he might think he can win a three-way race against the two of them. Stranger things have happened in politics.
Donald Trump married Melania Knaus of communist Yugoslavia, now called Slovenia, in 2005. They have one son. Trump has two previous marriages; one with Marla Maples of Dalton, Georgia, who he married after fathering a child out of wedlock; his first wife was Ivana Zelnickova of Communist Czechoslovakia. the marriage lasted 15 years; she bore him three children.
Anyway, Donald Trump is an extremely attractive candidate for an electorate that worships celebrity. He is like the poison apple in the garden of Eden. Many Americans—like Eve—may be unable to stop themselves from taking their first bite. As the story in Genesis reveals, that first bite can start a cascade of events, which could ruin America.
Billionaires, like the Bush family, already have too much influence; worse, they live in a bubble, which renders their decision-making into a game by blind-fools. The Bush family, for sure, loves America, but they nearly destroyed it; they certainly unraveled the Middle East and precipitated the financial collapse of 2008.
Trump is surrounded by yes-people; let’s admit the obvious; he doesn’t tolerate dissenting voices very well. When Trump starts making foolish decisions—as he most certainly will—he will have to suppress dissent to carry his asinine visions to fruition. It won’t be a good time for people who think for themselves; it won’t be a good time for diversity. Donald Trump strongly advocates the use of harsh techniques against enemies. Should he turn his contempt on free-speaking Americans who oppose him, we could be in for a rough ride.
If history serves as a reliable guide, one component of the electorate Donald Trump can count on will be the evangelicals. Since they became an organized voting block in the 1970s, right-wing evangelical voters seem to have voted against self-identified Christian candidates more times than not. They opposed Jimmy Carter; they united against Barack Obama; and they are fighting against Hillary Clinton, who stood by her husband after he betrayed her; she continued to love him—something Jesus admonished Christians to do.
Some evangelical voters tend to be legalists; many care nothing about love, forgiveness, charity, or non-violence. They pay lip-service to those qualities, but only when it serves their legalistic views; some could care less. And they will be voting for Trump in droves. Trump says he is honored by the evangelical support he is getting.
From where I’m sitting, Donald Trump seems to represent the New Confederacy. Some of his supporters who I’ve met paste Confederate flags on the back of their trucks and display Old Dixie in their living rooms. I can foresee a time under a Trump presidency (I would say it’s already started) when Americans aren’t going to see black faces on television anymore. We won’t be watching street demonstrations or riots or anything else that might threaten the social fabric on television, either. The technology of suppression is simply too advanced. Trump won’t hesitate to use it.
For people who aren’t directly involved; who watch television and live inside their own bubbles of safety, the world is going to seem like a pretty good place, at first, under a Trump presidency. The droning insects of right-wing media will stop flapping their angry wings; optimism will be projected from every billionaire-controlled media outlet; sighs of relief will be heard throughout the land; and once again the exhilarating drums of war will beat hypnotically as we take on the stragglers around the world who refuse to follow our vision; who refuse to dance in lock-step to our new tune.
It will be an exciting time to be alive, especially for those billionaires who own defense-industry businesses; for those who have a talent for building walls; for those who enjoy controlling and manipulating large groups of (sometimes non-cooperative) people. But will anyone permit me to interrupt this wonderful dream for a reality check?
Bad things happened under similar presidents, like Reagan and the Bushes. Reagan entrenched the power of billionaire families by changing the tax codes; he allowed the wealthy to earn unlimited incomes for the first time; the middle class hasn’t had a raise in pay since, because the wealthy keep the excess profits for themselves.
The wealthy have no tax write-off advantages or other financial incentives to encourage them to invest in their workers; in fact, it’s the opposite. Since the rich are no longer taxed at 92% on the unreasonable part of their unreasonably high incomes, they set aside their windfalls for their own families instead of upgrading their company infrastructures and raising the standard of living for their work-forces; neither do they pay the taxes that would solve so many of our internal problems—like the deterioration of our roads and bridges, our power grids, and the quality of education.
The Bush family took us into wars, which history shows were completely avoidable. The First Gulf War was a living nightmare, in case anyone has forgot. Remember the oil-well fires? They were terrifying. Remember our troops donning gas masks and hazmat suits during the Second Gulf War?
The wealthy refused to pay for these insane escapades, which is why our country can’t shake off its huge debt. We got into these predicaments, because our wealthy folks seem to be out of touch, arrogant, and financially tied to companies who do business with the military. It’s pretty simple, when anyone takes the time to think about it.
Donald Trump has devoted his life to building safe spaces where the wealthy can live large, play hard, gamble, and entertain their friends; nothing is so terribly wrong or unusual about that. But he lives in a part of America that 99.9% of Americans know little or nothing about. He isn’t one of us. He never will be.
Hillary Clinton is arguably the most qualified candidate to make the run for president, ever. A successful attorney, she married “Bill” who became Governor of Arkansas and a two-term president; she served two terms in the United States Senate for the state of New York. President Obama appointed her to lead the State Department as his Secretary of State.
We are a freedom loving people who can take care of ourselves. We don’t need billionaire baby-sitters to tell us where to sit and when to use the bathroom. We can fix our country by ourselves, thank you, and we have Mama Clinton to help us do it. She is one of us. She was raised poor and will never be a billionaire.
A billion is one-thousand millions, for anyone not good at math. It is a ridiculous amount of money. Were it a felony to possess a billion dollars, many of the problems caused by greed in this world would disappear over-night. Think about it.
I’m praying that the Good Lord will keep Hillary Clinton safe. I pray for all the candidates; that they and their families will be protected from all harm. It is a courageous act to run for president. Every single candidate has been threatened at one time or another.
Most qualified people won’t run for president. It’s good that a few capable people dare to step up to lead the fight for freedom and fairness. Hillary Clinton is one of those heroic people. She isn’t just another pretty face.
It’s a national disgrace that the ”fine-looking” Christian activist, ”Minty” Ross Harriet Tubman will not appear on the $20 bill until 2026 at the earliest. Some say it could be as late as 2030. The cynical say it will never happen. It’s certain that Minty was beautiful, because ”fine-looking” is how her owners described her on a Wanted Poster after she escaped at age twenty-seven.
Unfortunately, no pictures of Minty as a young woman have been found. She lived on to become a prominent administrator of the Underground Railroad; a friend of abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown; a Civil War soldier and spy for the Union Army; and much, much more.
The Mint people say it takes a long time to retool the currency. In the case of Minty Ross, it will take at least ten years; maybe fifteen. I’m not sure I believe them.
With Ms. Tubman, it seems like one injustice followed another; she suffered abuse like no other heroine I’ve read about. A slave-owner crushed her skull with a hunk of iron he threw at another slave she was trying to protect. While traveling on a train, passengers broke her arms when she refused to move to another car. All her suffering came from haters, pure and simple. She will never get the credit she deserves.
Russian Professor, Igor Panarin, says the USA will look like this map, someday. Some folks think it already does.
Does anyone really think the USA will be around ten or fifteen years from now? It is likely to be divided into four countries, presumably under the control of the Russians or an international coalition of foreign powers, if leaked Russian intelligence assessments can be believed.
Sorry, but that’s what seems to be coming, according to Russian analysts. The world has had its fill; the earth’s power brokers are planning to take us down; they seem to be gathering the family of nations to make a grand, international intervention on our behalf — for our own good and for the well-being of the planet and its impoverished peoples.
Russia is deploying Nuclear Drone Submarines (NUDS) to overwhelm our defenses.
The Russian military is filling the oceans with drone subs armed with nuclear material; possibly missiles. Some sit in the sand at the bottom of the oceans on both coasts of the USA.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba. They have submarine and air bases on the island.
The Chinese are building artificial islands in the Pacific and constructing military bases. During the past twenty years the Chinese have built the most modern Navy the world has ever seen.
The Koreans and several other hostile countries are building first strike nuclear capabilities. It’s not that they dislike the United States. It’s a matter of trust. They think our leaders are crazy, selfish, arrogant, and too powerful. It’s not good for other countries when one becomes disproportionately powerful.
It’s not enough for the USA to stop doing bad things. It must do good things. We don’t seem able to save ourselves, because the USA has a legacy of a country that has hated too many people; it has hurt and killed too many people.
The USA hasburned alive millions of people with diabolical weapons like napalm, Hellfire missiles, and atomic bombs. Most of the world outside the United States believes we dropped anthrax bombs on Chinese troops in North Korea in 1954. We placed a ”hospital” ship off the peninsula from which we spread a virulent strain of typhus that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. We drew up plans to drop atomic munitions until a cessation of hostilities took hold and calmer heads prevailed.
The USA has inflicted too much injustice; ignored the cries of too many disadvantaged people; humiliated the weak and impoverished; and, since the end of WWII, has waged war against a quarter of all the countries on the earth.
We have crossed moral boundaries into the dark space of torture and drone-kills. A country that tortures and assassinates thousands of people by remote control is not worth defending or protecting, some say.
Modern Chinese Stealth Destroyer
The billionaires are having their parties; for them the world has never been better. In fact, many Americans, rich and poor, are ingesting daily cocktails of drugs, legal and illegal, to keep going; they are oblivious, uninformed, and asleep.
In our drug-induced stupor we are about to elect a mega-billionaire and his cronies to administer what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation on Earth. Like everything else we’ve done lately, it won’t go over well. The nations of the world are already preparing for this catastrophe; the outcome isn’t going to be good for any of us; no way.
The refusal of our military officers, our intelligence administrators, foreign service officials, and especially our elected political leaders to follow with enthusiasm the vision of our current president has not been lost on other nations.
South Carolina Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, twice yelled You Lie! at President Obama during his speech before a joint session of Congress in 2009. Disrespect for the president is universal, open, and virulent among GOP congressmen, who make up the majority of our elected officials. The GOP’s unreasonable hatred for well-intentioned people is the main reason the community of nations fears the changes that will come with the election of a Republican president in 2016.
Our president’s capitulation to the world view of our bureaucratic cartels; his inability to get the simplest things done (like closing the Guantanamo torture chambers and returning the military base in Cuba to its rightful owner); his surrender to Wall Street thugs with Ivy League educations; his quiet suffering of disrespect by media and petty demagogues has convinced the powerful people abroad who both do and don’t like us that the United States won’t change; indeed, it cannot change.
Meanwhile, our citizens are tired of war. They don’t acknowledge basic facts; the Chinese Navy is the best in the world. Russian drone technology is the world’s best in the air, beneath the seas, and on land. And so on and on.
Yes, our government is spending two trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear first-strike capabilities. We are spending our national treasure on a doomsday matrix designed to destroy planet Earth, should we get backed into a corner and face certain defeat.
We are so blind. The irony is that we are always looking deep into the heavens searching for advanced civilizations. We believe millions of hi-tech worlds are “out there”. Yet, we have found not a single one. Maybe the story of civilization is familiar; maybe it plays out across the universe on every inhabited planet in the same tragic way.
In every corner of our Milky Way galaxy, and in the trillion or more other galaxies that populate our unimaginably huge universe, intelligent life-forms fight to survive and prevail. They unlock the secrets of nature.
Somehow the technology gets control of them. The unnatural plutonium they create and store, even when it is not strewn in a fit of suicidal anger, leaches into their soils and poisons their planets, irreversibly.
Workers inspect chemical weapons barrels for leaks at a warehouse in Gorny, Syria. Stockpiles like this one exist in countries all over the world.
A slow death by poisoning might well be the future of every planet that has buried beneath its surface tens-of-thousands of thermo-nuclear bombs as well as biological and chemical weapons in every shade of depravity that super-intelligent life-forms can dream-up and build.
These weapons cannot be maintained forever. How many thousands of years can we go on pouring our treasure into poisons, until we have no more treasure, and the bombs begin to rot; the toxins soak into soil like turpentine into a sponge; the viruses and bacteria escape to breed and blow in the wind like dust and fall to the ground like drops of rain?
Armageddon is on its way. It may come fast; it may go slow. What every informed person knows is that Harriet Tubman’s face will never grace our currency. Time is too short, and making things right is not our nation’s highest priority. Not even close.
I believe, like my dad before me, that right makes might. Civilizations who dare to reverse the order — who use might to force others to believe that their abusers are right — play a fool’s game.
One important thing we can do as a country right now is to place Harriet Tubman’s portrait (and other freedom fighters like her) on our money, sooner rather than later. The plan, incredibly, is to put a slave-owner’s picture (Andrew Jackson, of all people) on the reverse side of the twenty-dollar bill opposite Ms. Tubman — to kind of balance out the message, I suppose.
No. That’s wrong. No way. Andrew Jackson owned the Hermitage Plantation of Tennessee and another plantation in Mississippi where, during his tenure, 150 slaves produced the cotton that made him wealthy.
As a General in the US army, Jackson fought genocidal wars against the Shawnee and Creek Indians of Georgia and Alabama; he warred against the Seminole Tribes of Florida. He had a reputation for ruthlessness. Native Americans referred to him as ”Sharp Knife.”
This 1905 photo of actors in Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show portrays the killing of Custer by Sitting Bull. The Battle of Little Bighorn was unusual, because the native Americans actually won the battle. Some would argue that America’s war against its indigenous and kidnapped peoples has never really ended; apologies, forgiveness, and reparations are long overdue.
No slave holder, no human being who forced other human beings to work long hours for no pay under the threat of lash and beating; under the threat of death and loss of family should ever again have their likeness placed on any financial instrument, coin, or bill of the United States of America. What kind of people are we, anyway?
We are a people who stand for freedom and equality before the law, our schools teach us. Let’s behave like we believe it’s true. Crimes against people affect the generations of children who come after. Genocides against African slaves and native Americans can traumatize for centuries; ask any descendant of a victim of Hitler’sholocaust, if there is anyone who doesn’t believe it. The USA has not even begun to make things right, some argue.
Actions speak louder than words. The world watches, much of it in disgust and horror as we venerate the wicked and suppress our saints, like Araminta Ross Tubman. Time is running out. We have to make that change, as Michael Jackson once sung; sooner rather than later.
Loving others is a way to save our beloved America. Love will rescue us. Love is important; it’s powerful. It can sustain our civilization; it can preserve our freedoms; it can extinguish Armageddon.
