Our Two Apparent ‘Choices’
Our two apparent ‘choices’ for president in 2020: namely, Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. The first exudes greed, corruption, moral degeneracy, ignorance to the point of vulgarity, sexism, and racism; yet still appeals to many because he acts like he cares about the people and says things that imply that he cares. Biden embraces all of the above negative qualities except for the ignorance, but is more secretive and dangerous because he appears — falsely — to be more on the side of the people and more trustworthy. For many, he gives a convincing show, and the mass media back up and promote that show. Biden, like Bill Clinton, is the type who could steal candy from babies while kissing them and get away with it. Well, these days, he is not quite as slick as Clinton was when he was running for president due to his very long track record and his early signs of dementia. However, for those liberal, progressive Americans who eschew independent sources of news and information, and who want to believe that Biden is the real deal, he is one they can believe in. And therefore, reason number two for his being dangerous: instead of inspiring people to fight against the unjust, oppressive regime we now live under, he will be able to lull most Americans back into a state of complacency and apathy.
Trump has only a small minority of the general public as his supporters, but they are extremely vocal supporters who tend to watch and are, in fact, cult followers of the mass media news outlet ‘Fox Fascist Fantasy-World News.’ Fox has become more than a source of news for many of its devotees; it has become a fun and loyalty-inspiring club that they can belong to. In today’s materialistic, dog-eat-dog society, many Americans are lonely and alienated, and have a great need to belong to something or some group. Fox News fills the bill. But for all the camaraderie and esprit de corps feelings its devotees get from the warm and folksy anchors and talk show hosts and the patriotic and glitzy sets, there is a price to pay — that of having a few untruths slipped into the shows. And Fox programs keep it simple, repeating a few well-targeted talking points over and over to their audience so as to program them into a false, oversimplified view of the world and the people who inhabit it — and much of it is very dark.
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
― Joseph Goebbels
Only 6 mega-corporations own and control every single one of the mass media outlets in the U.S.($.R.?) today, and the result of this monolithic monstrosity’s control over ALL of the news, information, and entertainment the vast majority of Americans get has been to silence selected areas of science, free-reined investigative reporting, whistleblower-exposed information, objective criticism and debate of major issues, and criticism of and negative information about the powers that be: the billionaire oligarchs and their underlings. Censorship was unconstitutionally allowed under the bills passed during the Reagan and Clinton administrations which allowed greater and greater consolidation of the American mass media; and again under the Trump administration, when the FCC voted 2–1 to allow Internet companies to start censoring the Internet by speeding up some connections and slowing down some, and engaging in other freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom to assemble-stifling practices — as most Americans use the Internet for all of the above purposes. Censorship of the Internet was carried out before this in sophisticated, clever ways such as Google’s diverting of links from going to negative information about Hillary Clinton (which Internet users were searching for) during the 2015–16 primaries. But the FCC under Trump opened the Internet up to more far-reaching and openly applied forms of censorship.
Biden, unlike Trump, is quiet — in fact, so quiet that he makes the more observant wonder what he’s up to or hiding — and he’s got a lot to hide! Biden also has a very small percentage of the general public as his true supporters. However, a much greater percentage of the general public is willing to honor him with their sacred votes in November because they are under a different, more subtle, mass-media spell: the belief that he will be the ‘lesser of the two evils.’ This segment of the general public also watches mass media outlets, such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. These news outlets also disseminate DDOPE (Distraction, Distortion, Omission, Promotion, and Erasure) 24/7/365, but DDOPE that is less dramatically delivered and is more subtly inaccurate. These media outlets have been wildly successful in convincing their viewers into believing that things are O-KAY! and that the future will be bright with their particular puppet of preference in P-O-W-E-R. They are also highly successful in pinning the blame for most of the nation’s ills on U.S. President #45, Donald Trump. The problem with this narrative is, though it has its own cultish, belong-to-the-in-the-know-group appeal that Fox has, it leaves out such important details as: 1) It is the billionaire oligarchs to whom #45 answers — he does not come up with any of his major policies or actions. 2) These same billionaire oligarchs are, for the most part, the ones all the U.S. presidents since 1963 have answered to. (Well, some have died since then, but it’s the same billionaire oligarch group.) 3) #45 is actually continuing policies and fulfilling agendas that were begun and/or furthered by former U.S. presidents since 1963. Having dumbed down the U.S. population little by little, oh, what the oligarchs can get away with when most are not even aware of what previous presidents have said or done!
The first of our apparent ‘choices’ — I don’t consider the two candidates who have been rammed down my throat by the two oligarch-owned, major political parties and the mass media for the past year to be ‘choices’ — is the son of a man who was arrested while attending a KKK rally, and was a New York City slumlord who treated his poor, minority tenants worse than one would hope farm animals would be treated — and is himself, a card-carrying racist.
The other is the proud architect of the 1994 ‘Crime Bill,’ which was enthusiastically promoted and shoved through Congress by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and triumphantly signed into law by a beaming President Bill Clinton. This ‘Landmark Crime Bill’ ushered in, right on schedule and as planned, racial profiling on steroids, and the era of U.S. mass incarceration, A.K.A., neo-Jim Crowism, brought to us by its friends who espoused ‘neoliberalism’ — one of history’s all-time worst misnomers, as it implies liberalism and has no right to claim to have anything to with it. The effects of this bill transformed the U.S. into a shameful member of the club of nations which use or have used mass incarceration for political reasons. Nixon had already started the use of it but on a smaller scale as an adjunct to his infamous ‘war on drugs.’ John Ehrlichman, later in life, stated that, in truth, the war on drugs was a program designed to target Blacks and hippies, who were more likely to oppose the extremely conservative Nixon and the Vietnam War.
But wait, there is something missing in this mess… Ah, yes! The 2-ton elephant sitting in the room: Bernie Sanders, the truly liberal, truly progressive, heavyweight U.S. Senator from Vermont who in both 2016 and 2020 was swindled out of — actually, We the People were swindled out of — his nomination for President by the Democratic Party, the DNC, and the billionaire-oligarch-owned mass media — which historic fact was extremely well documented in the DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks in 2016. And so, we now witness the unjust imprisonment of whistleblower extraordinaire and courageous, award-winning journalist Julian Assange; and the assassinations of Seth Rich — who obtained and delivered the emails to Wikileaks — and Shawn Lucas — whose cheerful delivery of the subpoena to the DNC (specifically, to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Director of the DNC) in regard to the lawsuit against them that resulted from the emails was videotaped. Et tu, Hillary? Et tu, Debbie?
The rather badly hidden truth is that Senator Sanders would make a great president, and would be the first honest, upright, and autonomous — other than his unyielding loyalty to the American people — president we’ve had in almost six decades. And he is a true patriot, civil rights activist, and humanitarian. To top it off, he’s smart, being both politically savvy and book smart. Further, he is tough. And after a lifetime of tireless political activism and service to the public in the form two terms as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont; eight terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; and three terms in the U.S. Senate, he knows of what he speaks when he gives a speech on the Senate floor on some important issue of the day — always on the side of the people and against the greedy self-interests of the billionaire oligarchs — and when he gives a speech to a crowd of tens of thousands of his supporters in a packed stadium in some city in America. Bernie Sanders is a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, which is to say one who is for democracy — first and foremost — and a democratically-determined mixed economy such as exist in the happy, healthy, wealthy, peace-loving Scandinavian countries — such as we would and should have, if our government had not been taken over by the billionaire oligarchs and was not violating our most important constitutional rights. In contrast, for those of us in the U.S., so much injustice and oppression has taken its clumsy, heavy-handed toll and reaped its rotting rewards. To the victors go the spoils … the rotten spoils of our sick planet and sick society — thanks a bunch, you korporate, kleptocratic klutzes!
Life IS stranger than fiction. If I have at times sounded a bit like Rod Sterling, it is because language which hums along to the intonations of Rod Sterling giving his introduction to an episode of The Twilight Zone is quite apropos for such a lurid story. However, The Twilight Zone could not begin to depict the level of bizarre that our world has been catapulted to in these days. It is no wonder that many people are singing the dirges of the last days. And no matter how hard Rod Sterling tried, he could never have begun to capture and depict, dramatically, the apocalyptic, existential threats wielded by the puppeteers who manipulate the puppet strings of the two fakes in whose balance we all appear to tenuously hang. All while super-slugger Senator Sanders is made to sit on the sidelines during this World Series too. I can still hear the crowds roar on that afternoon that Bernie came to the Key Arena in Seattle in 2016. There were over 40,000 present. They had to turn many away who had waited for hours in the rain. This level of bizarre could not have happened overnight. It has taken 57 years — starting with the assassination of JFK, the last honest, upright, and autonomous president we had — and the sinister, secretive, and persistent work of a few mad, sociopathic billionaires and their underlings, for the world to reach this point of incomprehensible destruction and deterioration. The depth of the destruction they have wreaked on our planet, the democratic mechanisms of our government and society, and much of our civility, humanity, education, and excellence is unfathomable.
Sadly, I have no simple solutions to offer — to those who even are aware of the problems. All the simple ones seem so elusive. But one thing I can offer is something that Bernie Sanders said: “Despair is not an option.” I agree. I will plod along doing what I can to continue to hope, and pray and meditate for, and to act, to help bring about the ‘Great Society’ that FDR worked himself to death endeavoring to bring about, and which JFK was assassinated for endeavoring to realize for We the People. I still have hope, and I still believe it is possible.
Sources
Kroll, Andy. 2019, November 26. “Will Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Finally Tell the Truth About Seth Rich?” The Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/will-julian-assange-and-wikileaks-finally-tell-the-truth-about-seth-rich-918946/
Lockie, Alex. (2019, July 31). “Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the ‘war on drugs’ decades ago.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-anti-left-anti-black-war-on-drugs-2019-7?op=1
Martens, Pam; & Martens, Russ. (2016, August 8). “Sanders Supporters Stunned by Sudden Death of 38-Year Shawn Lucas Who Served the Lawsuit on the DNC and Wasserman Shultz.” Wall Street on Parade. https://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/08/sanders-supporters-stunned-by-sudden-death-of-38-year-shawn-lucas-who-served-the-lawsuit-on-the-dnc-and-wasserman-shultz/
Parscale, Brad. (2018, September 10). “Trump is right: More than Facebook & Twitter, Google threatens democracy, online freedom.” USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/trump-google-youtube-search-results-biased-against-republicans-conservatives-column/1248099002/