When Obama needed the votes of progressives to get elected, his message was Change We Can Believe In. But now that he no longer needs us, now that he has power, he has a very different message for progressives . . .
That blunt message is echoing from one end of the Beltway to the other, from the White House to Capitol Hill, it's echoing from K Street to Wall Street and across the corporate media airwaves. Corporate power must not be challenged. Don't even think about it. Byron Dorgan got the message. Chris Dodd got the message. Robert Wexler got the message. We all got the message.
2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't have to tell you what her latest mistake was, I don't have to tell you when she made that mistake, I don't have to tell you because she wasn't the only one who made that mistake. 100 million other Americans made the same mistake on November 4, 2008, they believed the lies, they voted for liars and frauds and career criminals up and down the ballot.
So here we are.
"Pragmatic" progressives tell us we can't jump the track, the corporate media tells us we're just cars on a cable, the "Christians" tell us life's like an hourglass, glued to the table, so go to church unless you want to be damned to Hell for eternity like the Muslims and the Jews and the heathens in Africa and Asia. Well we've seen this movie before, we know who the killers are, we know who the victims are, we know who the warmongers are, we know who the hypocrites are, we know how it ends, we know how it always ends, but no one can find the rewind button, no one can ever find the rewind button.
This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we're facing. The fault lies everywhere. The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone's program. Politicians can't seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. Any talk of raising taxes is considered blasphemous, but there is a constant din of empty yapping about controlling budget deficits.
It won't be empty yapping for long, Lieberman and Conrad and Nelson and Snowe will see to that. Social welfare programs will be shredded, "entitlements" will be gutted, no Democrat will defend them, they've seen the writing on the wall, the ones who aren't "retiring" will say what their corporate masters tell them to say and do what their corporate masters tell them to do.
Hypocrites . . .
They're all there for the very same reason--POWER.
The deficit scolds are coming out of the woodwork now that the Republicans brought us to the brink, slashing taxes for the wealthy, larding their own contributors with earmarks, solidifying the notion that military industrial complex spending is a sacred, untouchable icon, and fetishing and deregulating the market until they finally brought the whole system to its knees.
There's a light at each end of this tunnel, we shout, but we're just as far in as we'll ever be out, and these mistakes that we've made, we just make them again, like we did in 1980, and 1982, and 1984, and 1986, and 1988, like we've done every two years ever since the Reagan/Bush years, over and over again, by reelecting corrupt corporate Republicans and corrupt corporate Democrats.
We're trapped in that two-party tunnel to nowhere, we're just as far in as we'll ever be out. We've always been just as far in as we'll ever be out, we always will be just as far in as we'll ever be out. We've been wrong. We've been wrong every time. There's no light at either end of that tunnel. There's no light at the Corporate Democratic end of that tunnel and there sure as hell isn't any light at the Corporate Republican end of that tunnel.
Sing it if you understand.
May he turned 21 on the base at Fort Bliss. "Just a day," he sat down to the flask in his fist. "Ain't been sober, since maybe October of last year." Just a day. Just another day in the tunnel, just another demoralizing day like the one before it and the one after it, just another demeaning day for the powerless, for the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have no choice but to obey their commanders, for the working people of this country who have no choice but to obey their bosses. Just another day in the tunnel, just another demeaning day in a demeaning life in a dying nation being destroyed by criminals.
I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country in this tragic, tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis; only to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land. But not people whose names we don't know, and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable; it's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable; it's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer.
Mike Prysner understands: "Our enemies are not 5000 miles away, they are right here at home" . . .
We need to get organized, we need to fight back. Take a deep breath. Take as many as you need. Then face the truth. There's only one way out of this. Working within the system is no longer an option, it just plays into the hands of the corrupt criminals who control the system.
Sing it if you understand.
2 AM and I'm still awake, writing these words,
If I get them down on paper, they're no longer inside of me,
Threatening the life they belong to.
The writers and poets, the songwriters, the activists, the seekers of peace and justice who who speak truth to power, who will not sell their souls for a corporate paycheck, who have seen enough, who will not submit to a criminal government, who know what has to be done, who are ready to do it, could use some help. From you. From every American who still gives a damn, from every American who still believes that justice matters, from every American who is ready to be the change they seek, from every American who is ready to get arrested if that's what it's going to take to restore democracy and the rule of law to this country.
I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd,
'Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud,
And I know that you'll use them, however you want to.
I can't speak for anyone else here, but I know why I'm here. I'm here to find the words, to use them as they were meant to be used, to make Americans understand, to find a way out of this tunnel, to forge a movement, to show those criminals in Washington what accountability looks like, to show them what massive civil disobedience looks like, so we can take back our government, so the rule of law can be restored, so democracy can be redeemed.
Somebody needs to get the fuck out, but it's not us, it's not progressives, it's not We the People, it's the criminal bankers and corrupt politicians and corporate media hacks who have the blood of the innocent on their hands, who have bankrupted an entire nation, who have turned America into a wasteland of lies, into a cauldron of corruption, into a corporate dictatorship. They have shamed us all. They are beneath contempt. They are the ones who need to get the fuck out of Washington, out of Wall Street, out of their propaganda studios, out of their corporate boardrooms, out of this country and out of our lives. If they won't go, we will have to make them go. One way or another.
Diane Gee's Wild, Wild Left is a Multi-authored collaboration of the Best and the Brightest moving the World to a Sane & Equitable Future for the World!
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