Eeek! Communists!

Poor Debbie Lesko! Some mean people wanted to keep the Republican congresswoman from Arizona from bringing her gun into the Capitol. She is outraged. We don't know what kind of scene she makes at the airport, but in the Capitol, where she and her colleagues are routinely kettled for the convenience of armed mobs, she's stamping her little feet. "We now live in Pelosi's Communist America!" she tweeted thunderously. Yes, you can tweet thunderously.

Ah, that old chestnut! It brings me back. When I was a kid that's what you called other kids on the playground if you wanted to rile 'em up. They were commies! Specifically, dirty commies. Just like Miss Debbie, we didn't know what we meant by it. It was another word for asshole. 

So Miss Debbie doesn't really mean "Communist" when she complains about being detained at a metal detector. What she's really hopped up about is governmental overreach. Authoritarians are the worst, unless they're Russians or North Koreans or some other repressive, crushing regime that we kind of admire, right, Miss Debbie? Authoritarianism is awesome if God's on your side.

"Communist" is just one of those big-basket words that scoops up many different people indiscriminately. It's a broad brush. It's like calling all Republicans "Nazis," when a lot of them are just self-dealing assholes.

I like to keep an ear open for the language being used to perpetuate the plutocracy. It evolves. For four years now "socialist" has been the slur of choice, but now we're hearing more about communists. Hardly anyone can define the terms, but that's irrelevant. Every now and then you will hear someone elucidate what is so awful about being a socialist, and it usually comes down to "they want to take all your hard-earned money and give it to the lazy people."

Sounds bad! But weirdly, they are fantasizing something entirely different from having all their hard-earned wages, pensions, and benefits taken and given to the indolent rich, which is what has actually happened over the last forty years. Someone should look into that.

In any case, I have a lot of commerce with the motley Left Wing and can report that very few of us consider ourselves socialists. There are a few socialists, and an anarchist/anti-capitalist contingent, but the vast bulk of us would align with Democratic Socialism, which aims to maintain a market system but strip it of its worst excesses and failures. A bit more like Eisenhower's America, in other words, without all the racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia and...well, we'd like to polish things up a bit, and try to save the planet in the bargain. It's not really scary at all. Make everyone's lives a little better, without making the billionaires' lives worse. Because above a certain income, you shouldn't be able to notice how rich you are. You can drown your soul in a bathtub of money just as easily as in an ocean of it, after all.

There's a lot not to like about our current economic system, in which profit for some is sacred and the true costs of it are paid by the rest of us. Let's look at the results. Our planet may soon become uninhabitable. Extinctions are accelerating. Our resources have been stripped and turned into cash for the few. Legions of us are impoverished, homeless, sick. Entire populations all over the world are on the move for their very survival.

We would like to not be ruined by medical expenses. We would like to not be ruined by fossil fuel consumption. We would like clean water and a range of basic services. We would like to support small farmers. We would also like maybe some bullet trains, please.

"Communist America!" Poor Miss Debbie doesn't mean anything by it, not really. She's just using it as a phony label to instruct the masses who they're supposed to hate. You fling that word out enough and it fails to mean anything at all--it's just a stain in the brain that will hopefully remind you what Debbie wants you to do in the voting booth.

What she doesn't want you to do is think.

Save The Billionaires!

Hey friend. Again with the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meme? That's getting to be a habit with you. I know I asked once, and you said you just don't like her. I'd rather have more to go on than that, but okay, fine, you don't like her. I think maybe the only things you think you know about her are on these little propaganda hit pieces you keep posting, brought to you by the same folks who said Obama is a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. I don't know if you bought that too, but if you did, I'd say you're ripe for the picking.

This meme at least has a bit of substance to it, and isn't just trying to make AOC out to be a daffy uneducated bimbo. She's about as far from that as you can get, but evidently all you have to do is mock someone like that and people will gleefully spread it far and wide as though it were true. Just like you did! But this one cites a complaint about her involvement with a political action committee. The Federal Election Commission is looking into it, and I'd wait to see what they find out, myself--but hey, you go ahead on, and post the meme.

It's rich though. Really rich. The PAC she's involved with deliberately courts small donors. It's harder to come up with the millions it apparently takes to run a campaign when you're doing it that way, instead of tapping the billionaires, but it's the principle of the thing, and a fine principle it is for a working democracy, in my opinion. And the people ultimately responsible for ginning up the propaganda you lap up aren't bothering with the small donors.

They're probably starting with DonorsTrust,  through which they can make unlimited philanthropical (wink-wink) donations anonymously. And those untraceable billions, a.k.a. Dark Money, go to little grassroots (wink-wink) organizations like Americans For Job Security and All Votes Matter and Right To Work and other blatantly political outfits, many of which the original donors designed themselves. It's by far the biggest slush fund the world has ever seen, and look what it has accomplished! The defeat of universal health care in favor of the for-profit insurance industry, the rollback of taxes on the super-wealthy, and--most impressive of all--they were able to turn the tide on any effort to curb global warming, by paying off a few scientists, submitting a new script to their propaganda arms, planting irate citizen-actors in town halls, conducting focus groups to learn what particular line of bullshit would appeal to Mr. and Mrs. America, and good old-fashioned threats to pull funding from legislators--that sort of thing. Thus they were able to secure enormous private fortunes for another twenty years or so while threatening the future of every man, woman, child, fetus, and wombat on the planet. Bless their stony hearts, they may well have killed us all.

So. This is the group infiltrating your social media feed. This is the group working so hard to bring down this young freshman Ocasio-Cortez. And it's easy to see why the billionaire boys' club doesn't like her. They hate everything she stands for: Democratic Socialism, through which they might be relieved of the grossest excesses of their wealth in order to make life substantially better and more secure for people like you and me. And support for unions and a livable wage, both of which cut into their profits but which produce the actual job-providers. (You didn't buy that bit about the billionaires being the job providers, did you? Oh honey. It's normal people with enough security to live modestly with dignity, and pay each other to paint their houses or their nails. We keep each other afloat. And unions used to make sure we could, even those of us who weren't in one.) And, most urgent of all, she stands for getting us the hell off of fossil fuels and into the economy of the future before we have no future at all. Fast. Too fast, too extreme? As someone recently said, we're not in charge of the deadline: physics is. Ocasio-Cortez knows how imperative this work is, and how disruptive, and is working to make sure the poor and the shrunken middle class don't bear the brunt of it. She is not extreme. She is absolutely right.

So that's who's behind all this nastiness and mockery you like to spread around. I know exactly why the billionaires want to destroy this young woman. What I don't get is why you want to carry their water.