@Mark from Queens . He and his panel have great fun with tweets. They could bring this material to life and in so doing awaken a whole lot of folks -- while making us laugh, no less. What you did here is pure gold, and the work you put into it is very evident. Thanks so much for doing this.

the gap between rich and poor I hear the echo now of Jack London writing in 1905 of the "crime and betrayal" he observed during the time he spent among the 1% of his day...

I had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high places--the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead--clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence."

I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.

I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal machine. This editor, who published patent medicine advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.

This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross, uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. And this railroad magnate broke his word as a gentleman and a Christian when he granted a secret rebate to one of two captains of industry locked together in a struggle to the death.

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime--men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime.

I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlour floor of society. Intellectually I was as bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working-men. I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labour, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now and again and setting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars to work, we'll topple it over, along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlour floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.

Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."

"What Life Means To Me"

@IdealistCynic Ronnie Mitchell is my name.

Mark,

Thanks for this. But please put up the links to the tweets. I may have already shared some of them on Twitter. I'm frantically tweeting and retweeting everything on Twitter that I run across that is negative on Bloomberg as I find him what is called a more effective evil than Trump. I kind of resurrected my Twitter account having let it go dormant, but that seems to be a good medium to blast stuff out on this point against the PTB, better than FB.

BTW, my handle on Twitter is the same as my username on C99. I don't have a lot of followers since I really didn't use the account much until recently.

@IdealistCynic

Bingo. Plus a bit of old fashion buying it by buying up people's endoresement from people who know better. The number of black congress members across the country throwing their hat in with him when they know that his stop and frisk policy hurt many of the fellow blacks. This is what I can't get beyond. How many are just saying it's in the past and we 'should look forward' while police harassment against blacks is on going. If we had a function media we would learn that they killed another black person every day and it is the epidemic we should be talking about. I sure wonder how many rich white people would be saying let's look forward if cops had invaded their neighborhoods and threw out their 4th amendment? Yeah that shit would have been on the news hourly.

As for this. This is an excellent point.

Let’s be honest: Ads also enable Mike to mislead voters without being corrected. One ad portrays him as Obama’s BFF, even though Mike didn’t back him in '08 & barely did in '12, when he scolded Obama for being partisan, divisive & populist. But few will see this pushback

Mike is saying that the world will be all healed once he is in office without anyone asking just how he will accomplish it. I have seen a few of his ads and they sure sound nice, but no talk about how to achieve it.

The biggest thing though is his buying the DNC and getting Perez to change the rules that every other candidate has had to adhere to since this long road show started. And why the hell aren't people asking why candidates have to jump through new hoops to make the debates instead of hearing from all of them?

Mark,

Thanks for this. But please put up the links to the tweets. I may have already shared some of them on Twitter. I'm frantically tweeting and retweeting everything on Twitter that I run across that is negative on Bloomberg as I find him what is called a more effective evil than Trump. I kind of resurrected my Twitter account having let it go dormant, but that seems to be a good medium to blast stuff out on this point against the PTB, better than FB.

BTW, my handle on Twitter is the same as my username on C99. I don't have a lot of followers since I really didn't use the account much until recently.

@moneysmith

just click on that and it will take you to Twitter to read.

this is actually pretty scary, the possibility that this selfish, disgusting, wealthy man could actually purchase so much power. Instead of an election, why don't we just have an auction?

Thanks for all the work you put into this, Mark. Certainly is damning. And deserved. I had no idea he was such an awful human being.

@snoopydawg

Why?

somehow you missed the Russian money and constant favors for Putin as he sews the USSR back together.

Oh of course it's because of Russia Russia Russia....!! SMDH over the idiocy.
This qualifies for DCOTN #6

Dumbest call of the night.

A few things stand out for me.

Alas, we live in perhaps the most depressing of times. This fucking despotic, misogynistic and racist briber is attempting to be the first ever to almost completely circumvent the traditional idea of having to at least somewhat industriously campaign in and among the citizenry for votes, by instead using the pure cynically Machiavellian tactic of outright buying them or bribing their attendance at campaign stops or allegiance with endorsements with catered food and wine or funding their pet projects.

That so many people have decided to skip the rest of the primary and just decide to select Bloomberg has shown how dumb people have become since Trump became president. And especially when they skip over Bernie because he's not a democrat while overlooking the fact that neither is Bloomberg. He's not only a republican, but as you showed here he has worked against democrats in the past just because he wanted even more breaks than he has gotten or given himself. Buying a third term while people are freaking out about Trump not stepping down after the election has got to be the biggest giveaway of people losing their f'cking minds!

as long as they can beat Trump, is a testament to how warped and depraved we've plummeted to even further.

Amen. Glad you found the words I couldn't. BTW..it's just mind blowing how many centrists have jumped on the Bloomberg bandwagon.