Dear communitarians, not be confused with Commie-pinko-radical bastards, being as yesterday was Christmas, I, like many of you, overate. As a result I am still suffering from a case of shoe-in-mouth disease.
Howdy folks!
Here is the new and refined super-duper, non-partisan, all-weather list of demands to lob at people who propose to represent us.
To review, briefly, these are (intended to be) populist (things that resonate across parties and ideologies), medium-term demands.
I tried to focus on demands that, if realized, would put power back into the hands of the 99% such that a larger transformation of government is possible for us.
I winnowed the list down to 10 demands, reduced some of the wordings where I could and added a few things that people suggested in the comments a couple of weeks ago.
For this round of comment, if you feel that something vital is missing, please suggest either folding it into another demand or replacing one of the demands.
When we've got some sort of general consensus on the list of demands, we'll put it up as a document that can be linked to, tweeted, facebooked or printed out and mailed or distributed at candidate events, etc. I'll also write a short introduction that can be posted by way of explanation for people who don't regularly participate on C99 about the demands and how to use them and we'll post that for linking as well.
Revolutions through out history, while not all the same in nature or cause, do have a common thread that runs through every revolution, the disenchantment of the masses. This isn't to say that just because we don't agree with the prevailing Zeitgeist, we should over turn the apple cart so to speak. I firmly believe that we have to expose the prevailing Zeitgeist for the fraud that it truly is, through a sustained information campaign, ie a propaganda war if you will.
This election cycle offers an unparalleled opportunity for the movement to organize and cast off the yoke of the corporate duopoly that controls our election space. The behind-the-scenes nefarious actions that the parties use to control the elections have been more obvious than usual and have been brought to the public's attention repeatedly. The public seems more aware that the election process is not working as it should in the sort of democracy that the US tries to convince us we live in.
Awareness of the corruption of the process should be a great boon to bringing about demand and support for serious reforms from a broad segment of the public.
But I'll vote for him anyway. At least Bernie's a move in the right direction.
As Hillary Clinton made her New York victory speech, she said, “To all the people who supported Sen. Sanders, I believe that there’s much more that unites us than divides us.”
The pundits are all abuzz about whether or not Bernie Sanders has a "path to victory" in the Democratic primaries. Handicapping the horse race in all its minutiae from "the true math" to speculation over superdelegates and the size of campaign war chests fills the airwaves and plugs the tubes of the internets.
They are talking, largely, about a victory within the arcane electoral rules set up by the parties, but they are generally studiously ignoring the elephant in the room - the struggle of the 99% to achieve political and economic power.
Underneath all of the bloviating and rhetoric, power is what the so-called insurgent candidacies are really about.
Please give this a listen. She speaks for me, and for the 99%, because we're talking to each other. F the DNC and the media. This isn't about them, it's about us.
"We need to be on the right side of history."
