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Frank da Cruz
Bronx NY
October 26, 2022
Most recent update: Sat Nov 5 06:41:29 2022
It's not their fault, they are up against overwhelming odds. The same thing happened over 100 years ago but Teddy Roosevelt acted to curb the power of megacorporations. His cousin, FDR did the same thing in the 1930s. The corporations and elites learned from these experiences and made themselves untouchable and invulnerable. Today, they are the government. And the courts.
For fundamental change to take place, progressives would have had to convince a large segment of voters to change sides, as FDR did during the Great Depression. This can't be done with happy talk or empy promises; the only way to do it is to make profound and dramatic improvements in the lives of tens of millions of ordinary working people, especially in Middle America, the ones who have lost everything thanks to Republicans and Democrats alike: their farms or factory jobs, their unions, their living wages, etc etc.
But since 2020 Democrats haven't won over anybody new; the voters are still as split as they were two years ago, and the country (and much of the rest of the world) is crumbling around us. The only chance the Democrats have to hold the both houses of congress in the midterms is if huge numbers of women vote for them because of Roe-v-Wade. It's the last chance because after the midterms, the vote will be meaningless as Republican secretaries of state are installed everywhere, who will discard non-Republican votes and/or block anyone who doesn't "look right" from voting.
Meanwhile I get a constant stream of emails from Bernie, Barabara Lee, and the Squad plus countless progressive organizations askimg for money. I donated considerable amounts two years ago and continued over the next year-plus, and what good did it do? Here's the thing: 99% of Congress (give or take) is owned by billionaires and huge corporations that finance their campaigns and who-knows-what-else. So if you're a corrupt politician you can work all day at your job (i.e. servicing your rich patrons), whereas if you are a progressive who refuses bribes and corporate money, you have no time to do anything but plead with millions of ordinary people, individually, multiple times per day, for small contributions, thus wasting your time and alienating your base. In other words, the system itself is engineered to work for corrupt politicians and against honest ones.
Bernie, Barbara, AOC... you have a powerful message but (a) nobody hears it because the mass media (including most of the Internet) is controlled by the rich and powerful and (b) the Right has succeeded spectacularly at driving wedges between every imaginable kind of person, by race, gender, religion, sexual preference, ancestry, age, height, weight, health, you name it. And now, in the Age of Trump and toothless "he-said-she-said" American journalism, politicians can say whatever they want with no regard for truth, ethics, humanity, or morality with no penalty. It has been decades since there was a major public figure like FDR or MLK that ordinary people could trust.
So in 2022, it really comes down to abortion. Women and other people who care about women should come out and vote for Democrats, not because they'll do anything truly or even halfway good, but because — unlike the Republicans — they say they want to pass a law to guarantee the right to abortion. Can you believe them? Can they pull it off? Who knows. But you DO know what Republicans will do. Also, at least for now, the Democrats don't sow hatred and vitriol like the Republicans (their entire platform). So vote Democratic — or better still, Working Families — if you can get past the "poll-watcher" militias and if you haven't already mysteriously disappeared from the voting rolls.
As for the rest: environmental disaster, species extinction, crumbling infrastructure, enormous "defense" budget, nuclear weapons, neverending US interference in other countries, public education crisis, health care crisis, homeless crisis, mental health crisis, student debt crisis, gerrymandering, voter suppression, DC and PR statehood, Cuban embargo, corrupt campaign financing, corporate personhood, spiraling inflation, horrendous death rates from viruses because of the prevailing craziness... depression, veteran suicide, the lethal fentanyl epidemic, school shootings and other mass shootings and guns everywhere: the utter dysfunction of modern American life for the 90+%. Get used to it, none of it will change except for the worse.
Anyway, it might already be too late. Headline in The Guardian, 28 October 2022: "New US state voting laws present most intense voter suppression threat in decades". Perhaps irrelevant. Failed public education (defunded to near extinction), social media, cell phones: the perfect storm.
And speaking of elections, Lula won the one in Brazil, good. CIA: hands off Brazil! No more coups and assassinations in Latin America! Or anywhere else! ("CIA" is just a generic term these days, there are countless secret, covert, American hit squads operating in every country of the world. Please stop.)