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This current presidential election will be perhaps the single most important event the United States has faced in a hundred or more years.\u00a0 Never before has there been such a wide range and disparity between the different candidates.\u00a0 Never before has there been so much at stake.<\/p>\n
This is where we decide if we’re a representative democracy or an oligarchy.<\/p>\n
What has<\/em> our country come to?<\/p>\n The answer is that there have been some very fundamental, mostly gradual changes in \u00a0 recent years that brought us to where we are now. The biggest single, most disastrous event was the advent of the Citizen\u2019s United, <\/em>Supreme Court decision. This is where the oligarchs – the 1%,\u00a0<\/em>truly took over control of our country.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n As President Jimmy Carter observed about Citizen’s United<\/em>, <\/em><\/p>\n “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. <\/em>Now [the United States is]\u00a0just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we\u2019ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election\u2019s over.” <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>It’s true. If someone dumps massive amounts of cash into a politician\u2019s campaign, they do expect results. The politicians are not dummies, they know what’s expected. And they have a vested interest to keep the money coming in, so they work diligently\u00a0to protect\u00a0the interests of the people who bankrolled them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Money is a terrible<\/em> addiction.\u00a0 And it’s a progressive disease.<\/p>\n The result is that the political parties as we’ve known them have mostly ceased to exist. They’ve changed beyond all recognition, losing much of their substantive differences, to where their overriding missions are becoming virtually the same, with only minor variations in flavor. They’ve largely become empty shells of their former selves, simply offering blue-flavored<\/em> and red-flavored<\/em> candidates.<\/p>\n This is great for the oligarchs, and bad for everyone else. If this metamorphosis is allowed to continue, the United States as we know it, may soon cease to exist.<\/p>\n Our democracy is teetering on the edge of a vast, deep abyss\u00a0\u2013 with portends of much greater, more drastic, and truly\u00a0ugly<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>changes that will impact the 99% if we remain complaisant and\u00a0accept this as status quo, letting the current situation play out.\u00a0 If we don\u2019t take\u00a0back control of\u00a0our country now, later we may not be able.<\/p>\n So what are our choices? How do we turn this around?<\/p>\n Ostensibly a democrat, Hillary Clinton is in actuality\u00a0the blue-flavored<\/em> candidate of the 1%.\u00a0 The oligarch’s choice. Her primary constituents are the multinational corporations, Wall Street, the big banks and the ordinary mega-rich people.<\/p>\n Most of the $222.4M in campaign funds raised by Clinton comes from super PACs (28%) or from large donations of more than $200.<\/p>\n What promises has she made her corporate backers to secure their patronage?<\/p>\n We may never know for sure. Fighting to maintain secrecy, she has consistently refused to release transcripts of her closed-door Goldman Sachs speeches, speaking engagements where she earned a whopping $675,000 in 2013.<\/p>\n According to a report in Politico<\/em>, at one of these engagements she spoke about the role of Wall Street in the 2008 financial crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was pretty glowing about us,\u201d <\/em>one person who watched the event said. \u201cIt\u2019s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.\u201d<\/em> Politico.com on 2\/9\/16.<\/p>\n This is the true<\/em> Hillary.<\/p>\n The fact she’s working hard for the 1% is also evidenced by her support for NAFTA and up until recently, her glowing support of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yes, it’s true that she has flip flopped on the TPP, but how long will that last before she flip flops yet again?<\/p>\n She supported the Wall Street bailout (TARP), offshore oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline – all huge paybacks for her prime constituents. \u00a0 Then if that wasn’t enough, there’s the fact she voted in favor of invading Iraq – a disastrous decision that’s cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives, American and Iraqi.<\/p>\n A decision that also reaped US corporations billions. As an example, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made over $39.5 billion on the Iraq war, just by itself.<\/p>\n Hillary Clinton represents a continuation of the status quo for big business and the corporations \u2013 with a slight blue<\/em>–flavor<\/em>.\u00a0 A Clinton presidency would be overtly benign<\/em> for the masses, but we wouldn\u2019t see any rollback of income inequality or other real work on the critical problems we currently face, like Citizen’s United<\/em> and campaign financing, generally.\u00a0 The corporations\u2019 agendas would continue to take center stage; we would continue down the present road slowly transforming into a true\u00a0and complete oligarchical state\u00a0\u2013 albeit at a somewhat slower pace than a red-flavored<\/em> candidate might have had it.<\/p>\n Expect Clinton to take very good care<\/em> of her primary constituents. The rest of us would get mere crumbs.<\/p>\n On the other side of the aisle, the republican party as we\u2019ve known it is now history.\u00a0 It’s disintegrated, split into different diverse, reactionary factions all at war with each other and everyone else. What we have left bears almost no resemblance to the party of Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n Jeb Bush was likely to have been the 1%\u2019s main red-flavored<\/em> candidate \u2013\u00a0but he\u2019s gone, his departure a product of the combination of his last name and attacks from his republican rivals.<\/p>\n The GOP’s apparent man of the hour, by default, and on the extreme other side of the spectrum, is Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n Nominally a republican, this rogue oligarch embraces almost none of the party\u2019s actual ideology.\u00a0 The sad reality is he\u2019s an opportunist with no discernable fixed agenda, a racist, a bully, a misogynist, and a person who could very likely plunge us into another world war.\u00a0 And in that line, first and foremost of course, would be our war with Mexico over his stupid wall.<\/p>\n The comparisons of Trump with Hitler are apt.\u00a0 I’ve read a great deal about the rise of Hitler, and the parallels are many.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying that Trump is a fascist necessarily, although that may very well be true.\u00a0 But the similarities are startling: he’s a megalomaniac just like Hitler, as well as being an effective speaker and world-class manipulator, playing to people’s fears and prejudices, and even inciting violence.<\/p>\n He\u2019s also a pathological narcissist who seems hung up on proving his macho-ness – read the transcript of his interview with the Washington Post<\/em> editorial board where he spent five minutes talking about the size of his hands<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n He would have the United States commit war crimes, killing suspected terrorist’s families and torturing people. He’d ban all the Muslims from entering the US.<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump is a dangerous<\/em> man who is not fit to hold any<\/em> public office, much less the office of president of the United States.<\/p>\n The GOP’s other likely offering is Ted Cruz – a religious zealot version of Trump, a racist and bigot, a spoiler.\u00a0 Look at how he and his Tea Party held the entire country hostage over the federal budget.\u00a0 Like Trump, he’d have us commit war crimes, indiscriminately carpet bombing our enemies. \u00a0 He wants to put extra police patrols on American Muslim neighborhoods as a means to combat terrorism.\u00a0 Extrapolating from that, it’s logical to conclude his next step might be to round the Muslims\u00a0up into ghettos to make it easier to keep track of them. \u00a0 Then perhaps he\u2019d make them all wear green crescents on their sleeves.\u00a0 Does that sound vaguely familiar?<\/p>\n In his own, evil way, Cruz could end up being every bit as destructive as Donald Trump.<\/p>\n These are candidates for the office of president of the United States? \u00a0 What depths has our country sunk to? \u00a0 Still, there is some hope. <\/strong><\/p>\n There’s Bernie Sanders.<\/strong><\/p>\n He\u2019s a\u00a0real honest-to-God democrat<\/em>, not the watered-down, blue-flavored<\/em> politician<\/em>\u00a0we mostly have these days; these\u00a0purported democrats who, courtesy of Citizen’s United<\/em>, are\u00a0largely corrupted by the massive<\/em> amounts of money poured into their campaign coffers from super PACs, the corporations\u00a0and the ordinary mega-rich.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m not so na\u00efve to think that one man can turn back the damage of the last 20 years, but at least there\u2019s a chance.\u00a0\u00a0Bernie\u2019s head is in the right place.<\/p>\n He\u2019s honest.\u00a0 He\u2019s not for sale.\u00a0 He voted against NAFTA. \u00a0 He’s always been against the TPP. \u00a0 He voted against the Wall Street bailout. He opposes offshore oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline. And he voted against the Iraq war.<\/p>\n Just .02% of Sanders’ $139.8M in campaign funds came from super PACs, while 99.98% came from campaign contributions, and of that, 66% were from donations of $200 or less. He isn\u2019t beholden to Wall Street, like Clinton.<\/p>\n Bernie is the complete opposite from the blue-flavored<\/em> politicians; he\u2019s old school.\u00a0 He\u2019s made in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u00a0\u2013 the first<\/em> democratic socialist.\u00a0 I believe he\u2019s got a chance to help us stop this otherwise inexorable\u00a0descent into industrial feudalism.<\/p>\n In years past, I had never contributed money to a presidential campaign.\u00a0 I never saw the necessity.\u00a0 But with everything that\u2019s happened in the past decade and the sorry state our country has descended to, I now think it\u2019s an absolute imperative.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve decided to put my money where my mouth is, and today I’m sending him my third donation.\u00a0 If Sanders is going to make it through to get the democratic nomination, it\u2019s up to us, the 99%, to provide the money.<\/p>\n I challenge everyone to give Bernie as much as you can afford.\u00a0 This is our future, and the future of our children we\u2019re talking about. To be an oligarchy, or not to be. That is the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This current presidential election will be perhaps the single most important event the United States has faced in a hundred or more years.\u00a0 Never before has there been such a wide range and disparity between the different candidates.\u00a0 Never before has there been so much at stake. This is where we decide if we’re a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikepellegrini.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}