An Historic Election Victory… Now the real work begins
Congratulations Democrats! The midterm elections exceeded everyone’s expectations. We Democrats should pat ourselves on the back for coming together without fighting to achieve these dramatic results. I know a lot of you would like to shove politics into some cozy corner of your mind, relax, and enjoy your life. Me too. That, however, is not the hand we have been dealt. When the celebrations are over, the real work begins.
Our Situation
We Democrats have penchants for playing it safe and squabbling amongst ourselves. If we do either, we will lose our midterm majorities in both houses, botch the opportunity to elect a Democrat President and end our democracy permanently in 2028 (see my shirt design In Memoriam).
Trump’s acceptance of the results of the election has, so far, been too easy. He is, however, not going gentle into that good night. He is, in fact, doubling down. With Stephen Miller, as chief of staff, expect the inhumane attacks on immigrants to intensify. Expect the same intensity from all sectors of the government where Trump has seized control, especially the DOJ (investigations and indictments of Democrats starting with Joe Biden). Expect Supreme Court challenges to anything passed into law. Expect Trump to dismiss any action and proceed despite congressional action. Expect contrivances to stop the transition of power in January. Expect a flurry of executive orders aimed at stifling any attempt to thwart Trump (like the one to stop remodeling in the Oval Office). With Jim Jordan as the leader in the House expect vetoes and filibusters on most legislation counter to Trump’s agenda. Expect all of this to begin while Republicans have majorities in both houses. Expect Fetterman (D-PA) to vote with the Republicans most of the time.
How do we address our situation, avoid infighting, AND not play it safe? Be bold… but selective
The Senate and House of Representatives need to work together for success. We must put our difference aside just like we did for the midterms. Since Senator Schumer, evidently, engineered our historic Senate win, we must let him continue as Leader until he proves he is unwilling to be bold (no matter how much of a putz he is). Equally, since Hakeem Jeffries was handpicked as Speaker by the most successful Speaker of the House in the last 50 years, Nancy Pelosi, we should avoid squabbling over his leadership until it is clear that he is not up to the job.
Further, even if everything breaks our way in the remaining undecided races, the Senate and the House will be several seats short of being filibuster proof and a dozen or more seats short of being able to override a Trump veto. We are certainly going to need Republican votes to pass anything. Actions taken by the Senate and House before January 3 will reveal how many Republicans can be persuaded to vote with the Democrats.
To pass any legislation, we must be selective about what we pursue.
As much as all of us want to see the Trump Administration and Family prosecuted for their crimes, that action will be sold by Trump and loyal Republicans as ‘persecution.’ Besides, affordability was the number one issue in the midterms, not corruption. Affordability is what the crossover vote from MAGA was about. That must be addressed first. If we make life more affordable and sufficiently take credit for it over the next two years, election 2028 will be very blue.
If we cannot contain our need to address corruption, then start with the Epstein files. Force the release of the remaining Epstein files and begin hearings and prosecutions on those. This is a non-partisan issue. To prove our sincerity about fixing what is wrong, start with Democrats in the files.
It is a waste of time to impeach Trump. Even if successful we will still have to deal with a compromised DOJ and other institutions. Besides, if we make J.D. Vance president, it will clear his path to the 2028 Republican nomination and give him time to wipe Trump’s slate clean.
What can we do to lower prices that will get enough votes to override a Trump veto?
There are a couple of things Republicans may care about enough to vote in numbers with the Democrats.
- Reinstate Medicaid funding and Obamacare subsidies. Starting in 2027 $400Billion will be cut over the next 10 years. States will be required to pay for some of that out of their budgets. Both sides want this.
- Defund the war in Iran. Most Republicans do not favor this unnecessary war. Cut the funding and force our military to return home. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is helping by forcing an impeachment vote on Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense. The cost of diesel fuel for long haul semis, gasoline for everyday use, heating oil for winter, fertilizer for crops, and other items will go down along with inflation, as a result.
- Nullify Tariffs. This may be a heavier lift but ending tariffs, particularly on our allies, will force prices down, improve our standing in the world and reduce inflation. Republicans will no longer have Trump and the MAGA base to get them reelected.
- Raise minimum wage. This is another non-partisan issue that should attract enough Republican votes to overcome a filibuster or override a veto.
- Regulate AI and datacenters. More than 70% of Americans are against datacenters. Because constituents, especially, in Red states oppose datacenters, federally regulating AI and datacenters should be easy to get past the President.
If Democrats can accomplish these few things while continuing to curb Trump’s destructive tendencies over the next two years, it will secure election 2028 while maintaining Democrat margins in the House and Senate. It will also divide the Republican Party between those who wish to continue in politics and hardline Trump loyalists… a win-win.
Once we have accomplished this much, we can address rampant corruption.
Let the corruption investigations and prosecutions begin! Once we have increased affordability and reduced inflation, we will have the goodwill of the voters to drive us forward.
Pass ethics laws with real enforceable consequences across the federal government (especially the Executive branch and the Supreme Court). Appoint a watchdog.
End stock trading for federally elected and appointed officials. Make expulsion from office the penalty for violations.
Pass a bipartisan budget that can override a veto.
Tax the rich heavily. This will reduce the federal deficit and mitigate corruption by reducing dark money available to throw at everything they dislike. I do not know about you, but I am tired of playing political Whac-A-Mole. and genuinely believe the Parasitic Rich are the root cause of all of America’s problems.
What can we ordinary citizens do?
This is a strategy that will get the desired results. Attempting to impeach Trump or aggressively investigating and prosecuting people in this administration without first addressing affordability (and compromising with Republicans to get it) will result in failure.
If your Representative or Senator starts pushing one of the above failing agendas, get vocal. Call them. Write them. Hit social media with your complaints. Encourage friends to join in. Keep it up until they hear you. Afterall, we gave them this win and they work for us not the other way round.
Happy Halloween! (an AI toon)
Here for your enjoyment is another AI political cartoon that speaks for itself. What follows is a narrative that expands on that idea.
Some wealthy people are responsible citizens. The parasitic rich, however, are the scariest thing this Halloween.
Their singular focus is: MORE FOR ME. For them “Too much is never enough.”
They buy elections to make laws that justify their current ‘legal’ behavior.
They have monopolized their grip on food, clothing, housing, drugs, and healthcare to jack up prices at will, while not paying you enough to afford any of those things.
The world is on fire from Climate Change, a conflagration they started and stoke for short term profit.
They think their money will save them.
Now they have created an AI that, by their own admission, may make us extinct in the next few decades.
They will continue lying, cheating, and stealing your money to enrich themselves until the world ends or until we make them stop.
Attacking the real problem
As soon as you rip the labels off all the political parties, it becomes clear that the battle in front of us is not about left or right. It is a class war and we are losing badly. We can fix that, but we must act now to reverse the tide. We need to stop tilting at windmills and strike at the heart of the problem.
Scan the QR code and start fixing our problem: The Parasitic Rich
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While Vishnu Sleeps: my journey through
It had been a rough two weeks. About halfway through refinishing a deck, I started having a difficult time breathing and needed to go home. Over that weekend, I went to the emergency room. They sent me home. I did not improve and returned to the ER the following week. I was treated, put on prednisone, and sent home again. At my PCP on Wednesday, my blood pressure was 77/52. She had me admitted to 5 West at the VA Pittsburgh hospital. Diagnosis: possibly tuberculosis.
Stream of consciousness on the 4th day
By Friday, I had not slept in 4 days. But that did not prevent waking dreams. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw a smooth sepia colored wall that turned heavily textured. Then, in one of the ridges of the texture, muddy water began to seep in and ran across that wall. The leak became a torrent raging from right to left like a stream after a downpour. Then I saw a fish in the water. Then, more fish and debris. As the deluge continued there were whole trees being swept along. As if it were being played in reverse, the trees began to stand up in place beside the water. People rose out of the flow. They grew, stood, and played out scenes with other people in changing locations and time periods. Rapidly those became other scenes with more people. Then while the indistinguishable scenes played out across my screen, I noticed water again flowing, soon it was ankle deep. The people and locations began to crumble and fall in upon themselves. That motion became a rush as if the images headed toward a swirling drain. All those players before me were getting consumed. Soon the people were gone, replaced by a muddy river with trees and debris with fish among them. All this began to disappear into a square drain hole until they vanished, and their watery grave shrank into a crack in the surface that became many. like it on a textured plaster wall. Soon it was as smooth as where all of this began…
Then it started again. Each new reel was exactly like the one before but completely different. Repeat… Repeat… Repeat…
Emerging memories
In the background there was an itch in my mind that, scratched, became a thought, a memory, shrouded in the fog of time from more than 40 years ago during a decade of self-imposed exile from the toxic atmosphere of America’s South. I found myself in a bookstore in Los Angeles, seated in one of those tiny wooden chairs at a table that met my legs just below the knee, thumbing through a children’s picture book. The picture book before me in my reverie was the Bhagavad-Gita. The excellent illustrations were saturated with blues, reds, greens, and orange. Some pages depicted the Hindu creation story. Vishnu lay in repose in an ocean atop a vibrant yellow snake. As he dreams, a lotus flower sprouts and grows from his navel rising to float in another sea. Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, tends this Lotus blossom, the entirety of our existence. Everything we know, love, and experience, grows and thrives in this flower while Vishnu sleeps. When he wakes at the end of an age, the Lotus dies and all we know vanishes.
The Shadow
In the midst of? Behind? Overlaid on the whirring inside of my eyelids? I could see a growing shadow. It soon loomed over and on the entire vision. I knew this shadow. Always present, rarely visible. I have felt that chill. At least three times in my life that I am aware of when I should have died and did not. Would this visit be its last? Was I, in fact, still here?
Then the door of my hospital room opened. Technicians came to take me to a scheduled bronchoscopy. I nearly cried at the prospect of sleep, a drug induced deep, dreamless sleep. I am weary. I am weak. I am still here… and Vishnu sleeps.
I jolted awake at 5:30 am in the semi-as-a-hospital-room-gets darkness. A Christmas tree lit IV stand counts time to some unheard 20 second musical riff while, nearby, an overhead computer screen is beeping in time with the rhythms of my life. Light leaks in through the blind covered door, around a storeroom and around the bathroom door. I stare.
I gathered myself, opened the blinds to my west facing window, the only one on 5 West at the VA Hospital, Pittsburgh. I perched myself on the side of my bed and watched as luminescence crept toward the western skyline. I am sure time passed as it inevitably does while the sky did the slide trombone from night into day. I am empty. I am tired. I am…
As I peer at the brightening horizon, beyond sight and sound, the shadow looms. I can feel it in my third eye. The shadow did not stop for me today. It will not stop tomorrow. I am painfully aware of my remaining brevity.
Once again, the picture book rests on my knees, open at the first pages. This reminds me that the Vishnu creation story is only a small part of the Bhagavad-Gita strung out in fragments across Hindu religious literature and murmured in oral traditions. The main story begins as a conversation between Arjuna, a great warrior, and Krishna. They stand in a chariot on the eve of a great battle that Arjuna no longer wishes to fight.
I am Arjuna
I am Arjuna facing the battle, weary and worn. The battle before me, before us all, is for the survival of our entire species-homo sapiens.
One group of Christians believes it is their purpose in life to bring about the apocalypse that takes place in the Middle East. Mike Huckabee, American Ambassador to Israel, believes this.
The fossil fuel industry has lied to us about Climate Change since the 1970s. They are willing to burn this planet to the ground in pursuit of short-term profits.
The top 10% of the wealthy, in addition to generating the fossil fuels you and I use, personally generate 48% of all greenhouse gases. They are certain their money will save them.
Now these same rich men have created AI that is as dangerous as Climate Change, threatening to make us extinct.
Will we, in our greed, wake the sleeping Vishnu hastening the death of this, the only known outpost of life?
Until Vishu wakes, I am Arjuna, you are Arjuna, we are Arjuna revived in that chariot, Krishna whispering in our ears. May our aim be steady and true. May we aim with the heart!
Time grows short. There is much to do while Vishnu sleeps.
Until I feel the shadow’s hand on my shoulder, I fight. For life. For light. I am all-in to the end.
Are you?
Dear Rich People, your money will not save you
According to last April’s Forbes Magazine there are 2640 billionaires in the world. There are an additional 128,000 people who control $50Million or more. These 130,000 (.016% of population) account for more than 50% of all the wealth and income in the world, more than the 4 billion people combined at the fiscal bottom.
Climate Change
You, that comprise the global economic top 10%, cause 48% of the greenhouse gases changing our climate. American oil and gas producers knew about climate change in the 1970’s. They could have started then investing in green energy technology and, by today, the entire world would be much closer to mitigating the climate disaster that is upon us. Those corporations could have been the heroes and would now be more valuable than Amazon.
Instead, the leaders of those companies denied the science. They waged a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the evidence so they could continue to make short term profits. Air pollution kills 7 million people every year.
Now we are careening toward the cliff of our own extinction in a flaming Lamborghini of your making, gas pedal to the floor, spewing our own demise from the tailpipe.
As if that is not enough
The Sackler family knowingly continued to sell and distribute OxyContin claiming it was non-addictive while it laid waste to our lives and our families. They continued to hawk this narrative until massive lawsuits forced them to stop. More people died in America last year from opioid overdose than by guns and traffic accidents combined.
The NRA, as the lobbyist for gun manufacturers, has stymied, for decades, common sense legislation that would prevent the growing epidemic of gun violence in America. Last year guns were the leading cause of death in children.
A Norfolk Southern train filled with toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, OH, because safety measures were cut back to increase profits. They set fire to the derailed train cars spewing deadly pollution over the entire area. They first offered the town $1Million to let them off the hook. Pressure from the Department of Transportation and public outcry forced them to commit to complete clean up and compensation for the residents. Class action lawsuits are in the works. It will take decades to know how many residents will die. Regardless of the number of Norfolk Southern derailments since, they continue to lobby against more stringent rail safety regulations.
These are just a few examples of your egregious callousness toward your fellow homo sapiens. You do not care how many people you slaughter to enrich yourselves and your stockholders.
Poverty
According to the UN World Global Compact, a full 10% of the world’s 8.1Billion people live in extreme poverty on what amounts to less than $1.90 per day. That number is encompassed within the 25% of population the World Bank says live in social poverty.
Poverty exists, not because people are lazy or refuse to work, but because you refuse to pay the very people generating your enormous income a living wage. Without regulatory restraint, you would still be working 6-year-olds 7 days a week 12 hours a day for a pittance, no paid time to heal while sick or contagious. When they got too old or feeble to work, you would toss them off your payroll without means like unwanted food scraps. “They should have thought about this day,” you will say. That is not creating wealth. It is simply theft combined with the insensitivity it takes to intentionally sentence people to slowly die.
Poverty provides you with a workforce willing to work very cheaply without time off, take abuse without quitting, and on any bizarre schedule you impose. You do everything within your power to make sure poverty continues because it is good for your bottom line.
Rather than stop stealing us blind and killing us incrementally with poverty and poisonous pollution or murdering us rapidly with your carelessness and disregard, you spend enormous sums bribing politicians, buying elections, supporting wanton dictators, and backing repressive governments around the globe to make sure you continue to enrich yourselves at the expense of absolutely everyone else. You are the deep state, the swamp that must be drained.
As everything, everywhere gets hotter without mitigation, one or more of three scenarios will boil to the surface.
Scenario 1
Global tempers will rise like the temperature. With each temperature uptick the probability increases that a rapacious dictator or an American fascist you financially support will mistakenly conclude that using nuclear weapons is necessary. Apocalypse will ensue.
Scenario 2
Goaded by climate disaster with underlying greed driven human activity, we face a dwindling fresh water supply and a rapid decline in the insect population whose continued coupled crises will cause a collapse of the global food supply. The collapse of civilization will follow.
Scenario 3
As temperatures rise, the wealth gap continues to grow. When a modern-day Robespierre becomes sufficiently annoyed by the weather and that gap, he will direct a wholesale slaughter of you, your family, and your friends. It will render the French Revolution an insignificant skirmish. This is not a matter of if, but when.
Any of these storylines will make your money and assets worthless, your opinion empty of influence. If you do not turn your focus to our collective situations, some of you may die naturally but your children certainly will not. If humanity survives the coming cataclysm, your only enduring legacy will be that you caused this to happen.
This may be your last opportunity to become part of the solution instead of the entire problem.
Respectfully yours,
Thomas Crown
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