What it Will Take to Reverse Growth of Inequality and Save Human Existence?

I’m fine today, but I have a great deal worrying me. We all do, whether we know it yet or not. The USA is in trouble, and we are so bent on US hegemony that our malady spells trouble for the entire planet. Let me explain.

I voted for Bernie in the primary and still have tremendous respect for him. Having said that, before the predictable attacks begin, some disclaimers are needed. I am not a fanboy, and I’m not a Bernie-bro, either. Just so the Hillbots know, the issue to me was never about genitalia. I voted for Jill Stein in the general election, so don’t try the male chauvinist trope. And those “just-like-Ralph-Nader attack dogs” who falsely claim that my Jill Stein vote put Trump in office need to know ALL the facts before mouthing off. I live in VERY blue Massachusetts. Hillary won here by a landslide, as I knew she would. So no, I did NOT help elect Trump.

Why do I have to waste my first paragraph with such disclaimers? Because I see a progressive movement that all too often eats its own. Elections are NEVER won by alienating as many in your own political base as possible. The GOP is actually paying smart right-wing activists to pose as progressives and infiltrate left-wing groups online, on TV, and in print. You’ll find them posting attacks that pit one progressive camp against another or try to convince progressives to go third party in order to cripple any Democratic Party progressives who have any chance of winning national or state office. The David Brooks type of Democrats are up to the same tricks. Divide and conquer.

These paid trolls want to convince us all to pour our energy and money into third, fourth, and fifth party efforts. Why? Because the laws of elections are made by legislatures that the Dem/Rep duopoly has in a stranglehold. They have already rigged the game, so it is all but impossible for anyone outside the duopoly to win even a single seat, and winning a legislative majority is an impossible dream. If some third party finds a chink in their election rule armor, the duopoly will immediately legislate that vulnerability out of existence.

Meanwhile, the DNC corporate elites have shown that they would rather lose elections than forego the massive funding their oligarch masters shower on them. That means that the only workable strategy to wrest power back from a GOP gone utterly, suicidally mad is to work with and assume control of the Democratic Party. Senator Sanders and the many other real progressives in the party are working to that end.

We can only stop the GOP’s lemming-like plunge to planetary destruction by working with and assuming control of the Democratic Party. The Third-Way Neoliberals in charge of the DNC today are as obsessed with war as a business model as are their GOP counterparts. They claim to believe in global warming but push for drilling, fracking, and more pipelines. That they say one thing yet do another is unsurprising as the DNC elites answer to the same greedy, sociopathic oligarchs who order the GOP to rape and pillage the bottom 90% and pass the booty on to them. The real progressives in the Democratic Party are working to take the party back from the servants of the rich and hand control to we the people.

We face several existential threats as a species and even more as a nation. Donald Trump, blinded by his greed and unaware thanks to his profound incuriosity, is hard at work making each extinction threat far worse. His value system puts short-term profits above the long term interests of people at every single turn. The DNC elites are not noticeably better.

We do not have two or three decades to build a viable third party from the ground up and stop the destruction Trump, and his GOP allies are sewing from ending life as we know it, and very possibly all human existence. By the time we built a viable third party, if nuclear holocaust, massive and growing wealth inequality, or the climate crisis have not killed us all; it will be too late to stop their progress toward the end of human existence. We MUST focus on solutions that can be put into action NOW.