Go Bernie!

8000+ people waiting hours to see Bernie/ Missoula Montana/ May 11, 2016

Here's a little paragraph I wrote to the Bernie website I've been contributing to this last year ($27 a shot) when it asked me why I support Bernie. I don't suppose anyone will really read it there, so I thought I'd reprint it here and let five or ten other people see what they think. Ah, the internet! I suppose I should thank Al Gore for all these joys at my fingertips, but I'm still mad at him for not fighting harder the last time the media stole a presidential election. The bastards….

It's hard to express in this somewhat impersonal format how deeply I respect Bernie's efforts on our behalf. Since Reagan, most politicians bow out or wimp out long before the job is done, but Bernie is clearly the politician so many of us hope will be the prototype of the future. My main income these days is Social Security, and I figure if my children are going to have that program when they get to be my age Bernie's campaign is an excellent investment of a couple month's worth of mine now. Maybe the best thing about his (our) campaign is that he woke up so many people—especially the young--to the corporatist nature of the entrenched party and media. The latest machinations and collusions of the corporatists and the media in undermining our democratic process in the June 7 primaries—particularly in California--will never quit smelling like the rotten elk carcass in the hot sun that it is. This brand of open-air, stinking collusion between cozy elites has certainly happened before (the 2000 Bush vs Gore coup for instance) But thanks to Bernie we are finally being given a big enough voice to (maybe) shout them down this time. Maybe not yet, but the movement is building. In fact I feel it’s just the beginning and it’s entirely exciting. What choice do Us The People have but to be “clear-eyed” optimists?

Sincere thanks and…Go Bernie!

I recommend sending Bernie  donations as long as he asks for them. His donation site has about 20 progressive candidates that you can also help out with a credit card number and a push of a button. It's not the hardest thing we'll have to do in the near future, certainly not the only thing. But you can count on Bernie that every dollar you spend now is a real-time investment in your kids' and our Earth's future.

 DireWolf says:

 Get off your butts 

Don't give up 

And give til it hurts

Or your kids'll end up in a tar pit

And then go extinct.

Don't tell me I don't know!!

https://go.berniesanders.com   

“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things.”

“I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas kills one”

A Note to Montana Democrats

All of us in rural Montana who have organized meetings and strategy sessions around issues to the left of Attila the Wall Street Speculator know the feeling when we look around the room and calculate the average age. It’s usually around 60, isn’t it?

That’s why a now-common political slur is annoying me so greatly. I won’t footnote the year’s worth of “liberal” talking heads who’ve repeated it in one form or another, so I’ll just distill down to its simple essence:

People are pissed because the Wall Street crooks got away with their heist, so they’re supporting “extreme” protest candidates like Trump and Sanders.

It’s not that “old” progressives like myself are thin-skinned about such gratuitous dismissals coming from unexpected places. Remember Obama’s mantra “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” when he reneged on his campaign promise for a “public option”, when majorities of Montanans were showing up at Baucus’ dog-and-pony shows demanding healthcare reform not health insurance reform and the Democratic elites responded by substituting one Rube-Goldberg-get-rich-quick scheme for the already-rich with another? Cutting off the legs of your base after you get their votes with the rallying cry of “what choice do they have!” has been common scheme for Democrats in power for a long, long time. So “old” progressives like myself aren’t surprised with backhanded dismissals from “the center” when we are no longer seen as useful. We’re used to it. But guess what? All those young people whom Bernie has finally engaged, whom the Democratic Party needs so desperately to remain a viable movement as well as a party, aren’t.

This election cycle is, if it’s nothing else, different, and Montana Democrats are in a uniquely favored position to appreciate that difference. The divide between those who believe that the Edge of the World where dinosaurs live with humans is just south of Darby and those who don’t believe that is as self-evident as whether your septic juices flow into the Pacific or the Atlantic. So let’s take a minute and examine this canard that those who believe a better world than incremental slides toward dystopia is possible and those who believe in the Edge of the World are peas from the same “protest-vote” pod. Ready? Go…

            …There, that didn’t take long, did it? Now let’s consider what will happen to the Democratic Party if their leaders and activists stick to and act on such mind-numbingly-incorrect analyses.

            Rudely dismissing a whole generation of young people so desperately needed for so very long in every fight Democrats claim as theirs is explicitly self-destructive. For one thing, once they’re dismissed as starry-eyed, unrealistic Trumpians of the Left, you can bet they’ll disappear, and you can talk until you’re blue in the face about how they should show up and vote for Hillary anyway, but you know a lot of them won’t, and for good reason. Worse, they won’t show up to vote for the other progressive politicians on the ticket needed to really change the chemistry in Congress and the state legislatures, the ones who’ll do the heavy lifting of taking on Wall Street, the war machine, college debt, grade-school funding, the heathcare crisis. It won’t matter then, whether their Chosen One gets coronated or not. We’ll be in same politically-dysfunctional mess we’re in now for another four, or eight more years.

Worst of all in the opinion of a progressive who’s been active in one of our small, rural towns for many years: the saddest effect of condescendingly dismissing smart young people whose political dander is finally up is that when we take stock of our tiny local progressive “activist” lists in a few years, the average age will be 70.

News Flash

Note: to anyone still visiting this page since my last post, I should explain that I have been directing all of my working time on a book and have obviously been neglecting this site. Oh, well, if apologies are necessary, I do, although I’m not sure what the proper protocol for such things in our digital age are, or if such protocols even exist. But there you have it: an explanation, and a sincere thank-you for visiting this page!

Here’s a news flash. A group of American scientists have just published a study called “Functional mismatch in a bumble bee pollination mutualism under climate change”[i]

A very brief synopsis of the study is that in the last 40 years high-altitude bumblebees that used to specialize in pollinating deep-corolla flowers have evolved shorter tongues in order to become less specialized. That’s apparently because plant species are generally colonizing higher altitudes, the higher altitudes warming relatively faster than the lower ones, and so the flower mix available to the bumblebees is changing to shorter-corolla ones. In the words of the scientists:

“We see broader bumblebee foraging niches, immigration by short-tongued bumblebees, and shorter tongue length within resident bee populations as floral resources have dwindled,” and “In remote mountain habitats—largely isolated from habitat destruction, toxins, and pathogens—evolution is helping wild bees keep pace with climate change.”

So, at least in the protected high-altitude areas the scientists studied, the bumblebees have had a chance to evolve to meet the challenges of a warming climate. The flowers? I’d guess that maybe the long-corolla ones the bumblebees favored will develop shorter tubes, or maybe they’ll slowly get crowded out by their cousins moving in from below. If they do survive, the relationship between the flowers and the bumblebees will be forever changed, which is kind of like a death in the family, or a divorce, and is sad enough. In either case, in the face of what we are doing to their planet, species still have their best chances in the last-remaining protected habitats.

Furthermore, this new knowledge was essentially the result of 40 years of data collection and study, and the data is just now being observed, understood and published. What else is out there that we don’t know about?

Wilderness is “so sixties”? I don’t think so.

(Common Dreams has a good short article on this study[ii])

---

[i] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6255/1541

[ii] http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/04/warmer-winters-slow-growth-forest-giants

Stand and Fight

 “Think of this as an endless war,” Rick Berman told a roomful of gas and oil executives a few months before yesterday’s scorched-earth elections. “You can either win ugly or lose pretty.”

We suspect the Sons of A.L.E.C.[i] say such things to each other when they don’t think anyone’s listening, but we shouldn’t be surprised when a bit of the green zombie fluid that passes for blood in these creatures oozes through for us to gawk at. Snake oil is as American as P.T. Barnum and J.P. Morgan. In fact it's a hybrid of the two and has been around since at least as long as those rich, dead, white guys walked the Earth. 

Rick Berman, a Big Oil lobbyist, made the above comments while giving a pep talk about the infinite, patronizing wisdom of Big Oil’s handful of billionaires using dark money to throw elections. Oddly, his message was also meant to comfort the consciences of some of these extremely rich energy elites, some of whom apparently were feeling a bit queezy about participating in such a massively cynical and destructive con scheme as buying politicians for the sake of denying Global Warming. Some of these guys have kids, after all. To these executives whose souls haven’t yet been ossified in some tar pit, Berman’s message was: Not to worry!! Now that the Supreme Court has been firmly deep-pocketed by your boss, the Beast, you executives can relax. You, like the courtiers of King Louis the 16^th, no longer need any stinking public opinions. Winning, as in plutocracy, is the only game in town now. Ask any rich football player. With enough money, you can beat your wife and beat the rap. Ask Louis the 16^th. It’s just business.

Obviously their hubris will kill them, and we should all hope for their speedy and painful end. But if we don’t stand up to the gangrenous challenge tossed our way in the form of yesterday’s stolen elections and fight, it’ll kill us, too. We shouldn’t be surprised.

The only reason we know about Berman’s pep talk to these captains of Big Oil’s Scum Fleet is because one of those captains allowed his guilt to get the better of him and he leaked the contents of Berman’s message to the “liberal” press (full transcript) who dutifully buried it. Heard of Rick Berman? Probably not. Case closed, but the scum still leaves a sheen on the water that no one, not even the professional deniers, try to deny anymore.

If any American to the left of Attila had any doubts before yesterday’s elections that our country is being held hostage by filthy-rich sociopaths and downright psychopathic corpo-terrorists enabled by their bigoted, idiotic teabag “electorate”, these “election” results should disabuse them of their fantasies.

We have no democracy left in our elections. They have been sold to the highest bidder. Until we can effectively kill the flesh-eating zombie the corporate Supreme Court unleashed upon us—the Supreme Court that opines that zombie drool (and money) is speech—this will not only remain the case, but we will rot in our body politic until we match the foul appearance of its murderer.

This does not mean we are without democracy. It means that, notwithstanding notable and heartening exceptions, by and large Democracy does not reside in elections anymore. It lies in direct action. For the next couple of years, putting your bodies on the line for the sake of what you believe in and for what you hope your children will believe in is your vote.

Direct action does not mean violence. It does not mean the gunnut-style threat of violence. It means nonviolent civil disobedience. Placing your bodies, en masse, in front of the coal trains, the fracking rigs, the limosines carrying the zombie fodder to their next corporate feel-good power point seminar. It means placing yourself in the position of surviving Hurricane Katrina--that perfect metaphor of what these corpo-terrorists would like to do to all of us if given half the chance--and asking yourself “where can I be most useful?” It means saving lives. It means being creative. It means being brave, being very brave.

Direct action does not mean not voting. If boycotting elections to prove a point were going to work it surely would have by now. God knows we’ve given that approach plenty of chances. Progressive politics are our collective statement that we believe in Democracy and in civil society and that, as soon as we purge their filthy money out of our elections, we will have both. Until that happens, don’t look at rigged elections as the path to power. Look at them as statements. They know that we’re still out here and onto them, they know we're the majority and they fear us. Why else do they have zombie pep rallies with the likes of high-paid shills like Berman if they didn’t? Why else would one of those corporate elites have leaked his speech? They won't admit it but their actions, as always, belie their hearts, such as hearts are in their kind. 

Look at it this way. Capitalism, as these rich wingos define it, is dead. It's continued destructive existence can therefore only mean that the creatures who still adhere to it are flesh-eating zombies. That this is extremely problematic only clinches my point, because it's a fact that there’s nothing more fun than putting fear in the heart of a flesh-eating zombie.  Ask any Hollywood movie mogul. Zombies are, at best, conflicted beings and they wriggle so satisfyingly when they're distressed. Remember: we are the majority. They know that and are confused. They're wriggling. It's a fact. I rest my case.

There are those in America who don’t give a second’s worth of consideration as to whether snake oil is actually good for you or not. They gulp it right down because that’s what they’ve always done and because that’s what their momma and their daddy have always done and if it’s good enough for them and…etc. They are the minority. On the other hand, if you are the kind of American who has been around since long before the robber barons and their public relations scumbags tried to sell you the lie that you are not the majority, the kind of American who actually does place high value on freedom and democracy and who will stand and fight for those values, you should first of all be angry at this, another stolen election. You should be very angry. And then you should get ready to vote with your body, your direct action. Now is the time if there ever was one. There are plenty of opportunities. Look for them. Be creative. 

We haven't lost. Stand and fight.

---

[i] http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed