The DNC, The Mainstream Media, and the Train Wreck

I wrote this in March 2017, after the election of the latest DNC chair.

Funny how little has changed.

The DNC, The Mainstream Media, and the Train Wreck

I watched the election of the new DNC chair a few weeks ago, cringing the way you do when you see the train bearing down on the car stuck on the tracks but can’t do anything to stop it. When I finally took my hands away from my eyes I winced the way you do when you’re staring at the plume of smoke rising from the wreck. And then I watched the mainstream media cover this coronation with their expected earnest approval, and…sigh.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/tom-perez-profile/index.html

The Democratic Party has it right on any number of things. Their devotion to the truth that hatred and bigotry is wrong is commendable, and their emphatic embrace of civil liberties is righteous. They understand the importance of both healthcare and education, and that’s reassuring.

But on the matter of the economy, both the hierarchy of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media seem determined not to get it. Don’t get me wrong – I believe they want the middle class and working people of this country to be okay, just not if it involves the terrifying specter of standing up to Goldman Sachs, or any sacrifice of their own power and position. If it could just sort of happen without them having to take any real risk that’d be great, but if not, they’d rather talk about anything else. And so they do.

They talk about problems and suggest solutions that go absolutely nowhere. They point at bad things and frown and pontificate. They gabble like turkeys and cluck like chickens, and seem completely incapable of doing a single useful thing. And this was true the entire time they had maximum political power; I suppose now that they’re the minority they have an excuse, but – sigh.

And apparently they learned nothing from the election. After spending fourteen months trying to cram Hillary Clinton down the people’s throats despite the outraged protests of those who wanted real change – after blatantly eighty-sixing the one guy who was willing to take on the power structure – after being presented with incontrovertible proof that the people are sick and tired of the status quo – they select as the party’s new leader an establishment factotum, Tom Perez.

Since the election a great deal has been written and said about the future of the Democratic Party and the Left in general. There seems to be a sharp dichotomy between those who think the Party ought to move further to the Left and those who think it ought to move to the center. The Party hierarchy has predictably chosen the allegedly center route. Personally, I think neither camp is right.

The issue really isn’t further Left or center, and the very fact the choice is being parsed this way only shows how little the Party understands the people these days. (And those who believe that the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote indicates the party has some kind of mandate are deluded; her popular vote victory only indicates more people than not were frightened of Donald Trump as president.)

For forty years the people of this country have had political corruption shut them out of any real say in what actually happens in this country. They’ve seen the media substitute a kind of puppet show for the voices of real people. And they’ve seen multinational and transnational corporations vacuum up the wealth and income that was once theirs like a Hoover on steroids.

They want their government back. They want the free press back. And they want the orgy of corporate greed that has left them in constant terror of penury stopped – preferably without an orgy of ill-conceived regulations slapped together in a hurry without any real thought of their consequence, and preferably without an orgy of government spending that simply throws money at a problem (and a slew of bureaucrats and special interest groups in the bargain).

The hierarchy of the Democratic Party has zero intention of actually doing any of this, of course, and if you doubt that all you really need to listen to is Mr. Perez’ first statement as DNC chair: our first priority must be to send the message that you vote for a Democrat if you want a good job.

Note the wording: “send the message.”

Not we must create policies that deal firmly and courageously with the pattern of economic predation that is destroying the middle class. Not the well-being of the majority of the American people is more important than our own well-feathered nests. Not we are determined to root out the causes of your misery and change them.

No, it was we’re going to do what we always do: ask for your money so we can talk a good game and do absolutely nothing to fix the problem.

What the DNC really should have offered was an apology, one that would sound something like this:

We the Democratic Party wish to apologize to every working man and woman in America for abandoning you to the wolves these past forty years, for our shameful cowardice in being more interested in protecting our careers than serving you and taking on the powers that have destroyed your wealth and income. We apologize for throwing the Democratic Primary to the candidate we favored and completely ignoring your wishes as the people. And we apologize for using our chums in the media to force a choice on you that wasn’t yours.

We apologize for spending so much time sucking up to special interests and lobbyists and ignoring your problems. We apologize for selling out, again and again, to Wall Street and Greed Incorporated. We apologize for dismissing anyone who didn’t agree with us as ignorant, crazy, mean, or unenlightened. We apologize for thinking that talking is a substitute for doing.

We apologize for all the harm we have done you by sitting in our little self-satisfied circle and ignoring your needs, and we swear to you from this moment on you come first, not us. We swear we will fight with matchless courage against any power that seeks to harm you, that we will do, not simply talk, and that from this day forward we will make in action the well-being of the common people our first and main priority.

Every night I go to sleep and dream I wake to that. Were that it were so, I could stop cringing at the wreck.

Memorial Day

Note: I wrote this twenty years or so ago.

Today is Memorial Day. Today I’ll wake up my son and explain to him that today is a day we honor those who have given their lives for this country. He’ll notice a lot of barbecues and flags and solemn ceremonies on TV. He’ll probably think the shiny medals on the uniforms of those shown are neat. He’s three.

When he’s older I’ll explain to him that the day is to honor those who fought and died in wars to defend this country. I’ll explain they took a simple oath: to defend the United States of America and its constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. And that today we honor those who died in the process.

Then I’ll explain to him what that really means.

I’ll explain to him that they died falling from airplanes, burning alive, so that I have the right to sit down at this word processor and write about it when I think the House Majority Leader is a jackass. And that no one will come to arrest me for it.

I’ll explain to him that they died in mud-filled pits, slowly watching their blood seep out onto other corpses, so that I have the right to light Sabbath candles on Friday night and pray in Hebrew. Or to go out and say a prayer to the Goddess under the full moon. Or to put a Zen pine garden in my back yard. Or to wear a cross around my neck. Or to bow and pray facing Mecca. Or to believe in no god at all.

I’ll explain to him that they died blown to pieces by mines so that his father and I need not fear being rounded up and burned alive in concentration camps because of our bloodlines.

I’ll explain to him that they drowned amid the burning wreckage of a torpedoed battleship some barren place in the Pacific so that that when I walk down the street or sit in my house, no one can barge in and demand to plow through and confiscate my things unless a judge decides there is actual, tangible evidence I’m hiding something used in a crime.

I’ll explain to him that they died choking on mustard gas, their skin on fire, so that if I ever am accused of a crime, I will be assumed innocent until proven guilty, and that I have the right to defend myself with the help of a lawyer (a free one if I don’t have the money to pay for one), to be judged by a jury of regular men and women, and to appeal a conviction if I feel anything improper or illegal was done.

I’ll explain to him that they were starved to death as prisoners of war and buried in unmarked graves in distant lands so that I have the right to shout at the top of my lungs when I think our system is being elitist, or racist, or just plain stupid. I have the right to work for, even demand, change. Without fear of being disappeared. Or beheaded. Or sent to the Gulag.

I’ll explain that they died in agony knowing that their sacrifice held back the tyrant who let women die from uterine cancer rather than be treated by a male doctor. Or the dictator who decreed that each couple could bear only one child. Or the all-powerful organization of any kind that put heretics to the rack. Or the madman who wants to blow up our schoolchildren because we have designer jeans, MTV, cell phones, and all the other accoutrements of Satan.

And I’ll explain to him that many, possibly even most of them, had very different political views than mine. Many of them wouldn’t have thought my decision to bear a child without marrying was a sound idea. They died, however, to keep anyone from stoning me to death for doing it. Many of them wouldn’t have agreed with my idea that love between two women is just as valid as love between a man and a woman. They died, however, to see to it that those of us who feel that way don’t have to wear a purple triangle when we go out in public. Many of them wouldn’t have liked the songs I sing or the poems I write very much. They would have considered them awfully radical. They were, however, willing to die to defend my right to write them.

I’m not a “hawk.” I’m not an innocent, either. I think, as many people these days do, that there’s too much “collateral damage” in warfare. But then again, I’ve never been pinned down on the outskirts of a remote desert outpost facing villagers, some of them as young as ten, armed with hand grenades and AK-47s. And I think that sometimes the powers that be at the Pentagon engage in actions that are designed more to secure oil rights or commercial rights than human rights. But then again, I wonder how many people would freeze to death or starve without oil and commerce. I think that such decisions must be hellish to make, and I really do believe that the generals calling the shots are trying to what is best for all of us, and if they falter sometimes, I like to remember that they are only human, trying to protect their country. And as for the soldiers they command — they go to every corner of the world for us, to freezing, shelterless tundras, hostile, barren deserts, and war zones where bullets and land mines are a constant reality, eating K-rations my cat wouldn’t touch, shivering around campfires, sweltering in tanks, swarmed by mosquitoes and ticks, not showering for days on end, for us. They keep endless, boring, twelve-hour vigils doing nothing but staying alert and waiting for the enemy to strike. They make forays into jungles full of trees peppered with snipers. They’ve been blinded and burned by the Kuwaiti sun, had their legs and arms blown off in mine fields, walked into net traps rigged with hand grenades, been crushed by shoulder-to-air missiles, been infected with incurable diseases by chemicals sprayed on them — for us. They enter caves filled with rattlesnakes, plastique bombs, scorpions, and razor wire. They fly safety patrols over areas knowing hostile governments have offered citizens thousands of dollars for shooting them down and capturing them. They keep radio silence in subs in hostile waters, knowing that even if they’re in trouble, they’ll have to die slowly and terribly in those metal cans rather than be captured by the enemy. If they are captured, their fingernails will be pulled out with pliers. Their fingers will be sadistically broken. They’ll be burned with cigarettes. Sometimes their testicles will be burned with electrical wire. And still they won’t talk, because giving up information means Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden or some other tyrant-or-the-week will be one step closer to vaporizing San Francisco, or poisoning New York City, or leveling Washington D.C. They aren’t paid very much to do all this, by the way. The go from post to post, their families living in plain, small, functional base housing, their spouses and children uprooted constantly to begin a new life in yet another strange base town. They do all this, uncomplaining, for us.

And so I will explain to my son that the rights we take for granted every day — to watch the TV shows we like, say what we think, wear what we like, form activist groups we believe in, worship as we please, choose our occupations, decide where we live, travel where we like, and be who we are — were paid for in blood, by men and women who died in terror and terrible suffering, and continue to fight in hellish conditions, because the world is full of people who would gladly and joyfully take those rights from us.

And I will explain to him that that is what this day is for — to be grateful to and honor those who gave and are giving the most anyone can give, their very life, for you and me.

TELL TUCSON ELECTRIC POWER TO STOP ITS PLAN TO HARM HUNDREDS OF ELDERLY AND DISABLED TUCSONANS

Please check on your elderly and disabled neighbors during the next several weeks, as many of them are about to have their power disconnected by Tucson Electric Power and are likely to experience potentially life-threatening health issues. 

Tucson Electric Power is sending out disconnect notices that give the elderly and disabled only seven days to come up with hundreds of dollars or have their power cut.

The normal notice a customer is given before a service disconnect is 21-28 days.  However, in the current rising and dangerous heat, Tucson Electric Power is suddenly giving customers seven days to pay the bill in full – or suffer injury regardless of their medical situation, regardless of whether or not they risk severe injury from the heat, regardless of any medical form they fill out.

This means in the next three weeks you can expect the emergency rooms of Tucson and its outliers to begin filling up with elderly and disabled people suffering from heat-related injuries, courtesy of Tucson Electric Power and its parent company Fortis.

If you pay taxes in many cases you’ll be paying for these hospital visits, and if you pay for insurance it’ll go on that bill, again, courtesy of Tucson Electric Power.

Why?

I am told by two sources that a meeting took place in which Tucson Electric Power executives calculated how many fees for reconnection they could collect from local emergency charity organizations and the government by giving customers a week or less to come up with hundreds of dollars, said charitable organizations and the government being the ones who pay the enormous reconnect fees when the poor have their power cut.  Never mind that these organizations are already stretched to the limit trying to feed and house the ever-growing number of poor and dispossessed.

And the fastest-growing segment of the newly poor and homeless in this country is people who have worked hard all their lives teaching school, building our roads, driving groceries to the market and raising families, only to find themselves dispossessed from their homes by crooked speculators and priced out of even basic food by more crooked speculators, while our elected officials close their eyes and then suck up to the speculators.

These people – retired schoolteachers already begging for groceries at the food bank, eighty-year-old grandfathers struggling to pay for medicine – are about to be sent to the emergency room by Tucson Electric Power, again, as I am told, as part of a scheme to gin up reconnection fees.

If you are in dire straits and you call Tucson Electric Power and beg them not to disconnect your power because you or a family member will be injured, Tucson Electric Power will do two things:  direct you to a list of local charitable and government organizations that they know have not had funds to help since January, and (if you have a medical condition – heart or stroke risk from excessive heat, need for refrigerated insulin, autoimmune-suppressed while undergoing chemotherapy, etc.) they will send you a form for your doctor to fill out that Tucson Electric Power itself says will not keep them from disconnecting your power and sending you to the hospital.

To repeat:  Tucson Electric Power is sending hundreds of elderly and disabled Tucsonans disconnect notices that give them only seven days – not the usual twenty-one to twenty-eight – to come up with hundreds of dollars or have their power disconnected in 90+ degree heat, no extensions granted if your account is more than sixty days due.

Tucson Electric Power is then directing those in need to organizations that they know have no funds to help and haven’t for months, and telling those with medical situations to fill out a form that will not protect them from harm.

So, for the eighty-year-old woman cowering in her trailer, waiting for the power to be cut and the temperature to rise above 100˚ because Tucson Electric Power gave her seven days to come up with 500$ or suffer heatstroke: 

Please call Tucson Electric Power at (520)623-7711 or email Tucson Electric Power at tepcustomercare@tep,com  and tell them to protect Tucson’s most vulnerable citizens from harm.

For the mother battling cancer who’s cringing, waiting for the power to be cut and all the food she and her children have to spoil in the heat: 

Please call the Arizona Corporation Commission at  (602) 542-3026 or 1-(800) 345-5819, or email them at answers@azcc.gov and tell them not to let Tucson Electric Power do this.

For the rape survivor or wounded warrior with PTSD who’s about to have the lights shut off and her terror and panic level to go through the roof: 

Please call or email any or all of your legislators – you can find your state legislators here –

https://www.azleg.gov/memberroster

and tell them not to let Tucson Electric Power traumatize those who are already recovering from trauma.

For the mother of the autistic child who’s about to experience emotional trauma and self-injure because there’s no light and they can’t process that:

Please call or email Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and the Tucson City Council at mayor.romero@tucsonaz.gov or 520-791-4201 and tell them to protect disabled children.

And for the ever-growing number of hungry in Tucson who are about to lose all the food in their freezer or refrigerator – at a time when food prices are still rising and food banks are overwhelmed:

Please call or email Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs at engage@az.gov or 602-542- 4331 and tell her not to let this happen to thousands of elderly and disabled Arizonans.

Please protect Tucson’s most vulnerable citizens from harm by Tucson Electric Power and its parent company Fortis.

Thank you.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

If you’re breathing, be thankful.

If you have turkey, be thankful.

If you can see, and hear, and smell and taste and touch, be thankful.

If you love anyone – anyone at all – be thankful.

If anyone loves you – anyone at all – be thankful.

As to everything else?  Everything that’s broken or messed up and that you can’t be grateful for, that you want to change?

Be grateful that you live in a country that gives you the freedom and right and responsibility to change it.

Be grateful to all those who brought you those rights and freedoms and responsibilities.

Now go fix what’s wrong and bless what’s right and be thankful that you can.

God bless America, and Happy Thanksgiving!