The USA: An Enemy of the People

 

            My Pittsburgh friend, Marc, who works for the post office, says the postmaster general is a Trump crony. “Too bad the Dems sabotaged Bernie in 2016 or this might not have happened,” was a shared comment my Young Democrat daughter ignored. Guess which president started dismantling the US Post Office; starts with an ‘Oh’, as in “Oh how rotten American democracy has become. We are truly the enemy of the people for pointing this out, Republican and Democrat people alike.

Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre for the US Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy — a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General — had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers. Even if today (Aug.19) he backed off the demolition until after Election Day, I don’t believe it.  I am an enemy of the American people.

When the Democratic Party stops sabotaging progressive candidates, I'll stop laughing. Some think Biden in our time is better than showing the true colors of a racist, fascist, Christian oligarchy. With Clinton at his inauguration  insulting Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in his eulogy to John Lewis and explicitly thanking James Clyburn "for ending, with a stroke of his hand," the Sanders campaign, I'll take the third choice: Revolution. Trump must not go on but the best is not yet to come. Kwame Ture, in death, is still an enemy of the people.

Now, anything would be better than a dictatorship which would be harder to fight than a dysfunctional neoliberal state. I changed my driver’s license address so I can kill three birds with one stone; the third, a Trump bird. It would be nice to spend two or three weeks in Pittsburgh, voting and seeing three of my adult children, one with my two grandchildren. I would visit my youngest adult daughter in Portland, OR, before heading back to Taiwan for a two week quarantine.

If this wasn’t bad enough, Trump has threatened an executive order to end payroll tax, the tax that mostly funds Medicaid and Social Security. It is hard being a witness to a nation of frogs being slowly boiled alive. Radical friends know what is going on and what the ruling-class plan is for US citizens. One friend and I argued over when the dismantling of the dream began; was it after Eisenhower, after Kennedy was assassinated and Hoffa disappeared? Was it when after an anti-war struggle being won by the troops returning from Vietnam joining students and minority and women’s rights advocates was clamped down by Nixon’s resignation and pardon? Was it union membership plummeting on the attack, Patco de-certified and workers fired while taxes on the rich dwindled thanks to Reagan laws?

One cannot put a finger on the first case; I think the fish stinks from the head; Washington. What has been obvious to me since junior high school is still unclear; radicals are still the enemy of the people. To others, despite catastrophic indicators of imminent doom like green flesh floating in broth off the frogs’ boiling backs, it seems salvageable, but there is a clear choice to us: Either Americans fight back or exodus to save their families and themselves and fight from abroad, or simply start living a better life.

Howard Zinn might cringe but this is how it happened: The Stock Market crashed and The Great Depression started in 1929. The US government handled the Hoovervilles after WWI just as they handled the aspirations of rising unionists and victory before the First World War. The IWW was hounded, Eugene Debs was imprisoned, Big Bill Hayward arrested and sought asylum in the USSR. VP Wallace was marginalized and McCarthyism put socialism on the run again. Viet vets realized they were duped and joined the peace movement as Nixon made pals with the AFL-CIO that were in their beds, until Nixon was pardoned. Any progress made toward an equitable society squelched. Reagan nailed it in the 80's but progressives re-emerged in the 90's after Nicaragua, Granada, and El Salvador threatened fascism again. That's why they needed the benign neglect of a 911 attack to put national guard on the people's streets and 6 trillion dollars (3 from Bush, 3 from Obama) "to save our way of life" squelched any trend toward socialism. AFL-CIO unions played along giving back hard fought gains; the buy-out I took early retirement left young teachers and students unprotected, tenure-less, dumbed-down and tier 5. This controllable pandemic was left to decimate the common people once and for all and completely showed the USA's real colors since inception, as a fascist racist Christian imperialist state. More Americans realize what is going on but they are deer in headlights. The USA people are doomed. But radicals such as I are the enemy of the people.

You and I are the last generation to know the prospects of democracy. They've taken off the kid gloves. It's up to the young men and women who will spend their lifetimes suffering and insecure, increasingly in debt. My children are realists, contributing to the betterment of society, but they are not activists. It will take pitchforks and blood in the streets, fascist blood hopefully; CNN, NBC, the NY Times and Democratic Party don't care about The People. It is up to us. 

I want to see my grandchildren and my family this fall of an election year but I don't have to be there; I can vote by mail. Trump must be defeated and kept from starting a dictatorship. It is up to the Democrat Party; only they have the political power to respond and lead the charge. I'm afraid they won't; they haven't yet, in face sabotaging Bernie Sanders twice. I feel the US is doomed to racist dictatorship, its true colors. My Vietnam vet friend says only the military can stop them, but no one thinks like us. We know that the USA is the enemy of the people.