AND THE BULLYING GOES ON!

By Ruth A. Sheets

Recently, I read a piece online about Republican bullying.  I have considered this theme in the past, but still, few in power have been willing to do anything to stop the Republican attempts to bully our government, its officials, and anyone in the way, and their Project 2025 is a 900+-page guide to bullying the American people. 

I like the bullying analogy because it certainly feels like we all are being bullied by a group of people in power and/or with a whole lot of money, through the various media.  While addressing us,  they pretend to be our friends, to be working for us, to give us just what we want, while having no intention of taking us into account at all.

In addition to their media and social media presence, The bullies show up at rallies, gatherings of groups of the discontented, and wherever they can tap into the frustration people are feeling and redirect those negative feelings onto groups the bully does not like:  LGBTQ+ persons, women, teens, people of color, unions, teachers, etc.  The bullies select those seen as weak and ripe for attack, then bully their friends in power into passing laws that will harm those people.

There are numerous political bullies active in the United States today, mostly, but not entirely white men.  Among the most active: 

-             the super-rich like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, and many others who bully through their massive donations to political dark money groups and campaigns for candidates who are only running on the Republican ticket because they are easily manipulated, inexperienced, and often ignorant of what it means to serve in the role they are seeking (or rather to serve at all – they prefer to be served).  I guess they are after the power and money the job provides, not salary, of course, but the prominence, insider trading, and other  “perks” that will come their way (plus jobs with hedge funds and other huge money-making operations) when they leave office. 

-             Then there are the Supreme Court conservative6, the “cons.”  They need to be rightly called the bullies they are.  They hide behind something they and their predecessor, Justice Scalia called “originalism.”  It is nonsense, and just a way to bully the American people into believing the only way to understand Supreme Court rulings is to see the issue as the founders would have 237 years ago.  They make up things as they go along, cite 17th century witch-hunters and consider a 2,000 year old possible confrontation between Jesus and Roman Governor Pilate to justify their warped rulings against women’s right to bodily autonomy, and Trump’s right to immunity for whatever he does that the SC 6 agree is “official.”  The bullying in this case is near absolute because We the People have no say related to 6 justices nominated by Republican presidents for specific religious purposes that are not about the American people, probably their “salvation” or something.  

-             There are the scared mostly old white men in red state legislatures who choose to take away the rights of citizens of the state, to please themselves or someone else.  Like the Supreme 6, they make it up as they go along or find themselves bowing to their governor or Donald Trump, and not to the citizens who employ them.

-             Religious bullies have raised their heads trying to get privileges for their religious entity over others in a nation that can have no established religion, NONE!  They tell vulnerable Christians that Donald Trump is a messenger from god so they must support him and whatever he does because it is god’s will (then donate, of course).   Utter nonsense!

 

For the sake of all of us, these bullies need to be stopped.  Together, we could stand up and figure out who needs a moderate "punch in the nose" to make them stop bullying. That might include:

-             a serious "luck tax" on the very rich, say, with an income from all sources of over $3 million a year, Hmmm, 10%

-             pass 18-year term limits on SC justices as well as a strict code of ethics supervised by an independent board with real consequences, (, and expand the SC to cover all 13 district courts.

-             vote out those old state legislature  and governor white bullies and send them home to retire.

-             Remove tax-exempt status from churches that specifically promote the candidacy of people in particular political parties.

-             Begin regulating social media and heavily fining the owners and CEOs that use harmful deep fakes and destructive posts as reported by the media users and independent reviewers.   

-             Demand more of our mainstream media, better coverage of both campaigns, honesty when dealing with candidates who are not functioning, not just in one party, in short understand that their idea of “fair and balances” may be neither depending how it is covered.

-             We can stop the bullying and I believe Harris and Walz can get the process started or rather continue what has been attempted in the past 3 years or so. The bullying must stop!  We the People must demand it!  We do that at the ballot box in November.  Tell the world we will not be bullied anymore by a pack of unscrupulous actors who care nothing for anyone but their votes, as Trump told his followers.  The bullying will not stop by itself because the bullies benefit financially and politically from it, so it’s up to us.

WE’RE NOT GOING BACK

By Ruth A. Sheets

This week was the quadrennial Democratic Convention.  The Republican affair was last month, and there was no comparison of them that would be helpful because the Democrats overwhelmed anything the Republicans tried to do for their pathetic, though still popular candidate. 

I had listened to parts of conventions as early as 1964.  That year, my dad attended the convention in Atlantic City with his union and encouraged us to listen to the speeches.  I can’t remember if I heard Fanny Lou Hamer’s speech then or just replayed in the future, but I knew about it.  My dad told us he was impressed with her speech and her courage.  He also heard Andrew Young, another civil rights worker and told us he would be a great President of the United States.  Dad was very political, but not outwardly interested in the Civil Rights Movement.  I think his attending that convention changed his perspective on that. 

The 1968 Convention was plagued with police violence in Chicago.  I admit It brought back memories of 1968 when I learned the 2024 Convention would be held in Chicago.  Police have learned a lot in 56 years and they proved it in their dealings with protesters this year.  Even though I heard some of the speeches and roll call back then, I remember none of it, just the police violence.

In 1972 I was working at a residential summer camp for the children of working-class families.  I was a counselor for 3^rd and 4^th graders during the day and 3-5 year-olds at night.  By the time the Democratic convention came on each night that week, I was exhausted, but listened to the speeches until I finally fell asleep around midnight.  I loved the diversity of the speakers, the ideas they were putting forward for getting us out of Vietnam and ending racism and sexism.  I really liked George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton, and wanted them to take Nixon out of office.  As we know, Eagleton was replaced on the ticket due to past mental health issues, Nixon won by a landslide.  Watergate was only a blip that a small number of us thought could be a problem, a quick news item, and two years and about a month later, Nixon would resign, most of which overshadowed memories of the convention.

I listened to parts of the conventions after that but only in passing.  I always tried to hear the nominating and acceptance speeches for the nominees.  Most were good:  Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Obama (twice), and Hillary Clinton.  Biden’s speech 4 years ago was just what we all needed to hear as we were faced with COVID, misinformation from the Right, and a flagging economy, none of which Trump and friends had any clue how to deal with.  I listened to most of the 2016 Convention because I really liked Clinton and hoped she would be elected over Trump, a man who had no experience, no awareness, few skills, if any, and a lot of lies that regularly poured out unchecked from his mouth during rallies and interviews.  There was enthusiasm for Clinton, but  also a lot of conflict from various branches of the Democratic Party.  Those branches had the right to have their say, but that made the convention disjointed and the Convention ended with a weak party that couldn’t get motivated the way it needed to be to win in the electoral college, that racist institution designed to negate people’s votes.  We know how that election turned out too.

The 2024 Democratic Convention was very different from those in the past, even before it began.  There was a lot of excitement for it.  The nominees were not nominees a month before the  Convention, but one would never know it from the way they were greeted by the delegates and guests.  The speeches were impressive and included a wide variety of people and perspectives, not one of the speeches a dud.

Those previous conventions were interesting, but not like this one.  Maybe it is the desperation Democrats are feeling as they attempt to challenge a man who has lots of billionaire support, lots of media coverage, a ghastly Project 2025-inspired Agenda 47 for their leader Trump who has nothing to offer but weird statements about how he is more attractive than Kamala Harris, something about the “late great Hanibal Lecter,” and an inability to focus on anything but the usual insults, lies, and fantasies.  The Democratic Convention focused some on Trump’s inadequacy and a bit about his deterioration, but mostly showed how poorly Trump compares to Harris.

The phrase most often used by the delegates as well as the speakers was “we’re not going back.”  I think it’s a good slogan because thinking back over the years and conventions, I don’t want to go back to any of those times.  They also yelled, “Freedom and the Future.”  I like that too.  So, the Democratic Convention of 2024 is over and as Michele Obama commanded us, “do something!”  She got it right and it is time to fight for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for the future and “when we fight, we win.” 

PRESIDENT BIDEN, A TERRIFIC LEGACY AND HE ISN’T DONE YET!

By Ruth A. Sheets

Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and retired Professor at Berkeley wrote a piece today on Substack, appreciating President Joe Biden’s contributions to our nation.  The National Democratic Convention tonight is set to honor Biden for the many things Biden and his team have done so far to improve life for the people of this nation.  Prof. Reich suggests the greatest of these is to reverse the economic perspective from a Reaganomics, “trickle-down” approach where the top gets everything with the hope/possible expectation that some would trickle-down to the workers.  That economics approach was and continues to be a disaster, leaving workers to struggle despite working more productively and for more hours and the guys (mostly white men) at the top raking in the bucks by the billions.  

President Biden and his team are working toward something more equitable and reasonable:  living wages;  CEOs  earning a few tens of times more than the average worker rather than hundreds of times more; workers having the right to form or join unions and stand together for better pay and safer working conditions.  Their vision is more like what Franklin Roosevelt employed to bring us out of the Great Depression.

Despite what Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers would claim, Biden’s economic paradigm is not “big government” or socialism (although, the Project 2025ers don’t really understand what either of those are and in their lack of understanding and allegiance to corporate wealth, are bamboozling the American people).  Biden and his team have been working on a kind of “democratic capitalism” where government organizes the market for the common good, not just for the guys at the top.  FDR tried to stop the “looting of America” that Wall Street was involved in which led to the 1929 crash.  FDR’s actions are a model for Biden and his administration.

Professor Reich says that after FDR,

“Subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations enlarged and extended democratic capitalism. Wall Street was regulated, as were television networks, airlines, railroads, and other common carriers. CEO pay was modest. Taxes on the highest earners financed public investments in infrastructure (such as the national highway system) and higher education.

America’s postwar industrial policy spurred innovation. The Department of Defense and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration developed satellite communications, container ships, and the internet. The National Institutes of Health did trailblazing basic research in biochemistry, DNA, and infectious diseases.  Public spending rose during economic downturns to encourage hiring. Antitrust enforcers broke up AT&T and other monopolies. Small businesses were protected from giant chain stores. Labor unions thrived. By the 1960s, a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Large corporations sought to be responsive to all their stakeholders.”

That all changed with Reaganomics.

Biden has been underestimated because he does a lot of his work in collaboration with others and behind the scenes. He is a strong negotiator who does not make those he is negotiating with feel small or unimportant. People would learn a lot by paying attention to what Biden does and has done, something our media didn't see fit to do throughout most of Biden's administration. President Biden incorporated as many voices in a discussion as possible, including his Vice President and cabinet members. One thing of many that Biden learned from his background is that no organization can run well if only those at the top are heard and compensated. It has only happened that way in this country because We the People have allowed our representatives to ignore the workers and to keep bailing out the bad actors whose top guys care only for the money and power they can accumulate, their addiction.  Our various media have encouraged the American people to remain ignorant of what is really going on and its impacts.  For at least some of our media it has helped those in power to do what they can for the very rich, their donors.  Biden’s team wants to curb this brand of economics for something far more fair.  He notes we have the tools to do it, now it’s the will to do it we need. 

An important characteristic that people tend to ignore is that  President Biden learns as he goes along.  He makes mistakes, then, actually works to fix or make up for them as he has after the Clarence Thomas hearing when he admits he was not fair in his questioning of Anita Hill.   also unlike most people who have power, he has shown he can pass it on when the need arises.  There are too many in power who can’t do that.

At 6 months left in office, I was wondering what Biden would accomplish, well he is continuing to do a lot including a "prisoner" swap with Russia, and will hopefully keep steering us toward a better, more reasonable economy where accountability, responsibility, and the common good are at the forefront of what corporations do and what the American people expect. Go Biden, Harris and the crew!

A DOSE OF REALITY

By Ruth A. Sheets

Our Supreme Court conservatives like to pretend they are something they call, “originalists,” meaning they can somehow, read the minds and intentions of the founders, writers of our Constitution.  It is clear they can’t, but they do seem, along with the Trump campaign to want to drag us back to that time.  I keep reading that people actually lived a long time back then, if they survived childhood, pregnancy and child birth, and the diseases that plagued people around the world.  I suspect it was not as many as those writers would like us to believe.  However, clearly enough people survived to reproduce in numbers high enough to keep our species growing in number.  I get it that there are romantic ideas of what life was like237 years ago or so, but to want to live back then, not on your life, and that spoken by a woman who wanted to live at the time of our American Revolution when I was a 10–14-year-old. 

I believe the life-expectancy at the end of the 18th Century was about 47 years.  As mentioned above, many did live longer but a large number of children died before age 5 and in some places, around 1 in 10 women died in childbirth, and then there are the diseases that regularly killed or disabled people.  Why would anyone want to live back then, even in spirit.  The thought patterns of people living in such conditions with such challenges would not be the same as ours.  We can translate their writings into something comprehensible today, but to imagine we can interpret our world in the same way the founders did theirs is nonsense!

Therefore, it really is disturbing that a bunch of middle-aged and old white guys want to drag us back into the past. I think they have no clue, but because they have so much money, they have made up a pretend golden age that will let them have all the things they want while everyone else is left hanging and clawing for something in survival mode.

Consider that until rather recently:

we didn't have cancer drugs, but there was cancer.

We didn't have high blood pressure medicine, but there was high blood pressure.

We didn’t have manufactured insulin, but there was diabetes.

we did have abortion, but it was often deadly.

We didn’t have antibiotics, but there was infection.

We didn’t have accurate weather prediction, but there were tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, and the rest.

We didn’t have vaccines, but we had deadly viral diseases like small pox, polio, and measles.

We didn’t have phones, cables, planes, satellites, but there was long-distance communication, very slow and problematic.

A lot of those guys wanting to drag us back into the past are on advanced medications including cancer drugs, antibiotics, and use vaccines. They also depend on their cell phones for communication and the US Weather Service to make travel plans and protect their homes.  I think that when a collection of privileged people gets together and discuss what they want the nation to be like, they start heading down that old rabbit hole of illusion that ignores reality, putting center stage only what they want and need.  somehow acting like the rest of us don’t exist or they put us in our place, inferior to themselves, of course. We scare the hell out of them, so they want to be sure we have no or limited power.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been using phrases like “forward” and “we won’t go back” to try to counter some of this Republican fake nostalgia.  They believe that if the folks who are not rich, white, pseudo-christian, "straight" men would stand together, we could forcefully inform those guys we are not going back and that we are not inferior or superior, but at the same level as they are 

That understanding would be hard for those guys because they have been told most of their lives that they are better than everyone else and that is why they are rich, successful, and in power.  Their families, teachers, friends, universities neglected to inform them that most of what they have has come from privilege, family wealth and genetics, some talent, but mostly luck, a dose of reality they desperately need. 

Maybe, our task as fellow Americans is to enlighten them.  It might help them to notice the rest of us for a change and that we are not their pawns. And, once we have informed them, we could find ways to help them kick their addiction to money and power, probably the most powerful addiction out here. 

So, Harris and Walz, keep sowing the truth.  Keep looking to the future, a better future where the powerful are set down a few pegs and the rest of us are heard.  It could happen, and at the polls, we can vote to make it so! 

 

BOTH SIDESISM NOW

By Ruth A. Sheets

Republicans, trying to pretend they are in some way moderate have a technique that has been gaining ground for a while.  I think of it as “both sidesism.”  It usually appears in lines like “well, you know they all do it” or “politicians are all alike.” Or “both sides are trying to shove their preferred social values down each other’s throats” and other such statements.  If a Republican is accused of something, say, lying, the response, if the respondent acknowledges the lie at all is, “they all lie and none of them are any good.”  My guess is it serves the purpose of making Republicans look a little less radical and maybe it is working with some folks.

Our media display their both sidesism with their “fair and balanced reporting,” which is clearly neither fair nor balanced these days.  I first took notice of it 9 years ago when Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential campaign and the media, not too excited by his presence at the beginning (you know that escalator ride), came to be consumed with Trump and his shenanigans, normalizing comments, insults, and anti-American rhetoric while covering other candidates as though they were just as disruptive.  Hillary Clinton got the biggest blasts of media frenzy when everything she said was ignored in favor of Ben Gazi and emails.  They were portrayed as worse than Trump’s diatribes against women and Clinton in particular  with “lock her up” and anti-abortion rhetoric,   claims of immigrants being rapists, mocking of anyone different from himself, calling the press “fake news.”  I’d have thought the press would have fought back, but instead doubled down on Trump coverage.

For the past 8+ years, Republicans have an agenda that is so far outside the realms of decency in a democracy they have decided they must change direction and let us see “a kinder gentler side.”  In the meantime, the media have portrayed President Biden as too old to function, inept, the cause of inflation, which for our media made it look like both candidates were equally bad, but Trump a bit better because he didn’t seem as old.  The June 27^th “debate” cemented that in many people’s minds, even though Biden had trouble, he didn’t spend the entire affair lying to the American people as Trump did, which the media noted only in passing. 

Trump survived an “assassination attempt” with hardly a scratch but the media projected him as a hero because he kept standing with his fist up (I have heard it said it looked like a Hitler salute).  We were told Trump was going to be “nicer” from then on and the Republican Convention was billed as the way for Republicans to unite the country, even better than Democratic claims.  All kinds of headlines poured out that message, but the convention actually presented none of that “unity” or “niceness.”  In fact, Trump, himself, recently told a crowd of his worshippers that if they thought he was becoming “nicer” after the incident in Butler, PA, they were wrong and he asked them if they minded.  No Democrat would have done that.

A few days ago, I was responding to comments on a piece by Joyce Vance on her Substack page.   One of the respondents was complaining that she should not have to have drag queens reading books to kids in her public library.  She could give  no explanation, other than that children shouldn’t have to be exposed to something as corrupt as those people.”  Than a guy chimed in that drag queens are groomers and children would not be safe around them.  He, of course had no evidence of this and when I challenged him with actual facts that if anyone is ”grooming” it is conservative clergy, he tried to defend his statement with insults and claimed that somehow I just couldn’t understand the logic of keeping kids safe and away from drag queens, (targets for right-wing self-righteousness). 

How the thread decayed into people being forced to attend drag shows and that the “left” gets to force people to do things against their religion is still unclear even after rereading the various comments.  My comment back to him was probably not as “civil” as I might have done at another time, but here is what I said.

“no one on the left is forcing anyone to go to Drag queen or drag king story hours or to bake cakes for LGBTQ couples. However, on the other hand, the right-wing IS trying to keep a lot of us from voting, to let a president have the powers of a dictator to do whatever he wants to anyone he does not like. No left-wing policy is an anti-American diatribe against this nation with an entire plan for systematically taking away people’s rights, as Republican-written and supported “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is designed to do.  No Democrat intends to undermine our public schools in favor of rich private corporations who want to control what our children learn. No left-wing people want the ten commandments posted on classroom walls which is against our Constitution (OK, left-wing kids might enjoy checking off all the commandments Trump, their state's governor, and representatives have already broken and speculate which they will break in the future(. No left-wing person wants to impeach opponents they don't like because they just don't agree with them as they are trying to do to Kamala Harris (I guess in response to Trump having been impeached for actually committing crimes against this nation). No Left-wing people lie incessantly and enjoy the media ignoring that in favor of denigrating a president and vice president (Biden and Harris), who have improved lives for most Americans in the 3-1/2 years they have been in office. No left-wing politician is trying to wreck social security or Medicare or to deny struggling people Medicaid or SNAP.  Republicans have proposed all of these, but the media, it seems, since it can’t blame Democrats for such actions ignore them in favor of covering Trump’s rallies even though nothing Trump says is new.  That is until Kamala Harris stepped in as Democratic candidate for president when President Biden decided not to run.

I think you get the idea. Both sidesism is just ridiculous no matter what right-wing people believe. Those folks alas, already believe a lot of things that aren't true.  Unfortunately, I suspect that both sidesism will continue.  I keep hearing it’s because the media is now corporate.   Maybe so, but both sidesism is a lie no matter who is doing it.