What Republicans do

[Eric the Green]

https://youtu.be/WnNhULrpW70?t=767





The United States of America is an exceptional nation, indeed. It has become by far the worst developed nation in the world.

This is increasingly being driven home to me. One point was made for me on Amanpour and Company today by Jamal Greene. He is no radical, especially on the gun issue. But he pointed out that the United States is the only country in the world except Iceland with lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, and that we also have a very small Court compared to all other nations, with cases heard by all the justices all the time, so that in controversial cases one or two people "in the middle" makes the decision. Today, that is Brett Kavanaugh, as I mentioned above. How do you like having this crying pervert as our monarch who decides everything for us? So we have people with lifetime appointments who can retire whenever their Party can choose their replacement, acting in judgment of all policy as if they were the monarchs of the United States. I didn't realize that this institution, among many others of our systems (juries, the presidency, you name it), is so out of date and archaic. We now have a Supreme Court that enacts the platform of the Republican Party by fiat without regard or concern with balancing the needs of competing interests that is supposed to be their sworn function and duty.

Our leader, our decider:



What Jamal did not also point out is that we are also the only country with a Second Amendment, which was recently decided to be an individual right, not a provision for a well-regulated militia, which most people have forgotten was the correct interpretation of the 2nd for decades. The result of this individual "right to keep and bear arms (that) shall not be infringed", decreed and recently expanded by our reactionary Court, is that we no longer live in a safe society, but are subject to threat from any other citizen who might carry a gun, including vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse who got away with murder of two wonderful protesters against a black man being maimed for life by 7 shots from a racist policeman at point blank range just because he was getting into his car. And the police have too often been given the right to decide who lives or dies based on no reason other than their whim or fear, and the decision is very likely to be based on the race of the policeman's victim. So we are the most violent and unjust developed country by far, and more violent than most developing countries too-- THE most violent ones being countries that we export our guns to and import dangerous drugs from violent, deadly cartels within those countries.

We have announced to the world that we are the champion of individual human rights, and many looked to us and came here to what they saw as a land of opportunity and liberty. We are no longer that, because we are taking rights away, like women's right to choose pregnancy or not, and reserving them for those who are rich men or who are Christians. Our monarchical Court has decided that we have no right to protect ourselves though our government agency from greedy industrial barons who are causing global warming or hurting consumers and workers. It tells us congress must decide specifically what to regulate, but it upholds gerrymandering where the politicians running for congress themselves CHOOSE their voters instead of the other way around. It protects the right of the wealthy to buy elections, and defines this as free speech. It restricts the right to vote, especially by people of color. It tells the CDC that it can't mandate health measures, so that crazy anti-vax nonsense allows deadly disease to spread. Our congress enacts policies that sharply reduce taxes on the wealthy, enabling concentration of wealth, and our Court upholds the neoliberal, Bannonite project of dismantling the entire administrative, regulatory state, leaving the people at the mercy of the greedy business bosses with no recourse. The result is that we have the most unequal society in the developed world by far, and the worst level of social, health and economic problems and deficiencies in the developed world by far. The Dobbs v Jackson decision revoking Roe v Wade will endanger women even more in a country with the world's worst maternal mortality rate and among the worst women's life expectancy. The Court has decided that even though Trump was voted out of his ill-begotten office, which he had been voted into by a minority of the people, that it will carry out all his policies by fiat, and keep those policies in place indefinitely through their lifetime appointments or up until their Republican-Party-enabled times of retirement.



Are the people going to accept this last-place position of the USA in the developed world, the worst by any measure, and a monarchy by any reckoning? Are young people of the USA going to just be cynical and accept an unsafe, unequal, deregulated, unjust, undemocratic society, and vote for more of the same and worse just because they blame Biden for high gas prices? Especially when those prices are really mainly the result enabling the "free" market to price gouge us and do anything they want to us to boost their profits? Isn't it time to rise up and junk this deadly, unjust society, throw the Republican Trumpers OUT of office for good from all three branches of government, enact the democratic voting rights that the Democrats in congress have already proposed and passed in the House, reform the Supreme Court so that it is larger and has term limits for justices, enact the needed reforms of the police that have been proposed by the Democrats, restore a humane and workable immigration policy as was proposed in congress through bipartisan cooperation over a decade ago but defeated by extremist House Republicans, bypass the filibuster and Joe Manchin when necessary so these and other needed changes can be made, such as climate change energy transition and economic renewal of the middle class, before we become a feudal state in a world environment collapsing beyond repair?

Those who only watch only Fox News and Fucker Carlson, ARE the brainwashed ones. Trump gave a big boost to the war on truth. Those who participate in this war by swallowing conspiracy theories help us to become a society that no longer has any consensus on truth or fact or ability to determine it through good public education and critical thinking, but just depends on whatever you choose to believe that suits your political or cultural agenda, whether right or left or somewhere in between.