Fighting Oligarchy?
AOC & Bernie on Tour
Bernie and AOC hit Idaho on Monday night on their Western leg of the Fighting Oligarchy Tour. The Idaho Statesman estimated the crowd at 12,500 people at the Ford Idaho Center.
In 2016, Bernie won the Idaho state primary with 78% of the vote. He beat Hillary Clinton by an almost 4 to 1 margin and beat the combined total of Ted Cruz and Donold T***p on the Republican side.
Most of you have seen the speeches online as they have been live broadcast on Bernie’s YouTube channel.
The message was simple. Everyday people are more important than politicians and the big money that controls them. The crowd was raucous with lots of cheers and boos and hullabaloos.
I was happy that we made the trek through the traffic and to the Ford Idaho Center in time for the beginning of the event, but I left with deeply mixed feelings. While we were stuck in traffic, Bernie and AOC sped past in their motorcade.
“Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” —Isaiah Berlin
Both AOC and Bernie decried the “Dark Money” in politics on both sides of the political spectrum while also saying their message was for progressives, conservatives and independents. Is it?
The problem we have is that there are only two parties in America, and both are owned by their corporate overlords…so we really have no way out of this mess unless we can come up with a Congress that is independent and not beholden to the lobbyists and corruption of Washington, D.C.
Toxic Rage, Circle Jerk, Inc.
“The gentleman I’m about to bring to the circle [jerk] right here is massively, massively successful.” –Grant Cardone
Cardone is a conman huckster who has spent his life fleecing the rubes, so it is not surprising that he invited to his “circle jerk” one of the world’s most corrupt hucksters and conman. Birds of a feather. IT. IS. A. CULT.
Add to this an authoritarian regime fueled by a cult that has astro-turfed participants and people in charge who are off-the-chart incompetent while the circle jerk sycophancy is at 11. Could anything be more fucking stupid than Linda McMahon saying children are going to be taught “A1” in schools? Kudos to A1 Steak Sauce for jumping on it immediately with some very funny memes.
But some of the billionaire cabinet members are (were) not sleazebag hucksters. At least they weren’t until they entered the T***posphere. The men that spent their lives seeking out marks for their flimflams have failed to see that they are now the mark. T***p has fucked over everything and everyone he has ever touched or met.
“They are willful, petulant, and full of pointless defiance. They’ve become defined by an obsession with Trump as the sole remedy for the offenses imposed on them by a rotating cast of villains and evildoers. In the process, they’ve become easy marks for every flavor of conspiratorial lunacy and gimcrack appeals to their worst instincts.” –Rick Wilson: Everything Trump Touches Dies
They have not woken up to the reality that Everything Trump Touches Dies, #ETTD.
The tradeoff requires letting go of the misogyny, the racism and the Toxic Rage that fuels their entire beings. They are comfortable in their Circle Jerk and sycophancy. “T***p is playing 4D chess!”
It really is exhausting. A dipshit conman has his host of circle-jerking sycophants repeating Kremlin talking points while they build a world that serves only them, their wallets and their Toxic Rage. They are terribly weak, weak men.
Substack author, Jim Stewartson, calls this the Weak Men Virus. They are men (all men) that certainly should know better, but as Bernie pointed out last night, they are like heroin addicts that can not possible get enough of a fix.
For the monied class, it is about the accumulation of wealth. For the rest of the cult that is being abused by the wealthy, it is their latest “hit” of dopamine they get from their Faux Noise broadcast or Tuckums Carlson Kremlin-driven talking points.
By The People
The message of the Fight Oligarchy Tour is about “The People.” Yet, we exist in a world that is for “The Corporations,” for the rich.
Today’s Gilded Age 2.0 seems to have a movement started that has finally arrived at the reality that they are chattel for the top 1%. We pay for their tax breaks; we fund their super yachts and their rocket ships.
History has shown that the only recourse is mass labor strikes, mass economic strikes and mass movements. Project 2025 may implement The Insurrection Act and put military in the streets to shut us down…but they cannot take us to Walmart at gunpoint and make us “buy stuff.”
Rounding up dissidents and putting them in camps? Ask Weimar Germany how that worked out. As with this regime, the Nazis were also incredibly stupid and incompetent. Every move Hitler made further destroyed his own country. The equivalent of MAGA in the 1930s also could not let go of their worship of The Führer and they ended up in East Germany, with no access to flour, sugar, bread or butter.
Forget the Tariff Tantrums, the proposed budget is set to add $5 to $11 trillion to the U.S. debt, already at $36+ trillion. The party of “fiscal responsibility.” Those trillions go right to the 1%’s pockets.
Economic Populism is a strong motivator for democracy. Is it strong enough to defeat the Nerd Reich, the Fourth Reich?
For now, we take to the streets with our signs and our rallies. We close our wallets to the oligarchs. This weekend is the next nationwide protest organized by 50501 and other organizers.
“No democracy movement has ever failed when it was able to mobilize at least 3.5 percent of the population to protest over a sustained period At that scale, most soldiers have no desire to suppress protesters. Why? Because the crowd includes their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. With a population of 327 million, the U.S. would need to mobilize about 11.5 million people to assert popular, democratic power on the government. Could that happen?” –Big Think
The goal is to achieve the “3.5 Percent Solution.”
