Republicans = Grand Oligarch Party

 Here’s the basic problem as I see it, Sam Rayburn was too correct when he said “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” The Republicans, as the party of oligarchs, have an easier job of kicking down barns. Meanwhile, the Democrats can but wish they were as good carpenters as they think they are. So, if the Grand Oligarch Party does little more than cause chaos and confusion, they’re winning. If Democrats and Independents get so disgusted with the ineptness of the Democratic response to Republican misinformation and disinformation, as well as any outright lies, Republicans win because they want to destroy democracy, the working class, the middle class and leave but oligarchs, peasants and serfs. If you disagree with this assessment, take a look around at the headlines and social media.

Are you ready to VOTE?

Photo by J. Harrington

I’m not the only one with this gloomy outlook. Take a look at this review in The Guardian of the book Last Best Hope review: George Packer on the state we’re in – and how to fix it. It's the last part that has me particularly interested.

Packer offers more hope by using the last part of the book to remind us of the power of extraordinary individuals to bring about positive change.

He gives us brief portraits of Horace Greeley, the abolitionist editor of the New York Herald; Frances Perkins, the extraordinary social warrior who was Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the author of about half of the New Deal, including social security; A Philip Randolph, who pressured FDR into issuing an executive order banning discrimination in the federal government (though he failed to get the armed forces integrated during the second world war); and his young lieutenant, Bayard Rustin, the great gay civil rights leader who was the mastermind behind Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963.

We will need a dozen new leaders of their caliber to accomplish Packer’s other goals – a reinvigorated anti-trust policy to break up the tech giants, a revival of American unions and a new generation of journalists more like their muckraking predecessors in the 20th century.

For a different perspective, without reading the actual book, take a look at this review in The Washington Post. We’ve already entered the early stages of the 2022 midterm election campaigns. We strongly suggest, nay, implore, you to look for and support “extraordinary individuals,” those who know which end of a hammer to hold; who know to raise both the roof and taxes on the wealthiest 1%; and, most importantly, who aren’t jackasses with no greater ambition than to kick down a barn, as long as it’s not their barn.

Of course, we all know that extraordinary people are that because there aren’t very many of them. One way to compensate is to bring our better selves to the voting booth and everywhere else we go. Together with insisting on exercising our individual rights, we must do better at fulfilling our collective responsibilities to our families, communities, fellow citizens and country, because

We Are of a Tribe

By Alberto Ríos

We plant seeds in the ground

And dreams in the sky,

 

Hoping that, someday, the roots of one

Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.

 

It has not happened yet.

We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:

 

Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,

Even as we stand on uncertain ground.

 

The earth beneath us moves, quiet and wild,

Its boundaries shifting, its muscles wavering.

 

The dream of sky is indifferent to all this,

Impervious to borders, fences, reservations.

 

The sky is our common home, the place we all live.

There we are in the world together.

 

The dream of sky requires no passport.

Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.

 

Look up. Stay awhile. Let your breathing slow.

Know that you always have a home here.

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