Recall 1934. At a Madison Square Garden rally in New York. There in the spotlights, uniformed Americans, salute and pledge allegiance to the Fuhrer. In 2022, a reporter arrives at the presidential press conference prepared to energize a Republican base, marching in lockstep with fascists of old. It’s January, and the reporter is armed with a question for the Democrat celebrating the end of his first year as president of the United States: Why is Biden pulling the country to the left?
There’s a moment of silence as Biden thinks on how best to respond to the inquiry. Finally, he answers: “I’m not Bernie Sanders!” says Biden, “I’m a mainstream Democrat.” A capitalist.
If America is looking for what a socialist might look like, they are looking at the wrong man. On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders, over there is the socialist! As he has reiterated several times in past speeches, Biden is not Bernie. Instead, he’s a capitalist. What’s socialist or fascist, for that matter, about a capitalist!
I listen to the right-winged reporter and the liberal Democrat and know there’s something unspoken being exchanged between the “reporter” and the president.
The question isn’t really asking Biden to prove he’s a member of the Democratic Party. The reporter knows Biden is. What the reporter wants Biden to state for the record is whether or not he supports pro-democracy programs that would dismantle, in time, the capitalist system.
Capitalism, the modus operandi of America. Are you going to slide so much to “the left” as to make America unrecognizable to corporate capitalism? Are you to be counted on to make socialism available to the corporate establishment?
It’s not Bernie, it’s Black Americans. And there’s a reason for this fear of Black Americans and not just among the right-winged leadership.
To be fair, Biden’s not-Bernie Sanders comment is followed by a statement about the child tax credit. He’s in favor of those “bailout” packages to help the economically poor. Child tax credits shouldn’t serve as the solution to child poverty in the richest nation in the world. Why are so many American children born into poverty in the first place while billionaires are flying themselves and wealthy donors into space?
To be frank, the Republican Party is the latest American Fascist Party. No amount of pleading will satisfy this cabal of Americans who don’t want to see democracy come to fruition. Of democracy and capitalism, only one can dominate the other. Only one can expect to live. I’m talking about the Democratic leadership, the party supposedly calling itself a champion for the 99%.
The Democrats and Black Americans do seem to be a pair where democracy and capitalism aren’t in the least. Some 87% of Black Americans came out to vote for Biden at great risk to their health during a pandemic (The Guardian). Black Americans did so because they are faithful proponents of democracy, and always have been since the days of slavery, when even the thought of their resistance terrorized their handlers in the New World.
The Democratic leadership claims to be fearful of losing democracy, so is the leadership afraid of losing the support of Black Americans? You see, the reporter was serious. What is Biden concealing when he dismissed the reporter and moved on to the next questioner? Is it Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s ambiguous position? Both want to appear as if they recognize the contribution of Black Americans to this country. But is the Democratic Party more grateful to the corporate capitalists? The anti-democratic cabal as heartless as the Republican Party?
Will you move to the left?The reporter voiced what a good percentage of the populate discusses at the dinner table. White America doesn’t trust Biden and Black America is disappointed!
Isn’t this why we don’t have nice things? Isn’t it?
Speaking of things, household things anyway, prices as the neighborhood “dollar” stores are rising. I, along with everyone else, noticed the prices of groceries had risen in the last couple of months. Right on time for the 5.9% raise in social security payments! Items that were priced at $1.06 in December were now $1.25. And what really saddened me was the clerk’s response to my surprise. A middle-aged white woman. She shrugged her shoulders and said, that’s what it is. We’ll have to live with it! Then looked at me as if daring me to say something to the contrary.
This is Kenosha, Wisconsin where Jacob Blake is paralyzed, but Kyle Rittenhouse is a free man. It’s where the legislature hopes to pass bills punishing future “protesters,” like the one who, as the narratives goes here, destroyed downtown Kenosha. The clerk knows she can have the police arrive in minutes if I dare to ask her if she were a member of a union. Did she have health insurance? In an ideal world. A world in which democracy is prioritized and citizens understand its significance and fight for life in freedom rather than death in fascism. However many times I hear the word, democracy, I know that already fascism is gaining ground again.
I picked up my bag and walked of the store, thinking I was hearing the hissing sound from the humans drained of life by the pods featured in the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was “one of those,” not yet with the program!
Bezos is with the program! He wouldn’t be aware that in this wealthy nation some 28.0 Americans are uninsured (US Census). For a huge corporate employer such as Amazon, for example, white Americans make up 55.7% of the work force in the US; yet even these white employers are sadly mistaken if they think advocates of capitalism care about their welfare. That such a system permits others to treat people with indifference is of no concern to those who hire teams of financial professionals to conceal taxable income.
Yet, when I look at the images from the January 6th Insurrection I see angry white citizens, for the most part, citizens who could easily have surrounded Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., shouting, Go home, N—–! Historically, whites have been encouraged to look at Black Americans as the visible culprits of America’s downward spiral. Not someone such as Jeff Bezos.
Until George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin, few Americans had bothered to look at the system that incarcerates and kills Black Americans. Few still take the time to read a book by a Black author; yet most have no problem demanding that books that might make white children feel “uncomfortable” be removed from K-12 libraries.
Americans resign themselves to the dependency between the politicians and the corporate world. Follow the flow of the wealth of this nation. Blacks received the trauma of exploitation and terror but never the wealth their labor garnered to benefit white America.
In December 2021, a CNBC report cited that Joe Manchin’s political action committee saw “a surge in corporate contributions.” Manchin’s donors, according to the report, include, “Lockheed Martin, health insurance companies UnitedHealth Group and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and natural gas company CNX Resources.” Verizon and Wells Fargo also donated to Manchin.
Watching one member of the Democrat Party after another talk about conducting a “good” meeting with Manchin, I have to ask, Why would Manchin commit to fundamental change in the way America treat’s people of color, for example? Here or abroad! Why would he vote to change the modus operandi of his donors? His donors wouldn’t appreciate him or contribute to him ever again! What fools Manchin makes of fellow democrats feigning unawareness of his commitment to the corporate world? And why were those democrats willing to string the public along? Do they, too, see their own ambitions in Manchin’s “success”? How much money you possess matters in the US!
Why such reverence for greed?
It certainly goes a long way into securing future wealth and controlling the masses of people of color, globally.
Americans are confident in American exceptionalism to secure the flow of oil and whatever minerals necessary and by whatever means in order to remain atop the global pecking order. The man honored on the 17th of January, Dr. Martin L. King, decried America’s imperialist policies, but there’s a deliberate effort to usurp and twist only those words about a colorblind America rather than an America that is a purveyor of violence. No dream of King’s ever imagined that the US Senate, in the 21st Century would continue to grant the Pentagon a budget more than it’s head or the US Democratic president requested. Yet, there’s a $768 billion dollar goodies package for the senate to the Pentagon. But Manchin and Sinema have a problem with the Bill Back Better bill that would greatly improve the lives of citizens who aren’t billionaires.
What a windfall for the military industrial complex! The shipbuilding budget alone increases by $5 billion, and Boeing receives money to build fighter planes (NYT) because the US can never have enough fighter planes available for “protecting” allies. Oh, but don’t ask that America protect the rights of its Black citizens to vote! Don’t ask that! Democracy is a jet fighter plane! A drone!
The not-Bernie-Sanders president operates the Trump era sanctions at the US southern border because America combats invasions of Haitians and Mexicans daily. America is at war! But have no fear: Title 42, the former racist president’s immigration policy, “allows U. S. border agents to quickly expel migrants to Mexico or their home country without screening them for asylum” while Haitians are deported back to Haiti by the thousands (CBS News).
But Americans really need to stay clear of socialism? Really?
“Justice for black people,” Dr. King once stated, “will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society” (A Testament of Hope).
The voting rights bills must pass the senate, but then Americans need to think. Change must come, and it must be radical and fundamental, as King recognized decades ago. Or fascism will take up permanent residency in America.