Progressives (Liberals)

When I was in the Navy in 1963 in San Francisco there were substantial numbers of homeless on the street. It may be a worse problem, but it is far from something new to be concerned with.

So because it’s been a problem for 55+ years it’s not worth doing something about?

Your experience 55 years ago is not relevant to whatever homelessness problem SF is currently experiencing.

Correct, also, edgar missed the point entirely from what I can see. The point was in in the first sentence, the Title.

The downvoters have so little reading comprehension. They likely think I am against doing anything for the homeless. I used to be one of them, in essence. The homeless and unsettled people are a varied lot, same as with other segments of population. The ones who want help are as deserving as anybody. Certainly they are more deserving than the corporations on the big cash welfare dole.

Ed you were in the navy in San Francisco in 1963 while I was in nappies in Philadelphia in 1963.
Small world.


Don't pay attention to the down voters, it just shows you're saying something right.

But do you believe the homeless, for whatever reason they are homeless, should be taxed for being homeless?

They don't believe in democracy, for sure.

NYT


Why is Kemp allowed to be the Secretary of State and be in a campaign for governor at the same time? The fox guarding the hen house gets to make all the rules and pull stunts such as the above and time he wants to. It shouldn't be allowed.

I usually just say 1300.

1260-1390 is more accurate, but it's a bit cumbersome.

It establishes that the image on the shroud was not painted or created with pigments.

I was recently advised to not rely on sources such as this. Got to when it's the truth:
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election, was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman Salomon Melgen, who was convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The senator had flown to the Dominican Republic with Melgen on the physician’s private jet and stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican women who allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political favors for Melgen, including helping some of the Dominican women acquire visas to the United States. Menendez was indicted in a federal corruption trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung jury.

Menendez has a voting record as sordid as most Democrats’. He supported the $716 billion military spending bill, along with 85 percent of his fellow Senate Democrats. He signed a letter, along with other Democratic leaders, calling for steps to extradite Julian Assange to stand trial in the United States. The senator, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, is owned by the lobby for Israel—a country that routinely and massively interferes in our elections—and supported moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He helped cause the 2008 global financial crisis by voting to revoke Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law enacted to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks.

His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is Bob Hugin, whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200 million by conspiring to keep generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a model of everything that is wrong with our for-profit health care system, paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused the firm of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby defrauding Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of the cancer drug Revlimid to some $20,000 for a supply of 28 pills.

The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive issues. It is dominated by both candidates’ nonstop personal attacks and negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.


Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don’t bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother? One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week’s elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8 million, compared with Republicans’ $33.4 million, the center reported. The broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given $174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And Michael Bloomberg, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.

“In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector … ,” The New York Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.

Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.

Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man’s party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for it.

Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.

The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.

Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power” warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner’s sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism’s iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States’ form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its “friendly” face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America,” Gross wrote. “Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion.”

No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game.

You cannot use the word “liberty” when your government, as ours does, watches you 24 hours a day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in perpetuity. You cannot use the word “liberty” when you are the most photographed and monitored population in human history. You cannot use the word “liberty” when it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word “liberty” when the state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed citizens in the streets of American cities. You cannot use the word “liberty” when 2.3 million citizens, mostly poor people of color, are held in the largest prison system on earth. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. The choice is between whom we want to clamp on our chains—a jailer who mouths politically correct bromides or a racist, Christian fascist. Either way we are shackled.

Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism. It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of neoliberalism that consolidates power and wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, refining Gross’ thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly fascism as “inverted totalitarianism.” It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out, characterized by anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution and the iconography and symbols of American patriotism but internally had seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were being shackled incrementally. Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He wrote that “a friendly fascist power structure in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, or today’s Japan would be far more sophisticated than the ‘caesarism’ of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no charismatic dictator nor even a titular head … it would require no one-party rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution of legislatures, no denial of reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an outgrowth of present trends in the Establishment.”

Gross foresaw that technological advances in the hands of corporations would be used to trap the public in what he called “cultural ghettoization” so that “almost every individual would get a personalized sequence of information injections at any time of the day—or night.” This is what, of course, television, our electronic devices and the internet have done. He warned that we would be mesmerized by the entertaining shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave as we were enslaved.

Gross knew that the most destructive force against the body politic would be the war profiteers and the militarists. He saw how they would siphon off the resources of the state to wage endless war, a sum that now accounts for half of all discretionary spending. And he grasped that warfare is the natural extension of corporatism. He wrote:

Under the militarism of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism violence was openly glorified. It was applied regionally—by the Germans in Europe and England, the Italians in the Mediterranean, the Japanese in Asia. In battle, it was administered by professional militarists who, despite many conflicts with politicians, were guided by old-fashioned standards of duty, honor, country, and willingness to risk their own lives.

The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. It is global in scope. It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that Hitler could dream of but never achieve. It is based on an integration between industry, science, and the military that the old-fashioned fascists could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the civilian leaders—such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitze—tend to be much more bloodthirsty than any top brass. In turn, the new-style military professionals tend to become corporate-style entrepreneurs who tend to operate—as Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Savage have disclosed—in accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer subservience to the interests of transnational corporations and the continuing presentation of threats to some corporate investments as threats to the interest of the American people as a whole. Above all, in sharp contrast with classic fascism’s glorification of violence, the friendly fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of modern warfare behind such “value-free” terms as “nuclear exchange,” “counterforce” and “flexible response,” behind the huge geographical distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through missiles or even on the “automated battlefield,” and the even greater psychological distances between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might be consigned to quick or slow death.

We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there is no fight in us.

The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it. Take a look at the flight roster of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up spending 13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both parties and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as “Orgy Island,” on his jet, which the press nicknamed “the Lolita Express.” Some of the names on his flight roster, which usually included unidentified women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips, Alan Dershowitz, former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the Candide-like Steven Pinker, whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better and better, and Britain’s Prince Andrew. Epstein was also a friend of Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago.

We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have crumbled in the same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we learn from history is “that people and governments never have learned anything from history.” We will not arrest the decline if the Democrats regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable. Corporate power will do its dirty work regardless of which face—the friendly fascist face of the Democrats or the demented visage of the Trump Republicans—is pushed out front. If you want real change, change that means something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.

So many lies a casual read of that piece reveals. Please factcheck these things unless you understand/accept this is a very poorly sourced opinion piece.

A good friend of mine works for the San Francisco housing authority. She's been instrumental in shepherding some terrific projects through - housing for poor/elderly folks from a variety of cultural communities have been on her agenda.

The authority is somewhere between $25 and 30 million in the hole.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-has-to-cover-Housing-Authority-deficit-so-poor-13309607.php

It's one thing to be a homeless 20 year old. Another thing entirely to be 80 and homeless. Hopefully the proposed corporate taxes make it through.

Janis is one of my favorite persons:

Janis Ian shared a post.
6 mins ·
AN APOLOGY. Feel free to share.
My wife pointed out this morning that in asking people to vote for "rational beings" rather than straight party lines, I was in effect saying "Go ahead and 'vote your conscience', even though that person can't possibly win.'"
She's right. That is not what I mean, and I apologize. Because here is what I believe. Tomorrow, and the next presidential election, are the two most important elections in my lifetime. We have allowed the rule of money and privilege to subvert the rule of law. We have given corporations free reign to spend as much as they like making sure "their" candidates are elected. Our current president has encouraged violence, bigotry, outright hatred of the press, and cares about nothing but his own skin and his adoring cult fans.
So let me make this very clear. I BELIEVE THAT IF YOU VOTE FOR ANY REPUBLICAN WHO HAS BEEN SUPPORTING TRUMP IN ANY WAY, YOU ARE COMPLICIT.
You are complicit in the caging of children, in the separation of families without documentation to ensure they're reunited. You are complicit in believing women are good for one thing only, and that we deserve what we get when we are manhandled. You are complicit in agreeing to accept outright lies, fabrications, suggestions that the free press be muzzled, that protesters be beat up. You are supporting a president who doesn't know even the first verse of our National Anthem.
You are complicit in the wave of anti-Semitism we are experiencing.
If there is violence, it is on you. If people of color are less safe, it is your fault. If women are less safe, you will answer for that. If you think it's okay that wealthy white males are running this country, trying to turn back everything from equal pay and opportunities to freedom of expression, you are complicit.
I do NOT want to hear "Yeah, I don't like him, but it's for the greater good." If you can't see where that has gotten us, and where it is leading us, you have no business being a citizen of what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, because you only care about yourself.
Step up. Vote a Democratic ticket because there has GOT to be a show of strength large enough to make the McConnell wannabees think twice. Because they're stealing from Social Security. Because they're rolling back our rights. These people don't give a flying f*!k about you, and if you still don't believe that, you are a good example of what the dumbing down of an entire country's educational system creates.
A word of warning. If you respond to this post with words like "snowflake" "libtard" "moron" and profanity, I will not just block and ban you. I will publish your profile on that thread so others can block and ban you, and see you for the impoverished language you speak, and the ignorant racist you are.
Below is something I published on January 20, 2017. I still stand by it.
https://www.facebook.com/janisianpage/posts/1256196441133738
Published by Janis Ian · January 20, 2017 ·
In the past 48 hours I have been told to "get over it" and "suck it up" by more than 100 people on my own page.
Here is my response. I will continue to post as many political comments and memes as I like. I will also continue to post as many free downloads, funny photos, and interesting quotes as I like. Why? Because this is my page.
This is also my country. My grandparents did not watch their families slaughtered by Cossacks and gutted by so-called Russian "patriots", then WALK across Russia and Ukraine, endure unimaginable hardships, and finally arrive at the Statue of Liberty - and then learn a new language, a new way of life, a new way of government - so I could give up the right to dissent.
That is why my family came here. That is why my grandfather bagged groceries and my grandmother ran a boarding house and my other grandmother took in mending. That is why my father went into the service and then to college on the G.I. bill, why my mother took night courses, why everyone and everything in my family was geared toward thinking and questioning and moving forward. So that I, a second-generation American, could, through merit and hard work, become "the American dream".
So here is my answer to those of you who would normalize what is happening around us right now.
Dear James (and Elizabeth, and Harold, and all the rest) -
Thank you for posting. I appreciate your suggesting that I now "let it go" and "suck it up" because "like it or not, he's our president." (Or in the case of all the non-Americans chiming in for some reason to say "he's your president now.")
All right! Which part would you like me to let go of? Shall I drop the "grab pussy" part? or maybe the "gay people need conversion therapy" part, since Pence said it, not Trump?
How about the Muslim registry, so wonderfully reminiscent of that bright yellow star my forebears had to sew on their coats? Or maybe I should heed Trump's statement "It's cold in New York - we need global warming".
Wait. I can suck it up and try to forget the part where he dodged the draft, then said of John McCain "I like people who weren't captured" Wouldn't that be patriotic?
And as a Jersey girl, I could just "suck up" and "let go" of the part where he said "thousands and thousands of people" in Jersey City were cheering as the World Trade Center buildings fell.
Wait, I know! Let's forget freedom of the press, his veiled threats to allow White House briefing access only to periodicals that agree with him. Suck on that, you liberal swine. Maybe I can also let go of the part where he threatens newspapers with changes in the libel laws, so he can sue them - and I can suck up to the National Enquirer, owned and run by Trump's dear friends.
Wait! My grandparents were always terrified they'd have to prove they had a right to be in America, so even though it was always illegal to require it, they carried their "papers" with them everywhere. Yeah, if there'd been a Jew Registry, they could already have been counted.
How about I about I let go of him saying “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud”? Or when he said Mexico would pay for "the wall", except now we have to front the money?
Or my personal favorite, the part where he promises and promises to release his tax returns if he's elected....
C'mon, James. Which part should I let go of first?
No no no!!! I take it all back! I want to let go of this part, because somehow, I can't un-hear it. I can't un-see it. And I sure as hell can't "suck up to it":
"I did try and **** her. She was married. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look. I’ve gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything." Donald J. Trump
Nice. Go after married women. Cheat on your first two wives (at least). Kiss someone who doesn't invite it and consider yourself a "magnet". How presidential.
Yes, folks. I'll "suck it up" and "let it go". When hell freezes over.
You don't like it? Get off my page.
Janis Ian
January 20, 2017

So you are saying you now believe that voting for someone who can win even if they are the lesser of two evils is the correct choice?

You spoiled it!!

I thought he finally wised up. I’m still hoping that he has.

I'm saying I love Janis. But I have compromised some. I voted Beto O'Rourke, even though he is not liberal enough. I have said I would vote for someone like Elizabeth Warren. I would not vote for some potential candidates

Whether or not he's saying that, I certainly would. With one brief exception, the Republicans have controlled the House since the 1994 mid-terms. They now control the Senate. It has been a disastrous almost two years--a tax cut tailor-made for the fat boy in the White House, which is rapidly bankrupting the the government; trade wars with Canada, Europe and China (which are going to cost Americans plenty); threats against the treaty which has kept the peace and security of Europe since 1945; threats against the social security system which has given people a very scanty retirement security since 1935--this administration is a disaster. Better a shambling, lying and untrustworthy Democrat than to continue in power the party which has brought these disasters upon us for almost 25 years.

It's not just being liberal or not that has my ass shitting red hot rivets - It's the warmongers. It's hard to overlook people of both parties engaged in ever expanding military adventures and even giving more money to the military than was asked for. Enough.

It's like Trump has two bases he tries to accommodate, the establishment republicans who want the lowest taxes possible and protectionist side which came with Bannon with the trade wars. We have seen both policies come to pass since the 2016 election. It was simply the wrong time to make a principled stand when we had so much at stake, namely the Supreme Court with all those elderly justices who were hanging on until the election. Well, we now have a Trump court, chances are we will lose the Senate, we will have more Trump picks at the highest court in the land. The ones making a principled stand knew this and they did it anyway. Don't get me wrong, I like and approve of most of the progressive agenda, but, in 2016 it came down to Hillary and Trump. Bernie die hard's should have picked Hillary for the good of the country.

Waiting to see if Saudis are allowed to proceed unimpeded.

Bin Salman launches Saudi Arabia's first nuclear plant project