This Friday evening, September 17, Colorado Springs activists can have their cake and eat it too. The Jim Hightower event and the Colorado Senate race debate are back to back. So it’s sheet cake.
Jim Hightower is still plugging his populist pun, The People Are Revolting, which may be true of the hoi polloi in the whimsical sense, but hardly describes their political momentum –unless you count the Tea Party and its pretend rebellion, if anything, a conservative counter-revolution to reinstate the tea tax. Though Hightower’s tales are getting as long in the tooth as his common super-citizens meant to serve as examples for us all, he’s still worth lots of laughs, and his material angers, even if it fraudulently attempts to raise hope. That’s at 4:45PM, at the Cornerstone Arts Building, the southern-most encroachment of the Colorado College campus.
At 6:30PM there’s a rally planned for outside Centennial Hall, where Michael Bennet will be debating Ken Buck for the US Senate seat. Democrats have organized to protest Buck’s campaign promise to privatize Social Security. A progressive group is supplying the placards which read “HANDS OFF MY SOCIAL SECURITY.” It’s a worthy message, but like all slogans pre-printed by the SEIU, it tempers the more appropriate syntax. “Hands off” should be “Do not steal.” The bid to swipe the public monies is more like pillage than misguided tinkering.
And will those attending the rally be directing their outrage at only the Republican nominee? What about Bennet, the Democratic incumbent, who’s already been doing Wall Street’s bidding without fail? Thorough activists might want to bring ther own signage, for example: TELL BOTH CORPORATE PARTIES: DON’T STEAL SOCIAL SECURITY or perhaps: PRIVATIZATION IS CLASS WARFARE.
Otherwise, both events are exercises in placating public unrest. This Friday evening you can pretend your voice is being heard by the senate candidates, while Hightower comforts you with stories of others who think they’re making a difference too.
“What the Buck do you mean Privatize Social Security?”
“Socialized medicine saved my left foot…
Privatized Corporate Medical Denial destroyed the right one”
The closest I can come to slogan writing for now.
Yes, but the point being, it’s not just Ken Buck that needs telling. Michael Bennet is as much a Goldman stooge as Cheney or Obama.
Yeah, Buck’s just more blatant about it.
Both have other concerns, other dogs in the fight. Like the oil shale, that’s a big money concern for them.
Spending a lot of money trying to court, convert or divert public attention has to pay off for their bosses somewhere, so there is a difference to be made. Trouble being, it’s not going to be easy to find or manipulate.
My only access to the halls of the Rich and Powerful is through the Servant’s Entrance, so the most I know about them, personally, is that they don’t like to pay out money for anything.
Which is important. Like you said, speaking to the issue would have to take precedence over embarrassing one or the other candidate. I just hit a block where a one-catch-phrase-fits-all slogan escapes me at the moment.
If they’re diverting attention away from something else, it’s something that makes them even more money than privatizing Social Security would.
It is crucial enough that their bosses (or just boss singular) are spending money like a drunken sailor trying to manipulate public opinion on it.
What got me with this election cycle, is that something never before in my life happening. The purposeful and deliberate promises to Deny Health Care. The edge of the cover stories for it has frayed to where even the TeaBags are realizing exactly what they’re saying. I do believe in conscience, and that at least a simple majority would have one. Otherwise, as truly messed up as the world has so far come to be, with thousands of years of recorded history and billions of people, if the majority were in fact evil, or at least lacking conscience…
It would be worse. When they made the case against Saddam Hussein, they kept banging on about “What if Hitler had The Bomb?”
They were bullshitting because they knew Saddam didn’t have that power and probably had no chance of ever having that power.
Our government does. And now the sham elections are dangled in front of us as the only hope, supposedly, to avoid some of the most callous and violent people on earth having unrestricted access, not even the limitations of common dissent.
Even the revolutions are now sham.
Leads back to conscience. Not much to count on, maybe.
There simply is a bipartisan consensus to privatize everything, including retirement monies. The Democrats are not resisting this effort of the rich to get their hands on schools, medical care funds, and Social Security benefits. After all, the Democrats are funded by corporations just like the Republicans are. They even have gone along with privatizing warfare, which they push as much as the Republicans do.