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PatrickforB

PatrickforB's Journal
PatrickforB's Journal
December 31, 2018

Upcoming legislation we can ALL get behind :)

Speaker Pelosi apparently isn't wasting much time in working to ensure expansion of voting rights and to curtail voter suppression.

I'd strongly urge all of you to please call your Representatives and US Senators in support of HR1.

Here's a link to a Hill article that talks about it.

I think Pelosi's going to be outstanding her second time out of the block as Speaker.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/423343-why-same-day-registration-is-critical-to-the-success-of-hr1

Let's tell these folks with thousands and thousands of calls that we support what they are doing and give them the message we are watching (the Dems appreciatively, and the Repubs critically).

December 24, 2018

My evangelical church is gaslighting me, an article on HuffPo by

Elizabeth Baker, guest writer and evangelical Christian blogger.

Well worth reading and passing on, especially for those of us who cannot in good conscience call ourselves Christians anymore. Here's an excerpt:

The church told me that God is a God of justice. He says the poor and the persecuted are blessed and will have a great reward in heaven. However, the term “social justice warrior” is a reviled label in conservative Christian circles.

When I speak out against racism, police brutality, gun violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ community, many Christians sneer at the concept of justice and accuse me of being “divisive” and “too political.” Instead, they embrace nationalism, the rule of law without mercy and “Make America Great Again” as their values, even at the expense of human life.

It simply does not matter to the evangelical church that Trump is racist and that his dehumanizing rhetoric is emboldening radicals and costing Americans their lives. Americans are dying in mass shootings at the hands of white supremacists, while the church is celebrating the nation’s return to traditional values. For Christians who reject the MAGA mindset, this is absolute crazy making.

No wonder I live with crippling anxiety and spiritual trauma. The church that warned me against moral relativism now calls me a heretic when I apply the very principles they taught me to real situations, with real stakes for real people. I don’t know where to turn or whom to trust. Is any of it true? Have I wasted my life on a religion that hurts more than it helps?


Here's the link: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/evangelical-christians-trump_us_5bfc326de4b03b230fa57ae9
December 22, 2018

It boggles my mind how these spittle-spraying xenophobic racists have

used immigration to gin up fear in the Republican base. Basically, it is a molehill that has been made into an artificial mountain.

But wait - that's not the best of it. The reason they are such well-funded raving lunatics is because they provide a convenient distraction to the greatest heist in history - the giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations last year which transferred yet more trillions of dollars to the parasitic billionaire and CEO class.

Bankers have created a system of artificial scarcity through the Fed, which is primarily owned by JP Morgan Chase and Citi. It is NOT quasi-governmental - that is a sick joke. If the national debt is money we owe ourselves, then why are we paying it back to bankers with interest?

Wall Street MBA lizards have elevated the concept of shareholder primacy to an exact science that manifests in:
- for workers: unsafe working conditions, union busting, end-of-quarter and end-of-year layoffs just to raise share prices, crappy benefits and stagnant wages.

- for consumers: smaller packages at the same or higher prices, unsafe products, increased recalls, failure to honor warranties and products that are diluted or made poorer quality to increase profits.

- for the environment: the concept of 'externality' allows businesses to foul the environment and, as long as they aren't forced to pay, it is considered an 'externality.' So the earth is raped by capitalism and our entire species, as well as other living creatures, now face an existential crisis.

Billionaire parasites have bought our politicians, primarily the Republicans, have propagandized us to believe in a zero sum game - that if someone wins, then someone else must lose; we must all pull ourselves up by the bootstraps because we're rugged individualists, and only the strongest survive. In short, an Ayn Randian hell. This manifests itself in:
- irresponsible deregulation, which erodes our safety as consumers, our financial security (what little we all have left), and the quality of the environment.

- rampant privatization of things that should be part of the public domain, such as prisons, schools and non-military discretionary programs. And, make no mistake - the Wall Street greed heads have had their eye on the Social Security Trust Fund for decades.

- and gutting social programs through irresponsible tax cuts, coupled with more and more government contracts, primarily for 'defense.'

All these things, including the propaganda that drowns us, serves the sole purpose of transferring more and more of the world's wealth to the few at the expense of the many. Everything - the primacy of the shareholders, Citizens United, lack of a Fairness Doctrine allows this giant greed machine to grind us up a little more each day.

Tired of it yet?

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About PatrickforB

Counselor, economist and public servant.

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