Well said, with perfect clarity, Tom. It’s been a strategy employed by the rich to enslave the common citizen to such circumstances over decades and Trump has become the most useful idiot in their endgame. They fear an educated and economically independent people who may come together in unison against them, hence the deliberate systems created to deny them a shot at life’s possibilities by stripping these options in myriad ways. America has never been a democracy in any true sense but a Republic ruled by an Oligarchy. Yet, I live in hope, for there are citizens who are wise and care enough to aggressively counter these forces with strategies of their own to help the nation emerge victorious in the near future.
Thom the best and most thorough explanation of the scheming of the super rich class—which has been going on from the earliest recorded history. A modern corollary to Lord Acton’s insightful comment about power and corruption noted by Brian Meadows could be: Too much wealth divorces most people from their humanity. In other words, they become sociopaths incapable of any empathy for the suffering of the less fortunate. They should be labelled and called out as such. Instead, they are revered. Musk and Trump are examples of charismatic sociopaths. They aren’t charismatic to your readers, but they are to many.
As for the relevance of Christianity on this point, Jesus warned about wealth accumulation in the famous comparison of a rich man’s chance to enter heaven as being less than a camel’s chance of negotiating the dangerous passage called the Eye of the Needle. And yet instead of applying this to the billionaires, many Christians revere them.
As you correctly point out, Jesus said nothing about the abortion and LGBT issues that command so much time and are so divisive. Those issues relate to teachings from the Jewish Tanakh, which an early Christian council renamed the Old Testament. Much of 'Christianity' is in fact a Christian misinterpretation of Judaism. Writing in the 1800s, Helena Blavatsky called the Old Testament, the Rabbis revenge.
These issues are distraction so that people do not focus on the ways that the predatory billionaires have funnelled up most of the increase in the GDP since the 1970s. There’s far more wealth than there was in the 1960s, but there’s far less going to the working and middle classes. That can be stopped.
I think revering wealth goes back to the strand of the Protestant Reformation that included predestination: god chose certain people to be lucky in birth and opportunity. That translates into wealthy people (yes, mostly sociopaths) being "the chosen people," and therefore more worthy.
Yes, this idea that God wants the wealthy to be rich by predestination is a complete contradiction of the teachings of Jesus about care for the poor and used to overshadow them completely.
As a return to true Christian principles, every clergyman should start every Sunday sermon reciting the warning about rich men and camels to break the hypnotic illusion many live in about the greatness of a wealthy person.
Yet, how many clergy today would take up that task?
Jan, you might be interested to learn, that that biblical bit about camels, rich men and needles was an interpolation by a wealthy Roman, some think it be the same Piso, that had Josephus mention Jesus the Messiah in The Jewish Wars (no real Jew would have called such a persona messiah, the Jewish messiah must meet stringent requirements. one of which would be annihilation of the Romans.
The purpose of that passage was to tell the believers. the faithful, to be content with their fate, their station in life, because if they were wealthy they wouldn't get to heaven, see also the bit about render unto Caesar
The bible is a mish mash, some were lectures, screeds converted to writing by the Jewish missionaries, that thronged the Roman marketplaces, others were interpolations and screeds inserted by wealthy and learned Romans for their own purpose.
One such was a man the Church of Rome named the Great one (Augustine). a Manichean priest, he watched in horror as Pope Leo "The Great" threw Manichans to the lions, and he saw the light. He obviously assisted a monk by name of Jerome in translating the Gospels into the LatinVulgate, and in so doing he inserted Zoroastrian memes, (Mani was a Greek
Disciple of Zoroastrianism. the fundamentals of which are the duality of god and man.
So Augustine introduced the notion of a competing bad god, Lucifer, which the Zoroastians called Ahriman. Lucifer means the bringer of light, ot was also a name for Venus as the morning star.
Venus appeared in the morning just before the sun rose (the bringer of light),or morning star, and again the evening as the evening star The Islam flag, like that of Turkey, shows Allah or al Lihah the moon god in the days before Muhammad, as the new moon an Venus or al Uzzah,
Islam and Christianity are a hodge podge of Zoroastrian and Hebrew concepts.
Just for fun I’m taking a stab at this before I read it. I have long suspected and by long I mean 30 or 40 years, that Republicans don’t want a prosperous middle class for the same reason they oppose higher education. Educated people and other middle class earners can generally be counted on to earn enough money to have some disposable income, which incidentally feeds our economy, and perhaps the knowledge and critical thinking skills that Republicans fear. When the percentage of people in a nation possess those two attributes, the time and money, then they can make themselves a pest to the billionaire class. If most people are kept in poverty or semi poverty, and must work very long hours to eak out barely enough money to put food on their tables, they do not have the time or the resources to push back against the billionaire class. If they are poorly educated, and don’t know much about history and lack critical, thinking skills, they are also mentally ill equipped to evaluate what is going on around them and to construct the arguments to mobilize people to push back. Therefore, keeping the middle class relatively small is their strategy. They need a small class of people that they can deploy to do their bidding and serve as the overlords to hold the rest of us down. Think of medieval feudalism.
As a psychologist, I think the GOP is only partly about money. Who needs a billion dollars? I enjoy a dream retirement on a teeny-tiny fraction of that much wealth. I think a strong case can be made that amassing money is about insecurity - a need for dominance.
Wealth is power - especially in the era of Citizens United. By keeping the middle class focused on daily survival, most voters are too busy trying to make ends meet to devote much attention to who is in charge and what monopoly gets the next padded government contract. Politics are for the rich, they rationalize. So what if the Republicans redistrict to dominate elections? What can I do about that, and how does that affect my tomorrow? Gun laws? I can't afford a gun, and I do not have time to go hunting if I had one.
As a child I heard on the playground; "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich." That notion conflates merit with wealth. Americans cling to the notion that their country is a meritocracy, which it often can be. But then they wrongly conflate wealth with merit. If you are in charge then you earned it - you deserve it. If you are richer than me then you earned it - you deserve it. Somehow that pseudo-logic rationalizes what economist Dean Baker calls our rigged capitalist system.
In the case of billionaires, this perverted logic of merit conflates ruthlessness with the competence and will to govern. As AOC once reminded voters - You do not earn a billion dollars, you TAKE a billion dollars. Ergo, as Thom just pointed out, we have a government led by selfish liars, cheats, and thieves - TAKERS. Republicans use their money to take power away from the working class and justify their dominance by conflating money with merit.
Not to mention the knees, ears, eyes, teeth slightly malfunctioning day by day:
I’m joyous to be here!
I love my life! And I made it lovable!
I’ve been an ardent lefty since I was 7!
An atheist since was 6!
I have never regretted my choices to stand up for the terrible injustices in this beautiful mosaic country that I love.
So speaking truth to power is liberating, even when you know you will and often loose. But when I look at the wins!!I see miracles of people from all over the world living together in peace! Imagine!
(Mostly.) I see we have achieved more freedom and more equality than ever, now that some want to take some or all of it away, it becomes clear as this piece so adequately points out.
Living a life developed by empathy and ethics is surely a better choice than living as a partisan stooge. That includes partisan stooging on social media.
Thom, we used to believe that wealthy families were better to elect to public office as they'd be less interested in graft. Outside of Washington himself and some other slave-owning presidents, the only three families I can remember of whom this is, or might be, true are the Roosevelts, the Kennedys and, to be fair, the Bushes.
Many politicians from both the North and South who came up from humble beginnings walked the public service walk as well as talked the talk!
We need to drill into ourselves Lord Acton's dictum with an additional 'prologue' thus:
What else is wealth but the means of exchange? POWER.
What does power DO to any human as per Lord Acton: POWER TENDS TO CORRUPT AND ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY!!!
Can we possibly repeat that enough times?! Not, I think, for the foreseeable future! And by reducing the rich's power by PLENTY, we are also saving their souls! We'll be pulling them back from the lip of the fiery Pit along which they stride so heedlessly! Think about that and feel free to share this post!!
My apologies in advance, I don’t mean to be trying to dominate, this is just a topic that I have spent years ruminating upon. Because the billionaire class and their Republican minions distain a healthy middle class, and an educated populous, they had to push back against the New Deal policies that grew the largest middle class, in probably the history of the world during the 50s which matured in the 60s and brought us the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, Protesting against the war in Vietnam, etc.
When these people about which we are reading and writing, saw the “monster “that the New Deal created, they began the process of dismantling, piece by piece and plank by plank, all of the opportunities it had created for hard-working, ordinary, American people. Thom talks often about how our middle class has shrunk from about 2/3 of America by 20 or more percentage points since the Ronald Reagan presidency.
So for this part of my screed, I definitely owe a debt of gratitude to Thom, who has helped me to extend and refine my own thinking. Thanks to all of you who are weighing in and sharing because I think that this continues to be a vital important topic as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party continue to do their very best to destroy the American middle class.
Ouch. Knowledge is power, but in the land of the blind, it's also pain. Watching a slow motion disaster, knowing you can't get there in time, while still hoping for a miracle you refuse to admit won't come. The hand of god is implacable, despite all our prayers. Life sucks, then you die...
Once more, you hit the nail on the head with your observations.
One of the saddest facts is that these observations are there for everyone see, but somehow we as a people are too wrapped up in our own passion plays to make note that the middle class and poor are considered collateral damage when we stand in the way of the prospect of added profit or wealth accumulation. These attitudes have been around for eons. It’s nothing new, after all the so called middle class is relatively modern in nature.
There’s always been the haves and have nots; however, so many times in the past the have nots were totally without. Kings, Emperors, Pharaohs, etc., used the rest of the population as human tools, slaves and surfs. We were drained dry in money to finance some frivolous war then required to die in it.
Maturity as a species is so slow. I seriously wonder if we can rise above our shortcomings of desperation, fear, the hoarding of money, seeking revenge and calling it justice, declaring wars of pillage and greed, requiring imprisonment or the death penalty believing there is no other way to protect society, keeping the general public tied to mostly meaningless jobs in order to have the “privilege” of basic needs, etc., etc., before we destroy ourselves.
To add to my previous screed, the powerful church during the medieval period facilitated the chokehold the feudal lords and kings had on the serfs and other common people. The Christian religion in those days, and to some extent now as well under Christian nationalism, was also Weaponized to keep people in their place.
It is a fact (from systems science) that there has never been a natural or man-made system that hasn't destroyed itself if any part of it was designed or allowed to optimize or maximize any part of itself. The wealthy elites are indeed destroying the system that allows them to gather wealth. They do this by destroying any feedback lops that are restraining them. Failure is inevitable. The concentration of wealth is only one of many out of control positive feedback loops (population, consumption, extinction, climate change, control of wealth, control of information/ communication systems, concentration of ownership and more).
Are you familiar with the Tibetan concept of a hungry ghost? That is a person who has died and haunts the living because they still seek whatever they were seriously addicted to. Our wealthy are hungry ghosts incarnate i.e., alive, stalking the earth, and destroying lives and even the ability of the Earth to support life.
The period between 1935 and 1955 was unique and the affluient elites hated sharing political power with workers and their unions. Busting the unions is what led to decline of the middle class with the exporting of manufacturing jobs (and expertise and capital) that began with Nixon and accellerated with Reagan and in particular with Clinton pushing through NAFTA. Both parties now seek the approval of Wall Street and dismiss entirely the importance of workers and their unions.
Few people appreciate that the 25 wealthiest men in Germany in 1932 struck a deal with Hitler who in return for their backing agreed to ban workers' unions - which he did. In the USA we have two parties that share power and work 100% for the interests of the affluent elites.
The only wealthy presidents who were not grifters at some level were FDR and Teddy Roosevelt. They were men of wealth and intergrity and great humanity which we no longer see with our selected leaders. It was the elites who pushed Wallace off the ticket and replaced him with the incompetent and ignorant Truman. The party bosses selected the successor much as they have continued to do.
But there has been a seismic shift with the new bosses being the billionaires that own and control every form of media in the United States (except TikTok which there are working hard to force a sale to U.S. interests so it too can be controlled and its users censored. TikTok is the ONLY platform that allows anyone to express support for the people of Palestine.
What about the people of Ukraine, Sudan, Somalia Bruce. The only kvetching I hear is about Palestine,and there is real genocide, murder, suffering and human rights violations all over the world. Why is Palestine so special and Somalia, Sudan and Ukraine aren't, heck there is also Mali, Chad, Niger
If even half of these statements were not true (they all are true), that would still be a crime! But, they are all real and truthful. I am ashamed of the voters who have bought into the BS that Trump and his clan postulate. I feel like most of the population of our country are unaware or uneducated, or just have decided that they can’t win, so let’s burn down the status quo. All the while they about half did not even vote.
Well said, with perfect clarity, Tom. It’s been a strategy employed by the rich to enslave the common citizen to such circumstances over decades and Trump has become the most useful idiot in their endgame. They fear an educated and economically independent people who may come together in unison against them, hence the deliberate systems created to deny them a shot at life’s possibilities by stripping these options in myriad ways. America has never been a democracy in any true sense but a Republic ruled by an Oligarchy. Yet, I live in hope, for there are citizens who are wise and care enough to aggressively counter these forces with strategies of their own to help the nation emerge victorious in the near future.
Shorter version: for “Republicans”, greed is not good. It is god.
Thom the best and most thorough explanation of the scheming of the super rich class—which has been going on from the earliest recorded history. A modern corollary to Lord Acton’s insightful comment about power and corruption noted by Brian Meadows could be: Too much wealth divorces most people from their humanity. In other words, they become sociopaths incapable of any empathy for the suffering of the less fortunate. They should be labelled and called out as such. Instead, they are revered. Musk and Trump are examples of charismatic sociopaths. They aren’t charismatic to your readers, but they are to many.
As for the relevance of Christianity on this point, Jesus warned about wealth accumulation in the famous comparison of a rich man’s chance to enter heaven as being less than a camel’s chance of negotiating the dangerous passage called the Eye of the Needle. And yet instead of applying this to the billionaires, many Christians revere them.
As you correctly point out, Jesus said nothing about the abortion and LGBT issues that command so much time and are so divisive. Those issues relate to teachings from the Jewish Tanakh, which an early Christian council renamed the Old Testament. Much of 'Christianity' is in fact a Christian misinterpretation of Judaism. Writing in the 1800s, Helena Blavatsky called the Old Testament, the Rabbis revenge.
These issues are distraction so that people do not focus on the ways that the predatory billionaires have funnelled up most of the increase in the GDP since the 1970s. There’s far more wealth than there was in the 1960s, but there’s far less going to the working and middle classes. That can be stopped.
I think revering wealth goes back to the strand of the Protestant Reformation that included predestination: god chose certain people to be lucky in birth and opportunity. That translates into wealthy people (yes, mostly sociopaths) being "the chosen people," and therefore more worthy.
Yes, this idea that God wants the wealthy to be rich by predestination is a complete contradiction of the teachings of Jesus about care for the poor and used to overshadow them completely.
As a return to true Christian principles, every clergyman should start every Sunday sermon reciting the warning about rich men and camels to break the hypnotic illusion many live in about the greatness of a wealthy person.
Yet, how many clergy today would take up that task?
Jan, you might be interested to learn, that that biblical bit about camels, rich men and needles was an interpolation by a wealthy Roman, some think it be the same Piso, that had Josephus mention Jesus the Messiah in The Jewish Wars (no real Jew would have called such a persona messiah, the Jewish messiah must meet stringent requirements. one of which would be annihilation of the Romans.
The purpose of that passage was to tell the believers. the faithful, to be content with their fate, their station in life, because if they were wealthy they wouldn't get to heaven, see also the bit about render unto Caesar
The bible is a mish mash, some were lectures, screeds converted to writing by the Jewish missionaries, that thronged the Roman marketplaces, others were interpolations and screeds inserted by wealthy and learned Romans for their own purpose.
One such was a man the Church of Rome named the Great one (Augustine). a Manichean priest, he watched in horror as Pope Leo "The Great" threw Manichans to the lions, and he saw the light. He obviously assisted a monk by name of Jerome in translating the Gospels into the LatinVulgate, and in so doing he inserted Zoroastrian memes, (Mani was a Greek
Disciple of Zoroastrianism. the fundamentals of which are the duality of god and man.
So Augustine introduced the notion of a competing bad god, Lucifer, which the Zoroastians called Ahriman. Lucifer means the bringer of light, ot was also a name for Venus as the morning star.
Venus appeared in the morning just before the sun rose (the bringer of light),or morning star, and again the evening as the evening star The Islam flag, like that of Turkey, shows Allah or al Lihah the moon god in the days before Muhammad, as the new moon an Venus or al Uzzah,
Islam and Christianity are a hodge podge of Zoroastrian and Hebrew concepts.
Thanks William. Informative background.
Just for fun I’m taking a stab at this before I read it. I have long suspected and by long I mean 30 or 40 years, that Republicans don’t want a prosperous middle class for the same reason they oppose higher education. Educated people and other middle class earners can generally be counted on to earn enough money to have some disposable income, which incidentally feeds our economy, and perhaps the knowledge and critical thinking skills that Republicans fear. When the percentage of people in a nation possess those two attributes, the time and money, then they can make themselves a pest to the billionaire class. If most people are kept in poverty or semi poverty, and must work very long hours to eak out barely enough money to put food on their tables, they do not have the time or the resources to push back against the billionaire class. If they are poorly educated, and don’t know much about history and lack critical, thinking skills, they are also mentally ill equipped to evaluate what is going on around them and to construct the arguments to mobilize people to push back. Therefore, keeping the middle class relatively small is their strategy. They need a small class of people that they can deploy to do their bidding and serve as the overlords to hold the rest of us down. Think of medieval feudalism.
As a psychologist, I think the GOP is only partly about money. Who needs a billion dollars? I enjoy a dream retirement on a teeny-tiny fraction of that much wealth. I think a strong case can be made that amassing money is about insecurity - a need for dominance.
Wealth is power - especially in the era of Citizens United. By keeping the middle class focused on daily survival, most voters are too busy trying to make ends meet to devote much attention to who is in charge and what monopoly gets the next padded government contract. Politics are for the rich, they rationalize. So what if the Republicans redistrict to dominate elections? What can I do about that, and how does that affect my tomorrow? Gun laws? I can't afford a gun, and I do not have time to go hunting if I had one.
As a child I heard on the playground; "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich." That notion conflates merit with wealth. Americans cling to the notion that their country is a meritocracy, which it often can be. But then they wrongly conflate wealth with merit. If you are in charge then you earned it - you deserve it. If you are richer than me then you earned it - you deserve it. Somehow that pseudo-logic rationalizes what economist Dean Baker calls our rigged capitalist system.
In the case of billionaires, this perverted logic of merit conflates ruthlessness with the competence and will to govern. As AOC once reminded voters - You do not earn a billion dollars, you TAKE a billion dollars. Ergo, as Thom just pointed out, we have a government led by selfish liars, cheats, and thieves - TAKERS. Republicans use their money to take power away from the working class and justify their dominance by conflating money with merit.
Hate Trumps logic.
My life does not suck, John!
And at 83 I’m well aware of death at hand!
Not to mention the knees, ears, eyes, teeth slightly malfunctioning day by day:
I’m joyous to be here!
I love my life! And I made it lovable!
I’ve been an ardent lefty since I was 7!
An atheist since was 6!
I have never regretted my choices to stand up for the terrible injustices in this beautiful mosaic country that I love.
So speaking truth to power is liberating, even when you know you will and often loose. But when I look at the wins!!I see miracles of people from all over the world living together in peace! Imagine!
(Mostly.) I see we have achieved more freedom and more equality than ever, now that some want to take some or all of it away, it becomes clear as this piece so adequately points out.
I'm 84 with a similar background. We have much to be proud of by standing up for our values!
Living a life developed by empathy and ethics is surely a better choice than living as a partisan stooge. That includes partisan stooging on social media.
Thom, we used to believe that wealthy families were better to elect to public office as they'd be less interested in graft. Outside of Washington himself and some other slave-owning presidents, the only three families I can remember of whom this is, or might be, true are the Roosevelts, the Kennedys and, to be fair, the Bushes.
Many politicians from both the North and South who came up from humble beginnings walked the public service walk as well as talked the talk!
We need to drill into ourselves Lord Acton's dictum with an additional 'prologue' thus:
What else is wealth but the means of exchange? POWER.
What does power DO to any human as per Lord Acton: POWER TENDS TO CORRUPT AND ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY!!!
Can we possibly repeat that enough times?! Not, I think, for the foreseeable future! And by reducing the rich's power by PLENTY, we are also saving their souls! We'll be pulling them back from the lip of the fiery Pit along which they stride so heedlessly! Think about that and feel free to share this post!!
My apologies in advance, I don’t mean to be trying to dominate, this is just a topic that I have spent years ruminating upon. Because the billionaire class and their Republican minions distain a healthy middle class, and an educated populous, they had to push back against the New Deal policies that grew the largest middle class, in probably the history of the world during the 50s which matured in the 60s and brought us the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, Protesting against the war in Vietnam, etc.
When these people about which we are reading and writing, saw the “monster “that the New Deal created, they began the process of dismantling, piece by piece and plank by plank, all of the opportunities it had created for hard-working, ordinary, American people. Thom talks often about how our middle class has shrunk from about 2/3 of America by 20 or more percentage points since the Ronald Reagan presidency.
So for this part of my screed, I definitely owe a debt of gratitude to Thom, who has helped me to extend and refine my own thinking. Thanks to all of you who are weighing in and sharing because I think that this continues to be a vital important topic as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party continue to do their very best to destroy the American middle class.
Ouch. Knowledge is power, but in the land of the blind, it's also pain. Watching a slow motion disaster, knowing you can't get there in time, while still hoping for a miracle you refuse to admit won't come. The hand of god is implacable, despite all our prayers. Life sucks, then you die...
Mostly true and very depressing....
Once more, you hit the nail on the head with your observations.
One of the saddest facts is that these observations are there for everyone see, but somehow we as a people are too wrapped up in our own passion plays to make note that the middle class and poor are considered collateral damage when we stand in the way of the prospect of added profit or wealth accumulation. These attitudes have been around for eons. It’s nothing new, after all the so called middle class is relatively modern in nature.
There’s always been the haves and have nots; however, so many times in the past the have nots were totally without. Kings, Emperors, Pharaohs, etc., used the rest of the population as human tools, slaves and surfs. We were drained dry in money to finance some frivolous war then required to die in it.
Maturity as a species is so slow. I seriously wonder if we can rise above our shortcomings of desperation, fear, the hoarding of money, seeking revenge and calling it justice, declaring wars of pillage and greed, requiring imprisonment or the death penalty believing there is no other way to protect society, keeping the general public tied to mostly meaningless jobs in order to have the “privilege” of basic needs, etc., etc., before we destroy ourselves.
To add to my previous screed, the powerful church during the medieval period facilitated the chokehold the feudal lords and kings had on the serfs and other common people. The Christian religion in those days, and to some extent now as well under Christian nationalism, was also Weaponized to keep people in their place.
This is a 10,000 years old problem.
It is a fact (from systems science) that there has never been a natural or man-made system that hasn't destroyed itself if any part of it was designed or allowed to optimize or maximize any part of itself. The wealthy elites are indeed destroying the system that allows them to gather wealth. They do this by destroying any feedback lops that are restraining them. Failure is inevitable. The concentration of wealth is only one of many out of control positive feedback loops (population, consumption, extinction, climate change, control of wealth, control of information/ communication systems, concentration of ownership and more).
Are you familiar with the Tibetan concept of a hungry ghost? That is a person who has died and haunts the living because they still seek whatever they were seriously addicted to. Our wealthy are hungry ghosts incarnate i.e., alive, stalking the earth, and destroying lives and even the ability of the Earth to support life.
Thanks for the reminder of the hungry ghost. It is so relevant.
The period between 1935 and 1955 was unique and the affluient elites hated sharing political power with workers and their unions. Busting the unions is what led to decline of the middle class with the exporting of manufacturing jobs (and expertise and capital) that began with Nixon and accellerated with Reagan and in particular with Clinton pushing through NAFTA. Both parties now seek the approval of Wall Street and dismiss entirely the importance of workers and their unions.
Few people appreciate that the 25 wealthiest men in Germany in 1932 struck a deal with Hitler who in return for their backing agreed to ban workers' unions - which he did. In the USA we have two parties that share power and work 100% for the interests of the affluent elites.
The only wealthy presidents who were not grifters at some level were FDR and Teddy Roosevelt. They were men of wealth and intergrity and great humanity which we no longer see with our selected leaders. It was the elites who pushed Wallace off the ticket and replaced him with the incompetent and ignorant Truman. The party bosses selected the successor much as they have continued to do.
But there has been a seismic shift with the new bosses being the billionaires that own and control every form of media in the United States (except TikTok which there are working hard to force a sale to U.S. interests so it too can be controlled and its users censored. TikTok is the ONLY platform that allows anyone to express support for the people of Palestine.
What about the people of Ukraine, Sudan, Somalia Bruce. The only kvetching I hear is about Palestine,and there is real genocide, murder, suffering and human rights violations all over the world. Why is Palestine so special and Somalia, Sudan and Ukraine aren't, heck there is also Mali, Chad, Niger
If even half of these statements were not true (they all are true), that would still be a crime! But, they are all real and truthful. I am ashamed of the voters who have bought into the BS that Trump and his clan postulate. I feel like most of the population of our country are unaware or uneducated, or just have decided that they can’t win, so let’s burn down the status quo. All the while they about half did not even vote.
And seeing my whole life here.
Seems so obvious, the power of the greed!
You got it! What I’ve been preaching, teaching