021 The Birth of the People’s Party (of Peace)

Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, Can They Merge to Form a New Party?

Working 40-50 hours per week leaves precious little time to be as active as I’d like in performing my democratic duty of providing oversight of our venal politicians. There may be some irony in that I am a land surveyor, just as was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and other luminaries of our nation’s first birth.

But thanks to a broken ankle sustained from a slow speed tip over while riding my motorcycle, I have found a window of time away from work where I simply cannot be on my feet—and so I read and write; I watch TV and surf the web. Today I watched the most inspiring interview I’ve seen in a long time between Lee Camp of RT’s Redacted Tonight, and Nick Brana, the national political outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders. The topic is nothing less than the rebirth of the Bernie Sanders movement and the formation of a truly American party that represents real working people called The People’s Party. Brana is the founder of Draft Bernie for a People’s Party campaign.

In the title of this article title I took the liberty to change it to People’s Party of Peace because by the time this party gains momentum, and I believe it will, people will be sick and tired of hearing the Mockingbird Media promoting war with Russia, war with China, war with North Korea, war with Iran. We working class get it. We pay for the wars, some serve in the wars and some die or are maimed in the wars that the rich start because they are oh so profitable. The war fomenters sacrifice nothing yet gain everything, as long as were talking materialistic trinkets and baubles as gain—as these mental midgets do. These sociopaths are found leading the democratic and republican parties and are the puppets of the international financial overlords, but we all know that by now.

When Bernie Sanders capitulated in the primaries—largely due to the pressure from the establishment media, even the late night left-leaning talk show hosts urged him to take his funny hair and step aside so Queen Hillary could be ordained—his absence as OUR voice for We the People left a vacuum in the American electorate which was then forced to choose between the two Goldman Sachs puppets known as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The next revolution will be founded on trust, trust for the candidates, and trust for the logic and altruistic leanings of the candidate’s supporters. I’ve long been a fan of Lee Camp since his early days of Moments of Clarity. His witty, somewhat raw, but ethical satire is the tonic I need when political toxins build up in the cerebral glob in my head. He earned my trust a long time ago.

I did not know Brana until this interview. The purity and benevolence of his politics comes through when he admits it was a bad move for Bernie not to join Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign after the great capitulation, and his code of honor is apparent when he resigned from Bernie’s campaign under the leadership of Jeff Weaver, who wanted to abjure from Bernie’s pride of the $27 individual donation and take the billionaires’ money. Another thing I look for in political commentary is the desire to mitigate the contrived left/right divide and take the high road, clean up our own backyard.

In the interview these two pull no punches on the democratic leadership and Brana gives a history lesson on how the Republican Party was born as a revolt against slavery and overtook the defunct Whig party during Lincoln’s days. Already he’s offering more than an olive branch to frustrated people who happen to lean republican. When people learn to find common interests, and all working people should realize just how much we have in common, and understand just how much disdain and contempt the aristocrats have for them (us), then we will come together as one people, one nation and those rich motherfuckers can fight their own wars.

When six or eight people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire population of earth it’s a clear indication we need to overhaul the religious institution known as investment capitalism. It’s time to create a new brand of criminal: financial terrorists. After all, when the Lords of Wall St. take over our political system and use that system to launch wars of aggression, and hand the resources over to themselves, and thousands and millions of people are violently destroyed, that meets every criteria of terrorist. Take the silk suit and shiny loafers off of these cretins and they are nothing more than polished jihadists—they wage religious wars only their religion is gross materialism.

For The People’s Party to succeed it needs to appeal to workers, to appeal to workers it needs to understand the frustration of workers. To help them understand the frustration of workers I will offer my own perspective on economics because I’ve been working since I was a kid, almost always outdoors in all weather. Take it for what it’s worth Brana.

I am not an expert on economics, but I know enough to call bullshit to the “job creators” meme. Rich people don’t create jobs because they want to, the only jobs created by corporations and companies are created out of necessity. If they can mechanize or automate a process they will eliminate jobs just as fast as possible with a few exceptions. I will lay down my broad brush a moment and admit happily there are many very reputable corporations and companies—such as Dr. Bronner’s Soap. Mostly it’s the Fortunate 500 companies that are so quick to kick the American worker to the curb, perhaps the same curbs the American worker poured at one time. But that’s not the point either, capital comes after labor, not before it, therefore it is inferior to labor.

I can prove this many ways but it’s easier to move off-planet and start with a fresh canvas. Take two people to another planet, one is a homesteader who has a head full of practical knowledge and a few hand tools, the other is a stock broker, or hedge fund manager, or some such financial hot shot and he has a suitcase full of money. They arrive in the morning and by night the homesteader has cleared a spot, built a shelter, caught some fish, and planted some seeds. He has started a civilization. The hedge fund manager is without clue, he has no practical knowledge and his money is useless. Without the mercy of the homesteader the hedge fund manager would perish in a few days. Yet, on our planet, it is the homesteader who is marginalized, his skills trivialized while the hedge fund manager lives in an ivory tower and wallows in excess of the things only people with practical knowledge can provide.

Ok back to earth, back to the beginning of America, to the Deep South. Any money the early aristocrats had was brought over from the Old World so that is running out. To make wealth they dredged Africa for slaves, self-sustaining people living their lives and suddenly they are in chains and tortured and humiliated, but still valuable somehow and dragged back to the new world, the land of opportunity. Now they are doing back breaking work, unnatural work, planting and then picking cotton in the hot sun when people should be relaxing, enjoying some family time. But after thousands of man-hours of such labor, turning raw land into productive crops, “commodities” the slave owners grew wealthy. Labor proceeds wealth—violence forced labor, and labor created wealth.

But that’s not how it works today, you say. First there has to be a place to work before there can be any labor. So what happened is the labor, the turning of raw materials into a commodity created wealth, so, in essence, labor primed the pump of capitalism and nowadays capitalism forgets its utter dependence on labor.

Here is another way I can try to explain the frustration of the American worker. Visualize a piece of notebook paper, draw a horizontal line through the middle, from end to end. This line represents the initiating level of labor in the primary industries, in other words, in the timber industry, it would be the faller who scrambles in the woods and falls the trees so they can be skidded to the load-out landing. In mining it would be the prospector who hikes all day, but unlike recreational hikers whose packs get lighter and lighter, the prospector’s pack gets heavier and heavier with rock samples. In agriculture it’s the farmer who breaks the ground and plants the seeds and so on.

Then we move a bit up and down the page proportionally and draw successive lines and these represent successive stages of applying knowledge and labor to the process of turning raw materials into useful products and services. In the timber industry lines would represent skidding, bucking, loading, trucking, milling, more trucking, shipping, etc., the same, essentially, for all of the primary industries. In each and every case, the labor and the capital are supposed to reflect each other. Money was first devised as a means to facilitate barter, it was not devised to be a commodity in itself. That takes cunning.

Back to our graph, moving further up and down the page are many more lines representing the support industries and I’ll stick to the timber industry because I know it well: tire shops, chain saw shops, fuel, the food services, book keeping and so on. Now we get to the outer margins lines and these represent marketing and sales and this is where the system starts to break down. Let’s call this the dubious income line.

Here’s why. We originally logged, or mined, or fished because we needed these things for our own survival, comfort and long term viability. When the first settlers logged enough to build their homes, they quit logging, or only for firewood. There was no reason to set an alarm and get up in the dark and keep doing the same thing all your life because that would be considered insane. In the old days, we worked the seasons and did other things the other times, chasing the kids is a good pastime. Nowadays that would be unthinkable, time is money.

But when people averse to real work got into act and we started paying these people a commission, a percent on the product moved, then we gave them a reason to want to move product all the time, to buy low and sell high. So they eventually started applying their clever Ivy League skills and created a constant NEED in the public’s mind and suggested whenever people weren’t working, weren’t moving product they were losing money—oh my. Thus we still measure our productivity in GDP and that’s just gross because it creates an unsustainable system.

But, I’ll cut the marketers and brokers some slack, at least some of them are moving real products to the customers. What is much worse is the perversion of this commission system where people the farthest away far from the core producers are moving money and moving debt and moving futures and moving weapons and moving them in such volumes they have to create more money just to pay them the interest they make on doing absolutely nothing, see the hedge fund manage vs. homesteader above. When the banksters have to pay themselves such huge portions just because they move the money they create, they have to add that interest to the pool of money and this dilutes it. They don’t feel this dilution as bad because they are at the very front of the process, Ironically, it’s the primary workers, the loggers, miners, fisherman, who are at the end of the process and the money is hopelessly diluted until they can’t even afford a new truck just to use for work, and therefore have to borrow that diluted money from the banksters, who gladly lend it, with interest, diluting it further. What is frustrating is that the real workers are seeing the dubious income line and all the parasites above and below it growing bigger and bigger, while the actual workers area shrinks, yet real workers are asked to pay ever more to the lords above and lost souls below. (Tap into that frustration, Mr. Brana, and please consider pulling Stein into your movement, and you guys We the People will destroy the banksters duopoly parties and their party.)

And that still is not the end of the humiliation the predatory/parasitic upper class hold for the producers. Their system of money as a commodity has broken down so many souls who once believed in hard work and honesty, they turn to the drugs which are also promoted and moved by volume, by commission so now the very bottom of the page are the lost souls who cannot even fend for themselves and guess who gets to save them, the primary workers and their support industries, not the upper crust parasites because they have created the system and in their system are many loopholes so they don’t have to pay taxes, that responsibility is left to us suckers. Let me see if I can think of any billionaires who haven’t paid any taxes in 18 years—Trump.

So, to sum up, that’s working class economic 101, and I firmly believe if The People’s Party understands our economics then we can get on with uniting all workers, dissolve the left/right paradigm and elect Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. We can brand the financial parasites as financial terrorists and punish them with a life sentence of hard labor. Then, they truly can say they are the job creators.

 

P.S. here is a link to Draft Bernie petition and please donate, I did and I know my grown children will too.