A cranky old socialist speaks his mind

     "I really get tired of people with shiny money telling the Democrats what they should be."

Ralph Bowman taught school, sold business machines, and was a welfare worker. He is 81, retired, and pissed off about the way the world is playing out, and says so. 

Burn the place down. 


"What have you got to lose?" That was the question Donald Trump asked black voters in 2016. He insulted them, trolled them, appealed to white identity, and then asked black voters to vote for him. Democrats abandoned them, he said. He didn't sweet talk them. He said their neighborhoods are rat infested rubble, and their men are taking drugs and murdering each other, so they might as well take a flier and vote for him.

It worked. A huge number of black Americans in the Upper Midwest stayed home in 2016. They were Trump's margin of victory. 

Ralph Bowman

There is also a version of white nihilism, widely visible on Facebook groups supporting Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, and in the comments section of this blog: the voice of leftist/Socialists who think American government is beyond reform. Reform doesn't work, they write. Too late. Let the whole place burn down and the sooner the better. In the failure of capitalism run amok, the public will demand political revolution.

The say, What have we got to lose?

Ralph Bowman has written here before in stream of consciousness rants, a mixture of Jack Kerouac and Gertrude Stein. To be publishable I needed to put in punctuation, take out forbidden words, and re-arrange a few sentences.

I have learned that leftist Democrats in this mood do not want to hear about compromise, the "lesser of two evils," how bad Trump is, or that they should be "reasonable." They think the country is not reasonable.

There are lots of people like Ralph. Some of them are being politically strategic, trying to force Democrats to move left or else, in a game of political chicken, but more of them aren't strategic at all. They are simply frustrated and angry. 

It isn't strategy. It is nihilism. They say we are in late stage capitalism and it is beyond saving.

In a close election, they will be the margin of victory or loss.

Ralph Bowman speaks:  

"The Democrats lost the working class for three reasons: 

1. The illusion of giving money to the ghetto queens and kings under LBJ. Reagan pushed that and people believed it. (The White poor got most of it).  

2. Allowing the factories to ship themselves to the lowest paid workers nations, returning goods tariff free for a profit return that benefited the investor class, not the workers of the big box stores, nor the local merchants or towns that house these rapists. That's right, I called them rapists. They raped the economy. 

3. The slow steady shrinking of free education and social benefits infrastructure so they would have money to dish out the endless war money, all in order to exploit the third world and all without benefitting US local labor. Kids these days go into the armed services not to defend freedom but to have a job with benefits. 

The Democrats sold out under the leadership of the Clintons and Obama. They got their advice  from the Wall Street economists and people who advocated charter schools and privatization of any public work available for the grabbing.  They were comfy with people who wanted private prisons, they hired security experts for the war on terror, they arranged for the EPA to ok pipelines and fracking, they had drug lobbyists writing legislation, and on and on. 

 Hippies who used to wear triangle glasses and work at the Free Clinic to help friends through bad LSD trips found the stock market paid a hell of a lot better. And so was born the Liberal Democrat Yuppie. Think Jerry Rubin, famous Hippie/ Yippie, who got run over by a car on his way to his penthouse after a successful run as a Yuppie Wall Street schmuck. The great Yuppies have brought us silence on Global Warming. Great Yuppies showed how to trash the real estate markets and then get the tax payer to bail out their crashed stock, twice, 2001 and again 2008.

You know, I actually think Trump is more honest than liberal Democrats.  

The poor are in the street and the Democrats keep going on about the vanishing middle class. Trump pretends the working guy is getting richer, I mean GREATER, under his administration. That's what the Democrats pretended, too, until 2016. The mean Republicans are ruining the environment and making the Pharma factories rich. Well, so did the Democrats. Nothing is changing, only growing worse, sort of. 

The Democrats signed the NEW trade deal in exchange for a better environment in Mexico, say what? Mexico? And, oh yes, we now have the peacekeeping SPACEFORCE. HUH?

At least with Trump you know you are getting screwed; nothing is hidden under the veneer of liberal crap. Maybe when rural workers stand in the streets strapped with AK47s and loaded on opioids burn down the big box stores, when the XX State of Jefferson of retired truck drivers block I-5 and turn it into a toll road to collect the long overdue taxes from the giant corporations; when  kindergarteners  chain themselves to old growth trees to stop global warming maybe, then maybe the political renaissance will blossom forth. 

Yep. For sure, dude. Pass me a doobie."