Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Diversity in American politics, part 2e


Introduction

Previous pages in this series

Previous pages in this set have shown that there are factions within some of America's political parties.  Part 1, published in December 2017, showed some of the factions within the Republican Party, including the faction that is in love with Donald Trump personally.  I am still writing a page that will show other Republican factions that are not named on this page.

All of the pages in the second part are about the factions within the Democrat Party.  Part 2a, written in January 2018, mentions three Patriotic Democrat Presidents, who loved America so much, they were willing to challenge our enemies and win wars.  The page also mentions an ex-Governor who has shown patriotism through his public speeches.

In June 2014, I wrote an essay that recommended that the Democrat Party nominate him for the Presidency, for the benefit of the country.  If he had been nominated in 2016, instead of Hillary Clinton, a lot of Republicans would have voted for him, because of his moderate political views.  He might have been the President now.  He might have campaigned for other Democrats, and he mignt have convinced some independents and soft Republicans to vote for moderate Democrats who ran for the Senate, the House, and other political races.  The look and feel of the U.S. Congress mignt have been very different, all because the Democrat Party had nominated  a moderate instead of the political and economic extremist named Hillary Clinton.

Part 2b, written in early March 2018, mentions the rivalry between the Clinton family and the Obama family.  The YouTube video on the right has the audio of a 2008 Obama campaign ad that was broadcast on the radio.

The Clinton-Obama rivalry represents two different factions within the Democrat Party.


The page also mentions another Democrat faction called "classic liberals".  These are people who are proud to be open-minded.  They will listen to any new political idea.  For that reason, when voters get tired of extreme political ideas in the Democrat Party, the liberal group always gains political strength.

The page also mentions the fact that some Democrats in Congress are cooperating with the Republican Party to modify the Dodd-Frank law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2010.

Part 2c, written in late March 2018, mentions the Blue Dog Democrats, a faction that is publicly disagreeing with the extremists in their party.  Many of their members in Congress are cooperating with the Congressional Republicans to modify the Dodd-Frank law because this law, signed by President Obama in 2010, is hurting the small banks in America.

Part 2c, written in early May 2018, is about Democrats who don't like Capitalism.  Many of the people in this faction prefer Socialism, but some of them will tell their closest friends that Communism is the best economic system.  The difference between the two is that Socialism still allows people to own their houses, cars, and businesses, although there are extremely high taxes on all of these assets.

Under Communism, the national government owns all but the most minor assets in the nation.  Both systems promise vital services, such as income, infrastructure, and national defense, but few countries that practice Communism can deliver these services, and all of them still have a society that has at least two classes - people who are inside the government (they have political power and an often lavish lifestyle) and people who are outside of the government, who often live in poverty.


The current page

This page is about the friendships and alliances that Democrats sometimes make with political groups whose beliefs and goals would place them far away from the political center, as shown in the following graph.


Some of the far left groups who form these alliances want one governmental body, possibly the United Nations, to have political control over the whole world.  This group believes, sometimes passionately, that world-wide cooperation can end the conflicts between nations.  Any worldwide governmental body would necessarily function at the cost of any strong national identity for any one nation.

These far left groups are influenced by writers and artists, including Karl Marx.  They have adopted a similar literary style in order to promote their own vision of "a new world order".  They can accurately be called Democrats who don't like democracy.


Democrats who don't like democracy are worse than Democrats who don't like capitalism because economists aren't in control of any country.  Their strongest role is to advise national leaders, such as kings and presidents, in economic matters.  Any national military force depends for its' strength on soldiers who are well-paid, well-trained, well-equipped, and which has the best intelligence on its' potential enemies.  All this must be financed by a strong economy, but few political leaders realize this connection, so they devalue the economic advice that professional economists give them.

Democrats who don't like democracy are a real danger to any country because they tend to concentrate political power in one man and his closest friends, sometimes in one family, which often leads to a reduction in the civil rights of the people in that country.  For this reason, it is necessary to identify the threats to the United States and other countries that comes from Democrats who don't like democracy.


Definitions of democracy

Dictionary.com.
  1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
  2. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
  3. a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
  1. government by the people; especially : rule of the majority
  2. a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
The Cambridge English Dictionary.
  1. the belief in freedom and equality between people, or a system of government based on this belief, in which power is either held by elected representatives or directly by the people themselves
  2. A democracy is a country in which power is held by elected representatives.


Two similar governmental concepts

Both definitions are on the website Dictionary.com.

The definition of a republic.  Most of these words are clickable links.
  1. a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
  2. ny body of persons viewed as a commonwealth.
  3. a state in which the head of government is not a monarch or other hereditary head of state.
  4. (initial capital letter) any of the five periods of republican government in France.
    Compare First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic, Fourth Republic, Fifth Republic.
  5. (initial capital letter, italics) a philosophical dialogue (4th century b.c.) by Plato dealing with the composition and structure of the ideal state.

The definition of a federal republic.
  • noun. a form of government made up of a federal state with a constitution and self-governing subunits
  • example. The United States of America is a federal republic on the continent of North America.
In this example, the "self-governing subunits" are called states. Each of the 50 states that makes up the United States has its' own state constitution and the permission of the 9th and 10th Amendments in the U.S. Constitution to make their own state laws for the benefit of the people who live, work, and visit those states.


The history of Democracy

These are the first four paragraphs of a May 26, 2018 article in the (U.K.) Independent. The photo and the links were in their article.

Brexit – wrecks it? Let’s forget for a moment about 23 June 2016.

Suppose we were to enter a time-machine and have ourselves transported back 2,500 years to ancient Athens.  There we would find ourselves in the Greek city that invented “democracy”, both the word and the thing – government by mass meeting.  There, a plebiscitary referendum style of government was the norm, not a desperate, abnormal expedient.  It happened regularly, once a month, even as frequently as every 10 days.  For there and then the demos (people) of the Athenians really did hold and exercise the kratos (power) over the public organs of governance, and the right to decide, by majority vote, what the laws and policy of the Athenian state should be.

Flash-forward to 1863, Gettysberg, Pennsylvania.  In his great address President Lincoln hailed his own state’s political system as a form of democracy: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.  But what a difference a millennium or two had made.  From the originary, Athenian meaning of democracy to the Civil War-torn Americans’ etiolated, watered-down version of indirect, representative parliamentary democracy was a very long stretch indeed.

Since then, democracy in its various Western forms has taken a few mighty steps forward, not least the move to full adult suffrage regardless (in theory) of gender, race or creed, as well as economic status.
Demos (people) + Kratos (power) = Democracy


A refined definition

The writer of the previous article seems to believe that there shouldn't be any barriers to voting.  He states four categories of people who were excluded and are now included, but he doesn't state any group of people who deserve to remain excluded from voting.  For any country, the citizens of other countries, for example, should not be eligible to vote in that country.  This is the official policy of the government of Mexico, for instance, and it should be the policy of the United States Government as well.

These are the first four paragraphs of a February 22, 2018 article in Remezcla titled "How Mexicans Living Abroad Can Vote in the Upcoming Presidential Elections". All of these links were in their article.
To acknowledge the significant contributions of Mexicans living abroad and encourage them to take part in the country’s political process, the Mexican government has launched the Voto Chilango campaign.  Despite its name, the initiative is meant for all Mexican citizens.  The government is spreading information on how those interested can register to vote and/or apply for a voting card in hopes of increasing the number of participants in the upcoming elections this summer.

Though the campaign will help people vote in the presidential election happening later this year, it will also empower those from Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Puebla, Yucatan, and CDMX to participate in local elections.

In order to vote, you need to register with a valid voter ID card.  If you already have your ID and it’s not expired, you can simply head over to www.votochilango.mx or www.votoextranjero.mx and register before March 31.

If you don’t have a Mexican voter ID, you can obtain one in the US by making an appointment at your nearest Mexican consulate (there are 50 across the country) and presenting your birth certificate, a valid ID (such as a driver’s license, passport, consular ID card), and proof of address. You can set up an appointment over the phone at 1-877-639-4835 or online here.
This is the first sentence of the third paragraph in the previous article.

"In order to vote, you need to register with a valid voter ID card."

The Mexican government requires much stronger proof of eligibility to vote in Mexican Presidential elections than the United States Government requires for its' own Presidential elections.  Please read my essay about United States voter identification laws.


One alternative to Democracy

Democracy is a political term, so any alternatives to it would be political in nature, not economic.  Socialism is an economic term, so I will not mention it in this section.

An obvious, stated dictatorship

This is one complete page of the website of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  All of these links were on the page.
Dictatorship of the proletariat, in Marxism, rule by the proletariat—the economic and social class consisting of industrial workers who derive income solely from their labour—during the transitional phase between the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of communism.  During this transition, the proletariat is to suppress resistance to the socialist revolution by the bourgeoisie, destroy the social relations of production underlying the class system, and create a new, classless society.

The dictatorship of the proletariat originally was conceived by Karl Marx (1818–83) as a dictatorship by the majority class.  Because Marx regarded all governments as class dictatorships, he viewed proletarian dictatorship as no worse than any other form of government.  However, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 resulted in a dictatorship not of the majority class of proletarians but of a political party that claimed to represent proletarian interests.  Contrary to Marx’s vision and as George Orwell (1903–50), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), and others had foreseen, the proposed dictatorship of the proletariat eventually became a dictatorship of former proletarians.
This is the last sentence in this entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica page, without the links.

"Contrary to Marx’s vision and as George Orwell (1903–50), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), and others had foreseen, the proposed dictatorship of the proletariat eventually became a dictatorship of former proletarians."

Karl Marx and a co-author named Fredrich Engels wrote about their ideas for a classless society in the booklet on the left.

As I have stated on some of my other essays, the biggest threat to a society is the lack of accountability of it's leaders, not a class structure.  The leader of any country must be accountable to their people, and he should state his sincere belief that he is also accountable to God.

As I explicitly stated in my July 2012 essay Why Dictatorships are Always Bad, if there is no accountability in a country, then the resignation or death of one dictator, or a coup d'etat, can replace one dictator with another one.  This is why the Lenin the Dictator was replaced with Stalin the Dictator.


It's hard to transfer power peacefully in a dictatorship

These are the first three paragraphs of an undated history article on the British Broadcasting Corporation website. The two photos after these paragraphs were in their article.
A struggle for power developed between Stalin, the secretary of the Communist Party, and Trotsky, the brilliant Commissar for War.  In a way, the struggle was about what the Soviet Union would become, for Trotsky believed in encouraging world revolution, whereas Stalin advocated Communism in one country' and said Russia had to establish its power before there was any attempt to spread revolution.

Stalin was a master of political trickery.  He used his position as secretary to put his supporters on the Central Committee of the party.   He even told Trotsky the wrong date for Lenin's funeral, so Trotsky turned up a day late.  And so it was Stalin who became party leader in 1924.  Trotsky was dismissed, then exiled and murdered in 1940.

"And so it was Stalin who became party leader in 1924." (because Leon Trotsky had been murdered instead of simply losing an election)


Dictators are often killers

Eight years later, it was Stalin who caused the starvation death of seven million Ukrainians because he was unhappy with their dedication to the principles of Marxism.

These are the first three paragraphs of the Holodomor website.
In June of 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 men, women and children in Ukraine were dying of starvation each day.  The land that was known worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-made famine of unprecedented scale.

Stalin and his followers were determined to teach Ukraine’s farmers “a lesson they would not forget” for resisting collectivization, which meant giving up their own land to work on government controlled farms.  Moreover, the famine was meant to deal “a crushing blow” to any aspirations for independence from the Soviet Union by the Ukrainians, 80 percent of whom worked the land.

While millions of people in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Soviet Union was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population.  For 50 years, surviving generations were forbidden to speak of it, until the Soviet Union was near collapse.
This is the first sentence of the third paragraph above.

"While millions of people in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Soviet Union was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population."

Stalin killed more people than Hitler did, so he was a worse murderer than Hitler.


Both men (Hitler and Stalin) led a government that refused to give its' people any political power.  Stalin took advantage of the fact that Karl Marx's idea of a government didn't have any process for removing the leader, even if he was an alcoholic, like Stalin was.

In contrast, this is the structure of the American government including all three branches, listed in the order of their appearance in the U.S. Constitution.
  1. The Legislative Branch (the Congress)
  2. The Executive Brahcn (the President)
  3. The Judicial Branch (all U.S. Courts, headed by the Supreme Court)
All three of these branches have some oversight over each other.  The U.S. Constitution, even before any amendments were added, was written with the explicit ability to remove the President from office.  The 25th Amendment, ratified soon after President Roosevelt died of polio, includes a process that can force any President to leave office even if he is not impeached for any misbehavior.  These are three essays I wrote on the subject of this constitutional (and thus explicitly legal) process.
In addition, the people of America have some political power.  Every President and every legislator must be elected by a vote of the people.  If a first-term President wants a second term, he must be reelected, again by a vote of the people.  The technical aspects of this vote are explained in an essay I wrote on this blog in September 2016, when I thought there was a possibility that the presidential election of 2016 might be so close, a special procedure might be implemented so that the members of the U.S. House of Representatives would choose the next President.  That procedure is in Article II, Section 1 of the original document, but it was modified by the 12th Amendment and further modified by the 20th Amendment.


Democrats who don't like Democracy

Some of these people are registered members of the Democrat party, but their words and their actions disagree with other, more mainstream Democrats.  This section also mentions organizations which have received the public approval of well-known Democrats, even though their stated goals and their public tactics are very different from the definition of a democracy.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

Her opinion in 2011 of Occupy Wall Street

These are the first three paragraphs of an October 24, 2011 article in the Daily Beast. All of the links in these paragraphs were in their article.
Elizabeth Warren is running for office in the most high-profile race in the country not involving Barack Obama.  It’s a position that calls for some tact.  So what does she think about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are roiling the country?

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she says.  “I support what they do.”

Warren’s boast isn’t bluster:  As a professor of commercial law at Harvard and the force behind Obama’s consumer-protection bureau, Warren has been one of the most articulate voices challenging the excesses of Wall Street.  Still, she enjoys an outsize celebrity for an academic and bureaucrat: a favorite guest of Jon Stewart,  Warren, 62, has become a hero to the left, a villain to the right, and a fascination for everyone in between.  Now that she is challenging Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown, she has emerged this year as a poster child for what some of America loves, and an increasing swath of America hates, about the president.
“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she says. “I support what they do.”

The organization called "Occupy Wall Street" will be featured in the next page in this series.

These are links to similar stories, listed in chronological order, oldest first.
Huffington Post, October 25, 2011 Washington Post, October 25, 2011
Boston Globe, October 25, 2011 The Hill, October 25, 2011
Public Radio International, October 25, 2011 The Associated Press, October 27, 2011
Business Insider linked to the Daily Beast article on October 25th.

Red State linked to the Daily Beast article on October 25th.

Slate linked to the Daily Beast article on October 26th.

Mother Jones magazine linked to the Daily Beast article on October 26th.

Boston Magazine quoted to the Washington Post article on October 26th.

Pin the tail on the donkey

Elizabeth Warren supports a movement that hates the democratic process.  Democracy, by its' own definition, would give the people enough political power to choose:
  • a health plan,

  • whether to support America's military,

  • whether to believe scientific facts about the earth, including the facts that are in my April 2016 essay, which shows that the earth's temperature goes up and down when the earth-sun distance changes, and
● whether to work at a job that offers a particular wage, even if that wage makes it hard to pay your bills.  That wage may, in fact, be a fair wage, considering the low amount of job skills that are necessary for that job and the low monetary value of the products that are received when the job is done.


A lot of Elizabeth Warren's supporters also hate the democratic process, because they voted in 2012 for her to be in the U.S. Senate in larger numbers than the people who voted for the incumbent Republican (Scott Brown).  However, he has the last laugh, because President Donald Trump, elected in 2016, appointed him to be the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, which gives Scott a lot of foreign policy experience if he should decide that he wants to run for President.  The photo on the right shows him in New Zealand with his wife and dog.

The photos and video below shows that they are failing to use any part of the democratic process to make changes.  These people are, instead, using a process that was used by Russia's Bolsheviks to throw the ruling Romanov family out of power and thus, to begin the Russian Revolution.
This image came from a February 16, 2016 blog article.
The photo above came from an October 6, 2011 news story on the website of the CBS-News affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia.  Notice the sign that says "Capitalism is organized crime".  Elizabeth Warren gave these people their inspiration.  She doesn't believe in capitalism, either, and although she's a Senator, she prefers the undemocratic process known as street violence..

This video, uploaded in June 2018, shows an Antifa protest in Portland, Oregon.

These street protests are not a democratic process.  There is no free and fair election of the leaders of any event that is intended to cause political change.

The protest leaders do not listen to anyone who has a different opinion, either.
This video, uploaded in late September 2017 by Steven Crowder, shows the tactics that are used by violent groups like Antifa.

Elizabeth Warren approves of these tactics even though she, like every other United States Senator, takes an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution, which established the framework of the government that she is now a part of as a United States Senator.

This is not a democracy.



These are the first two paragraphs of an October 16, 2012 C.N.N. story. The photo was included in their story.

(CNN) – She served as one of President Barack Obama's top advisers during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, so it's no surprise that Obama has thrown his backing behind Elizabeth Warren, who is running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.

"Elizabeth Warren will be a strong, tireless and determined advocate for the people of Massachusetts, building on her remarkable record of working to help middle class families get ahead,"  Obama wrote in his statement.  "Her life's work has been helping ordinary Americans get the fair shot they need and deserve."
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren also never condemned the violence that was done to the supporters of Donald Trump immediately after his election as President.

Because Elizabeth Warren gave the intellectual background for these low-intellect people, she is saying  that she wants a revolution in this country, possibly just as violent as the ones that forced the Russian rulers to leave, because some of their family members were murdered.

This image came from an October 14, 2011 Crain's New York article about Occupy Wall Street.


The above photo was taken in New York City in the 1920s and was found in an August 25, 2017 article titled ‘Thank God for the Russian Revolution’: When America discovered Bolshevism on the website called "People's World". This website used to be called The Worker's Daily.

Link to a May 14, 2012 article in the Canada Free Press titled Elizabeth Warren: Senate Candidate, Marxist Author & Shameless Race Grifter.

Link to an undated article about the death of Occupy Wall Street, on the website of the Democratic Socialists of America.

This is the first paragraph of a November 8, 2017 article on the website of the Trubune of India. The photo of the Bolshevik Centennial Anniversary in Moscow was in their article.

Given that the system it gave birth to lasted only a bit over seven decades and has now been gone for over a quarter of century, does the Russian Revolution, even in its centenary year, hold much relevance?  But many still know little about what is known as the Great October (or Bolshevik) Revolution, including that it was Russia’s second in 1917 and actually occurred on November 7.
Elizabeth Warren is a Democrat in name only because she doesn't like the principles of democracy.  Her most accurate description is "Marxist".

In 2011, Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren supported street protests like this, which have been copied by more violent groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

These street protests are not a democratic process.  There is no free and fair election of the leaders of any event that is intended to cause political change.

This is not a democracy.
On August 12, 2017, she spoke to a group called Netroots Nation.

"'Democrats must move further left to improve their political fortunes', said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Saturday."

The previous quote "Democrats must move further left" and the following quote are both from an August 14, 2017 Daily Wire article, which was published two days after Senator Warren spoke.
The neo-Marxist senator recited a litany of left-wing euphemisms, including but not limited to “universal health care,” “reproductive rights,” “anti-war,” “campaign finance reform,” "comprehensive immigration reform," “net neutrality,” “gender identity,” “living wage,” "climate change," "trickle-down economics," “affordable housing,” “debt-free tuition,” “undocumented immigrants,” and “workers’ rights.”


These are the first three paragraphs of an August 20, 2018 article published by the Hoover Institute.  The link in these paragraphs were in their article.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been openly contemptuous of American business.   She proved it yet again last week by publishing a dangerous and uninformed screed in the Wall Street Journal outlining a proposal that, if implemented, will shake markets to their roots.  Like many proposals for radical reform, her Accountable Capitalism Act would destroy the institution she says she wants to save.  The bill’s central provision tells the whole story: all corporations whose annual revenues exceed $1 billion dollars would be required to receive a federal corporate charter to remain in business.  Those charters will come with conditions attached, to force corporations to pay due attention not just to their shareholders, but to their employees, suppliers, and their local communities.

Warren believes the federal government can attach whatever conditions it wants to the charters it issues, and she further claims that it should act to reverse the purportedly dangerous trend of top corporate officials making cash distributions to their shareholders instead of plowing those proceeds back into their own businesses.  Her intellectual nemesis, no surprise, is Milton Friedman, who in a seminal 1970 article argued that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

The most obvious problem with Warren’s proposal is that it would likely lead to the largest flight of capital from the United States in history.  Foreign investors will see little reason to put their wealth at the mercy of some crusading federal board that can override a company’s board of directors.  Current covered American corporations would have powerful incentives to dump assets or relocate overseas.  Make no mistake about it, her proposal calls for the outright confiscation of wealth through the nationalization of corporate boards that would be forever beholden to political figures.  Surreptitious socialism turns out to be her way of saving capitalism.  And for the worst of all reasons.
This is the first sentence in the third paragraph.

"The most obvious problem with Warren’s proposal is that it would likely lead to the largest flight of capital from the United States in history."

The Democrat Party, especially its' Socialists, are unable to accept the fact that the economies of every nation and every state within that nation have a dynamic economy.  If the people who live in that nation or state have the legal ability to make choices, they will always make choices that benefit themselves and their families.  None of them will allow a government's taxing authority to take more than half of their income.

As shown in the following diagram, when the legislature of any nation or state increases tax rates from a minimum amount to a moderate amount, the amount of tax that is actually received by the government will increase, but there is a tax rate that represents the maximum amount of tax revenue.  A tax rate that is above that maximum will decrease the amount of tax revenue that is received by the government.


Would you live in a country that confiscated 75% of your income and gave most of that to other people who lived in your country?

If any country did give away 75% of the income of its' wealthiest citizens, why would any poor person make the effort to work at a job, especially a job that had a risk of physical injury?


This ten-minute video, uploaded in July 2018, shows an interview with Elizabeth Warren, conducted by the CNBC show Speakeasy with John Harwood inside a restarurant.

At five minutes, fourteen seconds, he asks her, "You don't think capitalists are bad people?"

She responds, "I'm a capitalist, come on!"
She is lying through her teeth.  A capitalist would not have helped a group like Occupy Wall Street.  See the links to news stories at the beginning of this section.


U.S. Representative Steve Cohen

This is a link to his official website, hosted by the U.S. House.

On July 16, 2018, he posted this tweet.

Michael Moates, the Chairman of the D.C. Chronicle, was the first person to recognize that his tweet was literally asking for the U.S. military to take control of the government away from the U.S. President.

This is the link to the website of the U.S. House Committee on Ethics.  This is the very first section of Rule 23, the Official Code of Conduct that is enforced by this committee.
A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.
It is likely that Steve Cohen, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has just violated this rule of the House Ethics Committee. He may have also violated actual U.S. Laws, which is a much more serious matter.



Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

As stated in the first of the news articles quoted and linked below, she won an election for the U.S. House of Representatives, beating a man who was widely expected to become the next Minority Leader of the House, if the control of the House had switched from the Republican Party to the Democrat Party.

U.S.A. Today

These are the first six paragraphs of a June 27, 2018 U.S.A. Today story. The links in these paragraphs were in their article.
The message 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered in a web video last month may not have been specifically about federal issues, but it went viral and struck a chord in the diverse New York City district where she beat 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley in Tuesday's Democratic primary.

"After 20 years of the same representation, we have to ask: Who has New York been changing for?" Ocasio-Cortez said as Crowley was shown on the screen.

"Every day gets harder for working families like mine to get by. The rent gets higher, health care covers less, and our income stays the same. It's clear that these changes haven't been for us, and we deserve a champion," she said.

It's not that Crowley, 56, had ever been considered a conservative. He was potentially in line to succeed California Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' leader next term, and in a tweet gloating about Crowley's loss, President Donald Trump called him a "Big Trump Hater."

But in a climate where some liberals want Democrats to use every tactic available to resist Trump – and were angered they agreed to end a government shutdown in January without ensuring protection for young undocumented immigrants – Crowley, as the No. 4 Democratic leader in the House, was painted as part of the establishment.

Ocasio-Cortez ran on a platform promising paid family leave, Medicare for All, a universal government jobs guarantee, justice reform to "demilitarize our police," and abolishing ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
This is the last quoted paragraph of the previous story, without the link.

"Ocasio-Cortez ran on a platform promising paid family leave, Medicare for All, a universal government jobs guarantee, justice reform to 'demilitarize our police,' and abolishing ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office."

The police in any city, including New York City (her city), are there to protect innocent people from criminals.  The next story is one of thousands of stories I could show you if I had the time to find them and the space to reprint them.

These are the first three paragraphs of a December 11, 2017 N.B.C. News story. The link in the second paragraph was in their article.
A suspected terrorist detonated an "improvised low-tech explosive device" inside a New York City subway passageway during the Monday morning rush hour, injuring himself and three other people and causing chaos at one of the city's key traffic hubs.

The device went off in the 42nd Street passageway between 7th and 8th avenues, and the suspect, later identified as Akayed Ullah, 27, was taken into custody, New York Commissioner James O'Neill said.

Ullah said he attempted the attack in the name of ISIS, telling investigators that he was angry over the killing of Muslims being around the world, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.

New York Magazine

These are three paragraphs of a June 27, 2018 article in the New York Magazine, one of Alexandria's home-town publications.
Crowley’s team never went negative against Ocasio-Cortez, in part because of the big lead they thought they had, and in part because of the optics of bringing the fight to a young woman of Puerto Rican descent in a district that is just 25 percent white, and in part because it wasn’t Crowley’s style.

Ocasio-Cortez had no such qualms, at one point suggesting to an interviewer that there was a Crowley-led conspiracy to rig the voting machines against her.  She railed against Crowley’s ties to the Queens machine, in particular highlighting how high-level officials in the county Democratic Party serve as lawyers before Surrogate’s Court.  “He was the chairman of the Wall Street New Dems.  That is totally inappropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview in front of her campaign office late last week.  “He is manufacturing a foreclosure crisis by working with his donors.  It is to me completely disqualifying for this community, as working class as it is.”

She hit him for helping to create ICE — she favors abolishing the agency — and for working to weaken Dodd-Frank.  She railed against him for residing in the D.C. suburbs, where he is raising his three children with his wife.  “A Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us,” she said in a soaring and viral web video that laid out her candidacy.
“'A Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us,' she said in a soaring and viral web video that laid out her candidacy."

These complaints are all economic complaints, but her stated platform also has elements of Marxism, which goes further than Communism does.  Communism simply prevents ordinary people from owning their cars, houses, and businesses.  They all belong to the state under Communist principles.  A Marxist government also establishes a dictator as the head of the government.

Their primary literary inspiration is Karl Marx, who wrote that "the proletariat" must be a dictator, so any citizen who isn't revolutionary enough is, quite literally, an enemy of the people.  That's why Joseph Stalin was willing to starve seven million Ukrainians to death, as mentioned earlier on this page, and that's why the Democrat Party of the United States must marginalize Socialists before they can become influential Communists and Marxists in any state in this country.

This is a link to another article in that same publication, dated July 3, 2018, and titled Ocasio-Cortez’s Socialism Can Work in the Midwest — With a Rebrand, which means that at least one of their writers, and most of their editors, also believes in the overall benefit of Socialism and perhaps Communism and Marxism, too.

Newsweek

This section was added August 6, 2018.

These are three paragraphs of a July 17, 2018 Newsweek story.  The link was included in their article.
New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called on protesters rallying under the “Abolish ICE” banner to occupy border crossings, airports and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices across the country.

Ocasio-Cortez made the comments during an interview on Monday with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, speaking alongside Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau.

Asked by Goodman about her decision to leave New York to join protests at the U.S.-Mexico border just days before the primary in which she defeated Democratic Representative Joseph Crowley in a stunning upset, Ocasio-Cortez said, "There is no convenient time" to "stand up against human rights violations."
This is the last quoted paragraph of the previous story.

Asked by [Democracy Now's Amy] Goodman about her decision to leave New York to join protests at the U.S.-Mexico border just days before the primary in which she defeated Democratic Representative Joseph Crowley in a stunning upset, Ocasio-Cortez said, "There is no convenient time" to "stand up against human rights violations."

There are, however, many convenient and very democratic alternatives to street demonstrations.  They include speaking one-on-one with State Representatives, State Senators, U.S. Representatives, and the two U.S. Senators who represent your state in the U.S. Senate.  They are all elected by the people (a democratic process) to represent you and many other people in a legislative body that can make changes in the laws and send them to the chief executive (a governor or the president) for his signature.
 Speaking with voters is a basic part of every legislator's job because that legislator represents a group of voters, either one district or one state.

Speaking for one state is such an important job, the Constitution requires that two Senators speak for each state.




However, when a legislator talks with voters, he may find out that a large number of voters disagree with him on an issue that they care about and are happy to have the opportunity to tell him so.

These are three paragraphs of a May 20, 2017 Houston Chronicle story.
Congressman Al Green was threatened with lynching after he demanded the impeachment of President Donald Trump on the House floor this week.

"You ain't going to impeach nobody. Try it and we will lynch all of you," a caller said in one of several threatening recordings the Houston Democrat played at a town hall meeting Saturday.

"You'll be hanging from a tree," the caller continued.
The photo below was included in this Daily Mail story, published the same day, about the town hall meeting that was mentioned in the previous story.


The American Spectator

These are the first five paragraphs of a January 8, 2019 American Spectator article. The links in these paragraphs were in their article.
Throughout the 2018 campaign season, Democrats, pathologically obsessed with identity politics, were jazzed up about two particular candidates.  One, of course, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who Democrats are slobbering over as their party’s new poster-girl. DNC chair Tom Perez gushes that the 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez “represents the future of our party.”

What’s fascinating about that is that Ocasio-Cortez is not just a member of the Democratic Party; she’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — the nation’s largest socialist organization.  The DSA has surged from a membership of about 5,000 prior to November 2016 to over 40,000 by November 2018.  Ocasio-Cortez’s success has prodded herds of excitable “progressives” to sign on the socialist line.

“The day after she won the Democratic nomination, the group had 1,152 people join its ranks — 35 times more than an average day,” reported the Hill.  “The last time they saw a similar increase was the month after President Trump was elected.”

Not only is the DSA the hot new thing at your local Starbucks, but it’s also seeping into the Kultursmog at your insane local university.DSA boasts chapters on 217 campuses.  And if Joe and Sally Liberal are too old to join up at the local college crazy-house, they can conveniently find a DSA revolutionary center at the nearest big city.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is their girl, effectively crowned Miss DSA 2019, or, actually, Miss Democratic Party 2019.
Socialism has peaks in its' popularity.  These are often seen when a person who was a socialist before an election wins an election.  Alexandria is one of these people, but a socialist economy cannot be imposed on a capitalist country unless the political structure of the government changes to a dictatorship.

When she begins to work with other legislators on bills, and when she finds out how hard it is to force the ideas of one person on the House of Representatives, with 435 members, Alexandria will have to choose to either abandon her socialism or to keep it and abandon her House membership.

Watch the video in this tweet




Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, Oregon

This section was added August 6, 2018.

This is the website for the City of Portland, Oregon.

This is the page on that website for Ted Wheeler, the Mayor.

These are the first two paragraphs of a June 20, 2018 article in The Hill.
One person was arrested Tuesday after Portland protesters shut down a facility used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain immigrants.

A guard told a woman trying to get into the building that the prison “is closed and ‘it’s unknown when it will open,’” because of the protests, according to a report from Raw Story.
The photograph below and its' caption were included in a June 23, 2018 article on the website of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A tent city has formed outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Southwest Portland in protest of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.

These are the last four paragraphs of a June 23, 2018 article on the website of Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said the city’s police officers did not participate in any effort to remove protesters from the site.  He said their actions were limited to directing traffic after federal police blocked the roadway.

“I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience,” he said.

Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly said her office is coordinating with Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office to get clarity on the city’s role in DHS’ actions.  She said city officials are also coordinating with Oregon’s congressional delegation to get additional information on the situation.

“I have unwavering support for the protesters,” Eudaly told OPB.  “Portland is a Sanctuary City and we are going to act like one.  I’ll share additional information as soon as I have it.  For now, I encourage everyone on the scene to document interactions as much as they can to hold DHS accountable.”

These are the first six paragraphs of a June 30, 2018 article in Willamette Week, published in Willamette Valley, Oregon, whose location is pictured on the left.  The links in these paragraphs were in their article.
The union that represents U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers says on at least two occasions last month two federal ICE employees called Portland police while being harassed by protesters—but cops did not show up, because Portland's mayor had ordered them not to intervene.

Members of the union, called the National ICE Council, sent Mayor Ted Wheeler a cease and desist letter Monday demanding he require Portland police to assist federal agents if called upon.

The letter, filed this morning by the union on behalf of employees working in Portland's ICE office, says Wheeler's decision to order Portland police not to assist federal agents was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.  Specifically, it cites the 14th Amendment, which says the government cannot deny any person equal protection under the law.

"Your current policy forbidding Portland law enforcement agencies from assisting employees of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency who request law enforcement assistance while at or away from work is a violation of the United States Constitution's Equal Protection Clause," the letter says.

ICE is a scorned agency in Portland, especially in the wake of a White House policy of separating immigrant families at the U.S. border.  A protest camp blockaded and harried the Portland ICE office for more than a month.  The camp was abandoned and swept by police July 25.

But the letter places a new legal demand on Wheeler.  It says that if he does not allow Portland police to assist federal immigration agents from here on out, the ICE union will take him to court.
The Washington Times published a similar story on July 30, 2018.

These similar stories were published July 31, 2018.
The Hill Fox News The Daily Caller

The Wall Street Journal published a story on August 3, 2018 titled Anarchy Breaks Out in Portland, With the Mayor’s Blessing.

This is the Merriam-Webster definition of anarchy.
  1. absence of government
  2. a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
    • the city's descent into anarchy
  3. a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
These are the fifth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs of a June 27, 2018 Washington Post story titled Portland ICE protest grows; demonstrators seek to abolish agency amid immigration crisis.
Much larger cities have since picked up on the ICE encampment tactics started here, including in New York and Los Angeles, and protesters here aren’t surprised that homegrown Portland protest tactics are catching on elsewhere. This is a city that thrives on dissent, a place former president George H.W. Bush once called Little Beirut, that exploded in protests in the wake of Trump’s election and that continues to be a stage for antifa and Proud Boys to throw punches.

“It’s a part of our organic fabric of Portland. The energy and the anti-establishment fervor here is unlike any other place on the West Coast,” said T. Oliver, 46, who has come to the ICE protest during the daytime with his daughter. “This isn’t some Democratic Party agenda … it really is grass roots, nonviolent revolution.”

Danialle James, 32, leads an impromptu tour of the camp: There’s no leadership here, people say, but some members of the community speak via walkie talkies, and there’s a color-coded system of bandannas to signify duties. James, wearing a red Notorious BIG T-shirt, made her way through a camp kitchen where a walkway has been constructed out of wooden boards, where two volunteers were slicing watermelon and chopping vegetables. They put out bowls of fresh cherries and carrot sticks.
This is part of the second sentence in the third paragraph of the previous story.

"There's no leadership here, people say ...."

"No leadership" is the "absence of government" that is the very first definition of the word "anarchy".

Early in this section, I quoted the first six paragraphs of a June 30, 2018 article in a journal called Willamette Week.  This is the seventh paragraph of that article.  It quotes an attorney for some I.C.E. agents who communicated in writing to Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, Oregon.
"We understand that you have a difference of opinion with the current President of the United States, and some of his policies, but we fail to see why targeting the employees of ICE and leaving them vulnerable to violence, harassment and even death furthers a legitimate government interest," their attorney, Sean Riddell, says in the letter.  "Your policy has created a zone of terror and lawlessness."
"Your policy has created a zone of terror and lawlessness." which is a clear and unmistakable sign of the lack of any government.  One of the purposes of a legitimate government is to protect public safety, including the safety of the people who perform the sometimes hard task of enforcing their nation's law enforcement duties.

The Mayor of the City of Portland, Oregon is allowing a group of anarchists to stop a legitimate function of the U.S. Government, possibly because he sympathizes with the concept of anarchy himself and possibly because he prefers an alternative form of government, such as Marxism.

 I was there on December 13, 2018.

The statue had a "Merry Christmas" banner hanging from its' right shoulder, and its' hands were painted red to symbolize the blood that was "on his hands" as a result of his ruthless determination to eliminate all enemies of the new governmental state.


This statue is located in the city of Fremont, Oregon, near Seattle.

Another page in this series is unfinished. It will be about organizations, some of them part of city governments, that discourage or even disallow any involvement by their own people. That is an explicit change from the meaning of the word "democracy", which means the power of the people.  I quoted three different online dictionaries that had similar definitions of the word, but the people on this page and the organizations on the next page don't want any input from real people, some of whom disagree with them.


Future pages in this series

At least three minor political parties in America have factions.  Part 3 of this series will show those factions.

Only one page has been written so far about factions within the Republican Party of America.  I have begun writing another page on that topic.

On July 3, 2018, I had so much material about Democrats who don't like democracy, I decided to split the page in half.  The next page in this series will focus on organizations, including a city council in an American city and a college campus in an American state that don't like the principles of democracy, judging by their actions, not their words.
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