The Democratic Party and Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party just don't get it

Yesterday hundreds of Minnesotans were shipped off to Iraq... for what? To occupy a country, and steal the oil.

Funding for this dirty war should end immediately and all troops should be brought home now in line with George McGovern's "Blueprint" to end the war in Iraq. All the money being poured into death and destruction in Iraq should be used instead to create a single-payer, universal health care system here at home.

The Democrats are pushing right ahead with their feeble and miserly so-called "minimum wage increase," which is not an increase at all but will lead to a drastic reduction in living standards for millions of already impoverished working people as they "soar" over the thresh-holds for many social programs from which they will now be excluded.

Here in Minnesota the MNDFL has turned its back on the will of Minnesotans and the majority of the grassroots activists who have repeatedly insisted that the one and only solution at this point to the health care mess is single-payer, universal health care. Even the delegates to the state convention of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party endorsed single-payer, universal health care at its most recent state convention; the vote in support of single-payer, universal health care was overwhelming... the media has ignored this as it focuses on the pitiful proposals of conservative DFL legislators intent on undermining the democratic will of Minnesotans.

The New York Times lectures Hugo Chavez about democracy and private enterprise while ignoring the plight of working people here in the United States who don't have access to health care and are being ripped off by the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies.

What is it the Democratic Party and the MNDFL do not understand about what people want from them? I was tempted to ask what it is that they don't understand what people "expect" from them... but after talking to people the last few days it is quite obvious that people "expected" nothing more from the Democrats... they only voted against the Republicans, "hoping" for more from the Democrats.

The response of the Democrats in the U.S. House and the Senate along with DFL members of the Minnesota State Legislature have pretty much dashed any "hopes" the people had that Democrats would respond to the very progressive agenda people had in mind as they voted on November 7.

In the Minnesota legislature the DFL has refused to even acknowledge the massive problems people are experiencing and the threats to our living environment... together in "bi-partisan unity" with the Republicans the DFL members of the Minnesota legislature by-and-large are ignoring the facts:

People are losing the family homestead because they cannot afford the high cost of health care;

People are being foreclosed on left-and-right by the predatory lenders that are stalking this state in quest of their next prey;

Poverty is on the rise, and it is children who suffer the most;

We continue to experience a hemorrhaging of real jobs, paying real wages, with real benefits as the Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant is allowed to close without any opposition in the state legislature, and the Ford hydro dam is sold off at a bargain basement price after being heavily subsidized by tax-payers for so many years;

Minntac continues to contaminate the streams, rivers, lakes and land of northern Minnesota and state legislators look away in indifference;

Peat mining in the Big Bog continues to proceed under a permit issued by the MNDNR to a Canadian multi-national corporation completely subsidized by our tax dollars... as Berger brings from Quebec its vile, disgusting, and dirty politics into Minnesota that includes everything from bribery to get the permit to using the most pernicious and perverted attacks on opponents of this boondoggle;

Children and abused mothers have no place to turn for help as state legislators continue to ignore the need for shelters across this state; and, in counties like Washington County corruption is so rampant among judges it is a joke.

Over twenty thousand casino workers in Minnesota and hundreds of thousands more nationally continue to go to jobs in smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages and without any rights under state or federal labor laws proving conclusively that Democrats at the state and federal level have not one iota of concern for working people...

But the issues that expose the Democrats as being without any back-bone and very weak in the knees are the war in Iraq and their lack of response to this health care mess in which their primary concern, like the Republicans, is to insure that the profits keep flowing to the insurance industry which has been ripping working people off for years as it has gorged itself at this trough while pretending to provide people with health care coverage when nothing could be further from the truth.

The time has come to begin searching for alternatives to this two party trap in order to break free from the web that has been spun by the corporate greed of the capitalist system in which we are caught--- as these capitalist parasites continue to feed off of working people. We must keep the pressure on the Democratic Party and the MNDFL as we seek an alternative that will bring together liberals, progressives, socialists, and communists... working people are going to have to be more aggressive in seeking out real solutions to the quagmire we are stuck in... not just in Iraq, but here at home, also.

The capitalist system has turned into a dangerous imperialism that is rotten to its very core; and, has become cannibalistic as it sucks in the profits, chews up the people, and spits them out like seeds from an apple.

Let's talk about the politics and economics of livelihood as we sit around our kitchen tables discussing how we can free ourselves from this sticky capitalist web, the real "inconvenient truth" that has been treated as if the subject matter is taboo.