note This clip is an excerpt. Watch the full show here.
Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of The Bill of Rights Defense Committee drops knowledge on the NSA in his new House track The NSA vs. the USAwhile appearing on a recent episode of Acronym TV.
A sample verse:
Some people think Edward Snowden is a Traitor /
They forget everything that happened later /
Congress LIED TO by EXECUTIVE OFFICIALS /
We’re talking about CORRUPTION in the Capitol FO SHIZZLE /
Democracies FIZZLE when their people are watched /
That’s why the NSA’s got to be STOPPED
Shahid Buttar is the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a 2003 graduate of Stanford Law School, and has appeared in media outlets including the Intercept, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and the Baltimore Sun. He spoke about NSA spying at Johns Hopkins recently to a packed audience organized by the Hopkins human rights working group and the New Political Society.
If you want to live in a country where We The People govern ourselves, all you have to do is start acting like it.
Every two years, there’s some election of some sort. Every two years, the corporate owned media reports the election results as being split between somewhere around 50%.
That’s not true. Because each year, about 60% of the population DOESN’T VOTE.
Mathematically that means that the people who vote only make up around 40% of the population. And since that population of people who actually vote is split nearly 50/50 between two pro-war, pro-corporate parties who don’t give a fuck about you, we are being ruled by the electoral decisions of 21% of the population.
People on the blue side of the 40% of people who vote love to talk about Ralph Nader as being a ‘spoiler candidate.’
With a majority of people not voting, I think we need to start looking in the mirror for who’s REALLY spoiling our elections.
Mathematically, if everybody who didn’t vote in 2000 out of apathy or cynicism had voted for Ralph Nader, Ralph Nader would have been our 43rd president. Not Bush. Not Gore. It wouldn’t have mattered that over a million people were illegally barred from voting due to fictional criminal records. It wouldn’t have mattered that the supreme court decided the election in Bush’s favor when Gore had won the most votes.
The election would have been a landslide for the Green Party, with 60% voting Green, and only 20% voting Republican, and only 20% voting Democrat.
So why doesn’t this happen? We’re told all the time by the Droopy Dogs of left-wing, the cheerleaders for apathy and cyncism, people like Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges that we should try “not voting” as a way to protest, or that third parties don’t have a chance of winning because the corporate power over our lives is SO complete, blah blah blah, doom and gloom.
Here’s the truth-- we have the vote. We are the ones who are really in charge, but we either throw away our vote by supporting candidates that don’t support us, or we stay home in protest.
So what’s the real answer? This is my call to arms:
You need to get off the internet, and get into your community. You need to start working to build the third party movement into a force to be contended with. The Green Party is only 10 years old and at a national level is skeletal at best. We need people to organize in their communities, and build third parties like the Green Party up at the local and state level. Poland threw off Communist rule by organizing people all across the country in small local, decentralized groups. It was called the “Solidarity” movement.
We need a “Solidarity 2.0” here in the USA.
In truth, if you want a government where we the people govern ourselves, all you need to do is start acting like it.
VOTE.
Or, if you don’t mind being ruled by the will of 21% of the population, stay home.
Socialism has serious branding issues here in the USA.
It's totally reviled and hated, despite it being as American as Apple Pie.
The first Government-Run Fire department was started in 1898. It was a socialist model that replaced the private fire company model, in which fire companies would compete with one another to be the ones to respond to a fire in order to get payment from fire insurance companies.
These private fire companies were extremely corrupt, and would actively prevent other fire companies from responding to a fire to make sure that they would be first, through activities like sending a person ahead of their pump wagon with a barrel. This "Barrel Sitter" would place his barrel over the fire hydrant, and sit on the barrel to prevent other fire companies from gaining access to it, and thus becoming the first to respond.
While these schmucks fought over profits, fire destroyed homes and took the lives of those trapped by the flames and smoke.
To make matters worse, private fire companies refused to put out fires that affected homes that were too poor to afford fire insurance plaques, despite there being a definite risk to the public safety that had no regard for the income of residents, rich or poor.
The socialist model changed all that, and is the model seen almost everywhere in the United States today.
That's right! Whether they know it or not, your local fire department is filled with Socialists!
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