By Roldo Bartimole
You know folks, the 2012 Republicans are out to destroy working/middle class people and, of course, America with it. Everything goes to the top!
They cry, “Exceptionalism,” to describe America. Yet they push the nation toward mediocrity or worse. They don’t value freedom. They value the aristocracy of wealth.
They’d love to change Social Security to a private program open to Wall Street interests. Medicare? Do away with it, they say.
They want to stop the government. Or slow it as much as possible. Obstinate Obstruction is their political game. It has the Democrats bollixed.
Can we save our decaying democracy? Not from what I see.
I want to talk a bit about the silly trash talk about President Obama as our “Socialist” leader. The mainstream media allow this nonsense attention.
Mitt Romney repeats a line about President Barack Obama accusing him of wanting a “European-style welfare state.” Wish that he did.
The truth is that Romney and his wealthy Republican backers are the ones who would like to replace for Americans a “European-style” state.
It was called Serfdom.
The European Serfdom of the 14th Century. In other words, work for the Overlord. Work for what the Overlords decide is “fair.” And work as long each day as the Overlord decreed.
Serfs owned nothing. Labor for what they were told, where they were told and for how long they were told. If you or your children starved, well too bad.
You know, works something like the Gingrich plan. Fire the school janitors. And put the third graders to work. Get them ready for life as serfs.
Maybe Romney and John Kasich and the PD would like 4th graders to teach second graders. Then we can get rid of teachers, too.
The swirling to bottom is what seems to be the agenda of those who want to rule and tell the rest how to live.
We had a good example of this drive to the bottom with Gov. Kasich and the Republican legislature’s attack on labor. Thankfully it was overturned by the voters. But don’t expect the desire to damage working interests to end.
You also may notice that Kasich is getting a rehab by the Plain Dealer, which backed him and his Senate Bill 5, overturned by the voters. Now that he’s been revealed as a venal front man for corporate interest the PD is helping him soft sculpt a new image. He hasn’t changed his policies.
The other assault waged by this same Republican/corporate gang allows moneyed interests to wage economic war against Americans via the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision. Using the First Amendment to cripple free speech. What a joke. They have legalized the most vile corruption.
The Republican right-wing Supreme Court has essentially destroyed freedom of speech in America by putting a price tag on free speech. A high price! A price that only wealth can meet.
So now we have freedom of speech – the foundation of our democracy – on the auction floor. To the highest bidders.
It’s no longer government “Of the People, By the People, for the People,” as Lincoln said, but unlike he said, “Perish it from the nation.”
The situation is so dire that I believe anyone who votes for a Republican at this time is a traitor. There I said it. And I’m glad.
* * *
Martin Luther King, Jr. Impacted My Life
The Plain Dealer website posted a front page from April 27 1967 for Martin Luther King, Jr. day. It resurrected an article written by me as a Plain Dealer reporter.
I don’t remember all the circumstances of the day’s coverage. I do remember covering Dr. King several times. I also remember seeing a young, slim Rev. Jesse Jackson during those days. Dr. King brought his Southern Christian Leadership program to Cleveland to help elect Carl Stokes Mayor of Cleveland.
The article was a major front page piece headlined: “Dr. King’s Plea: ‘Shun Violence.'” He had spoken to some 8,000 Cleveland students.
Personally, his birthday isn’t the most memorable date for me. The March on Washington in 1963 means more to me. That was the occasion of his “I Have a Dream” speech. I was there that day. I remember it more, however, from news film clips than my attendance.
I was working at the Bridgeport Sunday Post at the time. I was told I wasn’t allowed a day off to make the trip. I almost didn’t.
Late the night before my son Todd was born. I got a call from my then wife to come to the hospital and see him and get the train or bus (I can’t remember which) to Washington DC. I did in the wee hours of the morning.
It was many years later, April 5, 1968, when Dr. King again entered my life in a dramatic way. As most know, he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The following day I attended a conference of Ohio professors in Aurora, Ohio. The speaker was George Wiley, a black man and the executive director of a national welfare rights organization. He spoke to an all-white group on this day of despair for blacks.
Wiley said he was no longer going to plea for understanding from whites. But he was doing just that – trying to make an all-white group understand what it meant to be black that morning.
I was shocked when the response was negative. When college educators responded by asking Wiley when blacks would stop burning cities. Indeed, many cities had experienced violence and rioting the night of April 4.
So shocked was I that on that day, my 35th birthday, I decided I could no longer continue a “normal life” but decided to make a life change. At the time I was working at the Wall Street Journal. I quit by May and started an anti-establishment newsletter that lasted 32 plus years.
So the PD website brought back memories of Dr. King and the impact he had on one person.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]
4 Responses to “ROLDO: Free Speech Now Up For Auction”
IndyCA35
Oh grow up, Roldo. The 1960s are over. All the Republicans stand for–and I wish they stood for it a lot stronger–is to leave you alone. They are smart enough to know that to “establish serfdom,” as you put it would cripple the country. Who is it that passed a law MANDATING that we have to buy a product? What’s next? A law that says we have to buy a certain brand of car? Just look at Cleveland. All you see is decay and decline. Run for 50 years by Democrats. Don’t you know that if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you got?
Obama is not the problem. The problem is all the fools who support him.
IndyCA35
PS: Oh! About Martin Luther King…
MLK was a Republican, you know, and it was the democrats (John and Bobby Kennedy) who set J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigating him and his illicit affairs with other women so they could blackmail him, if need be.
In fact it was the REPUBLICANS who got the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964.
Roldo Bartimole
The first message’s beginning is garbled so that I cannot read it well.
The charge that Cleveland has been ruined by only Democrats leaves out the fact that Ralph Perk and George Voinovich were Republican mayors. Further, Cleveland politicians such as George Forbes and Mike White were Democrats in name only.
If MLK were Republican he was the best Republican in history.
Thanks for comments,
Roldo Bartimole
Jill
Great story, thanks.