Our resistance is building from the ground up all across our land, as we engage in the struggle against an incompetently malicious President, elected by dint of racism, prevarication, religious fanaticism and most likely espionage.  It is easy for some in the media to characterize the Resistance Movement as simply Anti-Trump,  because it makes their analysis an easy sound byte,  but for me at least the Resistance means so much more.  In defining the parameters of Resistance,  I’m only speaking for myself,  though there are many wonderful and productive groups to which I lend my support.

There are many excellent accounts delineating and demolishing the latest ludicrous lie by this mendacious President,  the malevolent machinations of the Republican controlled Congress and the atavistic propaganda of media outlets controlled by radically reactionary Billionaires.  This Administration and it’s minions daily provide an overwhelming amount of  outrages detailing their war against any but the wealthiest in our society.  Their extreme excesses are so many in fact that our Resistance struggles to keep up with debunking their lies and falsehoods alone. Perhaps this barrage of execrable excesses is all part of a plan to inundate us with so many outrageous operations as to immobilize our opposition by overwhelming it with too many battles in which to engage.  As we fight our battles and as our fierce opposition grows apace, let us pause to ponder the nature of why it is that we Resist and what exactly we are resisting for.

The Trump “Victory” was the result of almost six decades of ultra-conservative propaganda aimed at destabilizing the effectiveness of the American republic’s constitutional plan. I’ve written about the cabal of Billionaires who funded this propaganda in  Majority Rules…..But Not In the Minds of Those Funding the Conservative Movement.  As I illustrated, the intent of these Billionaires was to not only unshackle themselves from the government laws and regulations that constrained their plundering of the economy, but in the absence of a strong government to gain complete control of our country by dint of their enormous wealth. To fully effectuate their plan though, this cabal found it necessary to enlist some of the carnival barkers of religious faith to improbably merge the gospels of Jesus with the concept of unfettered capitalism, as I explored in A Short History of the Merger of Fundamentalist Christianity and Corporations.  The final piece of this plan, crafted by some of the best Public Relations people money could buy, was to re-engineer political language in order to confound and confuse people to support policies inimical to their own best interests.  I discussed this in The Deceitful Language of the Republican Agenda which analyzed the memes created to push the retrograde agenda of the One Percent. Please forgive my linked self-reference, but I feel it is necessary to explain my premises about just what the philosophy of our Resistance should be.

The most important and therefore most pernicious effect of this battle to control America, which has played out for more than a half century, is that this cabal has made distrust of government and government action almost a given in our country.  The meme is in their negative connotation captured in the phrase “Big Government“.  This meme constructs the government as an enemy of the people to be derided.  If you think about it though, what this derisive meme stands for is the destruction of the ideal of a government of the people envisioned by our Founding Fathers and defined by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth“.

It is this conception of OUR American Government as the American people’s enemy,  that has caused incalculable harm to OUR NATION and to We the People.  The rationale for this Billionaire Cabal of would-be Oligarchs is simple to express.  If you have a weak government at all levels, starved by decreased taxation, then control is ceded to private enterprises that have the funds to exert their will upon all levels of government. There are some economists and political thinkers who believe this to be an ideal state of affairs.  They have mangled the conceptions of Adam Smith who “laid the foundations of classical free market economic theory” and who wrote  the seminal tome “The Wealth of Nations,…a precursor to the modern academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, he developed the concept of division of labour, and expounded upon how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity.”

Today a perversion of Smith’s ideas dominate the study of Economics he fostered and I’ve written about that perversion here.  This counter factual belief is that the “Free Market” is a positive, self-regulating phenomenon that in essence is all a society, OUR Society, needs to function optimally.  Given that we know that the sole aim of a capitalist corporation is to maximize profit, then the undeniable fact is that all corporations will move to monopolize their markets thus destroying the supposed positive benefits of a free market.

We can see how much Smith’s concepts have been perverted in this exerpt:

“Smith was sometimes tolerant of government intervention, “especially when the object is to reduce poverty.” Smith passionately argued, “When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” He saw a tacit conspiracy on the part of employers “always and everywhere” to keep wages as low as possible.”………

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”

That Adam Smith, who created the concept of the Free Market as a self-regulating entity, believed it was necessary for governments to intervene on the behalf of equity for all, seems a long way off from our American Oligarchs sales pitch of the evils of “Big Government“.  You might say that the distance is similar to that other perversion of Christianity, which re-packaged Jesus as a Republican Entrepreneur,  in the service of that self-same Billionaire Cartel.  This Cartel has spent billions propagandizing many Americans into believing that OUR Government is our enemy.

The only entity with the power to ensure a fair free market is government via regulation and oversight.  In the absence of government, which has become the ultra-Conservative and Republican Party wet dream, it becomes inevitable that a society would drift into a monopoly controlled, oligarchical dystopia.  The two most similar major countries with that model today are Russia and China.

Now….do you believe that it is any coincidence that the leader Donald Trump most admires today is Vladimir Putin?  Everything that Trump and his cronies have moved for politically is the destruction of the power of government to regulate corporate excess and to balance the equities of society for all of the people. From the destruction of government assisted health care, to the sale of public heritage lands, to the De-regulation of finance and industry, these lackeys of the wealthy oligarchs are working to dismantle any governmental programs that would fetter their corporate masters.

As the most ethnically and racially homogenized society on the planet, the figurative glue that binds these United States together is our Constitution and our Federal Government.  For more than 200 years our Republic has operated via the guidelines laid down in our Constitution, with the only glitch occurring when certain states waged a war of treason against the Federal Government.  From the beginning our Constitution was a flawed document due to the insistence that it turn a blind eye towards the disgrace of human slavery.  Yet flawed as it was, the American Constitution served to bind the people of this ethnically and religiously diverse nation together, allowing it to become the most successful country existing in modern times.  The war on “Big Government” is not a war waged by American patriots,  it is a war waged by radical extremists who would tear apart the very fabric of this nation.

So I propose that WE of the RESISTANCE, as we continue to double and re-double our efforts to oppose Trump and his evil agenda,  always keep in mind that this fool is merely the current symbol of a war being waged to dis-empower most Americans,  leaving us to the  aristocratic mercies of avaricious oligarchs.  Our struggle of RESISTANCE is nothing less than to gain control of OUR Government,  making it of, by and for the people!

While this song always brings tears to my eyes and resolution to my heart I would edit it to include Angry Women as well!