3 hour conversation with my little brother

he voted for Bush. he was a banker for Wells Fargo.
He is a christian.


we both agreed both wars are wrong and need to end.
we both agree that Dennis Kucinich is a good man, he likes Ron Paul also.
we both agreed their needs to be a public option for competition.
we both agreed that gay couples should have legal marriage.
we both agreed that corporations own most of the politicians.
he agreed to read more about Kucinich.
we both agreed that jesus was more of a buddhist .
we both agreed that wars are corporately run and to look at the money
we both agreed that many dems and the repubs, have pretty much sold out the country for money.

someone tell me what is going on.

I've noticed lots of common ground with some conservatives when it comes to wanting to curb corporate influence and end the wars too. Actually know several who are hopeful that health care reform will succeed in removing insurance industry from the equation altogether.

What is going on?

Look for more strange bedfellows in the near future. Then the powers that be will really have to work at creating pseudo-divides to keep us (the vast majority) from putting a stop, or at least slowing their (the top corporations and pigs who run them) exploitation and abuse.

edited for typo

even tho I think he is otherwise insane

I hope that those of us who are not of the top two percent start linking up together.

With that linkage, we could really have change.

All the important changes that have gone on have gone on because of huge amounts of people being of the same mind.

The centrists in both parties have turned those parties against we the people in the middle.

At the end of the 1800's even the Republican party supported the workers in the streets, and the union organizers. Now both parties sell us out for corporate donations that come to them when they voted in NAFTA, and voted out Glass Steagall, while the wars keep expanding and we are forced to hear the Ca-Ching Ca-Ching of the the campaign contributions of the Big Insurers, and the Big Bankster/Fraudsters.

And all the while the middle incomed are eliminated and forced into poverty, while the impoverished are made out to be criminals for such offenses as sleeping in their cars.

weren't feeding disinformation to divide us politically, the American people, as a whole, could be a formidable force.

Imagine that!

If only they could see they are used as pawns in a quest for power, corruption and money.

It's becoming painfully obvious that left/right doesn't matter so much as Congress is owned lock stock & barrel by wealthy contributors and corporations, meaning the occupants of seats don't matter worth a damn.

This is the beginning of the end of the Republic. If the Teabaggers take over the GOP, and get their candidates in office in 2010/2012 while taking back Congress, it's going to be a downward spiral from here on out.

Colonel Ludlow: What's going on here?

John T. O'Banion: What's going on here?

Colonel Ludlow: Yawh!

Remember that line from 2000?

Same general description: Bush, finance, christian.
The only thing we agree on is that he is orthodox in his beliefs and I am what he calls heterodox.

When enough of us can agree that corporate influence has no place in politics, THEN we can get some CHANGE. But, be forewarned, in my experience as soon as things start to improve, any common ground will disappear.

We're not allowed to find common ground with right wingers, unless it is to start wars, remove constitutional rights, or draft legislation that helps robber barons screw over the little people.

Have both of you read the Gnostic Gospels? If you have, your brother is smarter than you give him credit for.

he is not a fundy, it seems, he is more tolerant.
I was amazed. he has changed.
he had a heart attack last yr. he learned, it seems, from that.

that you dislike Obama..

he dislikes Bush and sees right thru him now.
That made me happy.

Did he recently come around to that conclusion?

Don

now he has wised up. he also thought the Iraq war was okay until he became aware of the truth, that it was a scam. he came around. he believed Fox, I guess, like so many people back then. the entire MSM was pushing for war.
He now agrees with me that Bush was wrong and he thinks it should be investigated.
I gently told him facts, and he was willing to listen (about PNAC, etc.)
he seemed unaware of that.
anyway, it was the nicest conversation I ever had with him.

Every time Democrats are in control. Nothing against your little bro, but it is typical to talk down the Democrats in power then say 'we have this magical fix to our solution!' In my life that 'fix' has been Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and GW. Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 has a helluva a lot of explaining to do before I would ever listen to their viewpoints. And valid explanations would be:

1. I was hooked on heroin.
2. I was recovering from massive head trauma.
3. I was a fucking idiot.

more of it would be nice :D

:sarcasm:

i would question where he really stood. he might be part of that percentage of people who feel differently based on anything the media reports.

He doesnt anymore. he woke up. he seems to like Ron Paul, but for the same reasons I like Kucinich.
its very odd.
anyway, at least we didnt yell at each other.

your brother.

Cool story. I stopped talking to my little sister when she became a born again Christian and wrote me a letter telling in minute detail just how horrible my punishment in Hell was going to be because I told her I believe that God doesn't hate Gay people. I think she really enjoyed imagining my everlasting suffering for eternity for that sacrilegious statement. Yet I remember when she was a real fighter for the very people she now things that God truly hates and therefore feels obliged to hate.

Most people get wiser with age. She just got more fearful and mean.

This is what happens when human beings communicate. It was likely easier because he was your brother and you have the secret ingredients of love and a shared past. Communication with strangers is challenging and is therefore avoided. The internets make it easier for all of us to crawl under a rock. We all have more in common than not. Perhaps we all should do more communicating with the enemy.

...and I think what's going on is both that your brother is evolving in his thinking, and more and more people are beginning to see where the common ground lies.

Thanks for sharing!

I currently work in a sports bar. It's a place where politics seldom intrudes for obvious reasons.

I am overhearing a few political conversations these days. A lot of talk about the honesty of politicians with the common refrain, and I have heard it so many times recently in some of the strangest situations I could possibly be in- "I've never had a problem getting a job. This is scary, I've always had a job." From what I'm hearing, what has happened to public option in HCR and the war and the bailout isn't going over well out there, and people are confused and a bit desparate.

What is really interesting is, they are talking to others about it. Strangers.

I'm sure many of those guys in the bar are not the people I would hang with for giggles. But they are echoing the thoughts of many other people of all walks of life that I have overheard or talked to in the last three weeks while wandering about on the errands of my day whether scheduled or accidental. There is a pattern. All working folk have a wide swath of common ground. We live in varied levels, but our predicament is the same.

:kick: & R

And he is just a little more libertarian than you are.

The "center" must be swinging back pretty far left if the left is nearly indistinguishable from the teabaggers.

We head 45 degrees left, 45 degrees right, 45 degrees left, 45 degrees right, being sold the idea that we have made a 'hard right turn' or a 'hard left turn' but all the while we are being "sailed" or sold upriver. Due north is unfortunately a corporately run, inescapable fascist state. The only constant is the move toward more power to the corporations and the imprisonment of the individual. Wedge issues keep us intentionally divided to ensure that we keep tacking, that we don't head off course, in a direction that is not beneficial to the oligopoly / kakistocracy / plutocracy.

A Republican starts a war, a Democrat expands it. A Democrat starts a welfare program, a Republican uses it as a tool for controlling and vilifying the underclass. A Republican crashes the economy, first a Republican and then a Democrat bails out the banks. A Democrat starts health insurance reform, the insurance companies end up enriched, and it will be later used by a Republican to destroy the existing partial public health care systems like Medicare and it defuses the momentum toward socialized medicine. A Democrat funds the Internet (God bless him!) but it is used by Republicans to create unprecedented levels of surveillance and invasions of privacy. A Democrat creates the Peace Corps, Republicans (and D's) use it to facilitate spies and coups. A Democrat creates the IMF and the World Bank ("marking the end of economic nationalism"), the Republicans use it to crush populist governments and bind the hands of those governments that challenge corporate causes. A Republican president wrote NAFTA, a Democratic president <link:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_n37_v4/ai_14276333/|championed it] as an "opportunity to provide an impetus to freedom and democracy in Latin America and create new jobs for America as well." A century ago, liberals pushed for public education, 'conservatives' use it over the years as a tool for promulgating propaganda about the Cold War or as a captive audience for corporate marketing or for de-clawing the masses or for soldier recruitment or homogenizing attitudes about ownership of stuff as the new American dream.

Lip service is paid (particularly during primaries) to populist causes like opposing NAFTA, keeping American jobs, stopping the wars, improving "education", "providing healthcare" "for all Americans", or "getting money out of politics". But the constants are that nothing stops the inexorable march toward a military state, a police state, or a corporate-dominated political system.