Stephen Lendman

Democrat and Republican platforms are more similar than different - largely on deplorable policies both parties support but won’t acknowledge.

Duopoly power runs America. Two right wings represent it. Both support wealth, power and privilege exclusively at the expense of enormous harm to most people worldwide - a virulent scourge threatening humanity’s welfare and survival.

They represent America’s dark side, the evil of ill intentions. Ignore party convention bravado, theater designed to distract, deceive and avoid vitally needed progressive change.

Party platforms don’t explain America’s imperial lawlessness, neoliberal harshness harming the nation’s most vulnerable, and police state injustice enforcing ruthless governance.

Nothing about prioritizing peace and stability over endless wars of aggression, enhancing social justice instead of eroding it, making America beautiful for everyone, not just its privileged few.

Nothing on universal healthcare and education to the highest levels - fundamental human rights ignored. Nothing about putting people ahead of profits.

Nothing about America’s gulag prison system, the shame of the nation, putting mostly people of color and the poor in cages, mostly for petty offenses too minor to matter, often despite innocence because victims lack resources for a proper defense.

Nothing giving ordinary Americans reason to support either party, many reasons to renounce them.

Republicans and Democrats compete to see who’s most extremist, most willing to sell their souls for special benefits derived, most willing to sacrifice the interests of ordinary Americans on the altar of self-aggrandizement and enrichment.

Republicans exposed their ugliness in their platform preamble opening line, saying “(w)e believe in American exceptionalism” - failing to explain advancing its agenda comes at the cost of millions of lives lost, victims of “American exceptionalism.”

Its leaders are no defenders of “liberty for the world to see.” No supporters of “inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” except for America’s privileged few.

It’s no nation upholding inviolable rule of law principles. No outreach of “friendship with all peoples and all nations” is extended.

The platform endorses tax reform, benefitting business at the expense of ordinary people. It defends privilege over populism, rugged individualism over social justice.

It endorses the notion that markets work best, free from regulatory restraints. Anything government does business does better so let it. Let free-wheeling capitalism run things. Let it plunder and profit freely.

The platform is ultraconservative on LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, religion and pornography - the latter called a “public health crisis” without defining what it is. It calls for transferring federal lands to states.

It endorses Trump’s Mexican border wall to keep out Latino immigrants, at the same time calling polluting coal a “clean” energy source.

It ignores epidemic-level gun violence. Killer cops aren’t addressed, nor imperial madness ravaging and destroying one country after another.

It calls for greater militarism than already, wanting US might to be “the strongest on earth, with vast superiority over any other nation or group of nations” - calling the world “dangerous” without explaining its because of rogue US policies.

It calls America “the indispensable nation,” saying “we will lead the world into a new century of greater peace and prosperity - another American Century” without denouncing raging US aggression in multiple theaters.

The platform is 53 tedious double-column pages long, pontificating plenty, saying little more than we’ve heard before - empty rhetoric signifying nothing.

Bipartisan extremism reflected in both party platforms threatens peace, stability and fundamental freedoms worldwide.

America is no “indispensable nation,” no beacon of light to the world. It’s a scourge threatening its destruction.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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