🦬 Dr Red Bison, PhD @redbison.bsky ♀🏳️‍🌈🌻

Raskin: This meaningless false dichotomy comes from the media, which is: Are you going to do accountability or are you going to do affordability? As if they were in any way different from each other. If Think about the French monarchy and when Marie Antoinette says, Let them eat cake. Is that a problem for the people of accountability, or is it a problem of affordability? It’s the exact same thing. It’s government in the interest of a tiny group of people, so nobody can afford to buy their bread. And so when the monarchy says, Let them eat cake, that is a statement of what the priorities are of a tiny privileged few who serve oligarchs and nobles and so on, and not the vast majority of the American people. I mean, the American Revolution began with the Boston Tea Party because the East India Company, which was this chartered, bloated corporation from the Crown, had decided that they should get tax advantages for the importation of tea that the colonists could not get. Now, is that a problem of corruption and authoritarianism and tyranny, or is it a problem of affordability and the cost of living? It’s the exact same thing, and it’s the same with us, right? So what’s the main dramatic price increase people have been complaining about? Well, it’s gasoline, which is up $1.50 a gallon since before the Iran War started, right? In some places, it’s still $4.50, $4.60 right now. Diesel is up to, I think, $6.70. Is that a problem of affordability or accountability? Affordability or corruption? Well, let’s see. The person who was supposed to be negotiating with Iran was centrally involved with the Donald Trump team in destroying the JCPOA. Jared Kushner was very involved in taking down the nuclear agreement that kept Iran, for at least more than a decade, from investing in any nuclear development. And then Trump came in and wanted above all to destroy that. Well, who else had an agenda of trying to destroy that so the lack of a nuclear agreement could be used as a pretext for war? Well, Iran’s principal enemies in the region—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Israel—all of those countries targeted Iran. They wanted that nuclear agreement to go away, and it was working. Great. There were all kinds of investigative enforcement mechanisms that were taking place, and it was working fine, and they wanted to tear it down. Then the lack of that agreement became the justification for this illegal, unconstitutional war, never declared by Congress, that has cost the American people more than, I think, $55 or $60 billion at this point and cost dozens of American lives. I don’t even know how many thousands of Iranians now, but certainly more than a thousand Iranians, as a girls’ boarding school was destroyed on the first day of the war.