balderdash9

I supported Bernie but the DNC are not legally required to be impartial. I voted for Obama, twice, but he turned out to be an establishment Democrat (despite the "Change" slogan).

Setting my own voting aside, imagine someone complaining about voting in Russia and you respond with: 1) Either run for office yourself or 2) Vote for who you like. That response completely misses the point. The electoral system is inherently flawed and aggressively suppresses attempts at reform that would actually represent the people.

Unironically typing "repeat the mistakes of the past" with ignoring the history of how we got here displays an astoundingly myopic view of recent events. Both parties serve the same billionaires, which is why the Republicans do what they want and Dems are content with "decorum". In fact, our two-parties have displayed a remarkable overlap on the Venn Diagram:

• Republicans and Democrats both vote to increase ICE funding every year. 
• Republicans and Democrats in Congress both practice insider trading. 
• Republicans and Democrats presidents both bail out corporations that are "too big to fail" (i.e., Bush Jr., Obama).
• Republicans and Democrats both vote to give corporations subsides (i.e., corporate welfare). 
• Republicans and Democrats both receive campaign finances from billionaires (i.e., legal bribery). 
• Republican and Democrat presidents both order drone strike, resulting in mass civilian casualties.
• Republican and Democrat presidents have both bombed countries without Congressional approval (e.g., Trump, Biden). 
• Republicans and Democrats both kept Guantanamo Bay open for decades. (A precursor for Trump's treatment of immigrants.) 
• Republicans and Democrats both crack down on whistle blowers. 
• Republicans and Democrats both maintain a surveillance state on its citizens. 
• Republican and Democrat administrations both assassinated democratically elected leaders overseas. 
• Republicans and Democrats both fund Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. 

Trump was not created ex nihilo. Presidential power has been growing for decades. Congress has been blatantly corrupt for decades. We have broken (and supported breaking) international laws for decades. Trump is a symptom of a larger problem: our government functions to serve profit rather than people. The problem will continue long after he is gone, unless the American people demand more.

They will just deny reality. It's funny how the conspiracy theories always work in favor of their political party.

Which begs the question: how long have they been knowingly sitting on these emails?

Education in America differs wildly by state (and even school district). Americans often get different instruction on slavery, the Confederacy, Vietnam war, etc.

Micheal Parenti's "Blackshirts and Reds" covers way too many examples to list here. A must-read for those attempting to reject Cold War-era propaganda. Here's an excerpt:

The Costs of Counterrevolution

From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught anything about these events, except to be told that U.S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U.S. interests, thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U.S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democracy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to "uplift lesser peoples " ...

In the name of democracy, U.S. leaders waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World War II by all combatants combined. Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate estimate. U.S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a "mistake" because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads. By prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese supposedly demonstrated that they were "unprepared for our democratic institutions."

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 million in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;^1^ over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust. Official sources either deny these U.S.-sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe.

Ftn 1:The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U.S.-led United Nations economic sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.

Gotta make sure we protect the Vietnamese from the evils of communism by killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Another hundred thousand civilian casualties due to dropping Napalm, for their own good

It's fine to discuss one thing at a time, but there is a broader point being made in this post. The missteps of socialism are always taken to show that it could never work, but capitalism is failing and has failed the vast majority of us for hundreds of years now.

And how many billions around the globe struggle to secure food/water/housing/medicine/electricity/etc despite the progress of technology? Right now we could produce enough for everyone on the planet; instead, hundreds of millions live in abject poverty, for generations, because our entire productive capacity is organized around profit instead of community need.

If we stop and tally the unnecessary deaths of those who succumbed to famine, homelessness, preventable disease, war, US imperialism, etc. we will see that the death toll of capitalism is immense.

Who's got a good story?

Carrot & Stick. The carrot is you get a fraction of the money you make your boss; the stick is you will live on the street if you don't. Capitalism needs a pool of desperate/poor/unemployed workers.