Dear Editor
Thanks for putting two interesting articles side-by-side in Friday's ADE.The writer of a letter, Ann Mullen, refers to a right-wing activist who is moving on from attacking the policies of Tractor Supply and is "now targeting the John Deere Company." The John Deere Company SHOULD be targeted, but for different reasons.
Progressive-Populists and other alert individualists have long known that John Deere is raping the farmers of America who rely on its products. Their latest atrocity against the farmers has resulted in a big set-back to John Deere, (which owns a large portion of Tractor Supply,) and which had discovered a new avenue to assert the greed of its owners and destroy the basic rights of the farmers.
One right is called the "right to repair." The equipment that farmers own and have traditionally repaired themselves over generations of small farmers right in the place it broke has been supplanted by Deere's new policy of making its equipment so complicated that only specially trained technicians using sophisticated tools can actually make the repair.
Deere rejects the traditional "roll-up-our-sleeves-and-fix-it" ethos of the family farmer and now requires any repair to be done by Deere employed master technicians who know how and have the correct equipment. Farmers must now ship their tractors and other equipment to a Deere facility where many other tractors are also awaiting their turn.
Time is money and now the money is being redistributed from family farmers to a brutal corporation that forces them to wait their turn when previously they could just fix it themselves, save money and make bigger profits.
Deere uses this method to steal from working families and make the rich even richer. Luckily, conservative legislatures in farm states have written "right-to-repair" laws to protect the farmers, at least until the likes of Deere come up with yet another method to pad their profits and ruin their customers.
Why do big corporations see the need to force Americans, such as their employees and customers, to sign contracts in which they agree not to sue the corporation for any reason? The answer is that corporations have discovered that many Americans are perfectly willing to meekly sign away their Constitutional rights to the fat cats, which is also one of the reasons the fat cats now have plenty of cash to pay for political protection courtesy of Republican politicians who pretend they are on the side of the little guy but then give away the store on Main Street to the powerful Wall Street elites.
Right next to Ms. Mullen's letter is an opinion piece by right-wing "Christian" Cal Thomas acting as an apologist for the very people the Bible says are not going to attain the kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 19:24) And according to 1 Timothy 6:10, the "love of money is the root of all evil." Why do conservatives who claim to be Christian allow the greedy rich and their corporations so much wealth and power when the Bible says they are the cause of all evil? Have they been captured by Satan and brain-washed by his henchmen in the Corporate State?
Thomas writes of the new Republican Party platform's statement that claims "the federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before." Actually, this sounds much more like the description of the activities of the un-elected Corporate State. The Corporate State is a "behemoth" that cuts taxes for the rich and their corporations, weaponizes its rules so that the little guy is forced to accept corporate dictates, and puts our traditional American values under siege as never before.
The conservatives are constantly attacking a ghost called "socialism" and will never accept the fact that socialism helped build America, especially our Western half. The word "socialism" did not even exist in 1862 when a Republican Congress and a Republican President passed the greatest socialist give away program in history, the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862.
This law allowed literally millions of Americans and immigrants to obtain land from the government free of charge if the settler could make it work for five years. Not a cent changed hands and now millions of westerners ignore historical fact and claim such socialism is evil, but they never give up their ownership of such inherited property because it makes them money. Socialism to make people rich? Only in America.
The new Republican platform wants to "restore the family as the centerpiece of American life." This will most easily be done when we go back to high taxes on the wealthy so to take the burden off the middle class which now is forced to subsidize their own entrapment into the vast and unresponsive Corporate State.
It says we need to "dismantle the administrative state," which watches the corporations like a hawk, but the best use of the administrative state should ideally be to fight the corporate state for the benefit of the people who are wrapped in a straight-jacket that was long ago deployed against our Constitutional right to sue any entity that harms any of We the People. The real problem will finally be addressed when we dismantle the corporate state.
It says we must defend our nation against global threats but now we may elect people who find friendship with Russia our best course. And these brain washed souls actually believe there will be no more problems when Ukraine is conquered by Putin.
It says we must "secure our God-given individual right to enjoy the blessings of liberty," but one of the reasons we had a revolution for was to secure the right to sue whoever abuses us but now the abusers have us dancing on strings and claiming the enemy is the liberals. But Putin is NOT a liberal.
The right to sue, like the right to repair, is God-given and we need to use our common sense and Biblical instruction to get back to even keel. The Constitution was not written in 1787 for the Corporate State, it was written for Main Street. The Wall Street Corporate State was not even legislated into existence until the 1830s in order to organize the financing of the building of the railroads, NOT to make politically connected people wealthy and powerful.