A visit with Bend Democrats

It sounds like you all are in the wrong party!

The Democrats have mostly supported the war, are totally in bed with big business, have not done much to help queers, and are about as anti-fascist as dead lice. Why don't you either find a new party (Socialists? Greens?) or forget the electoral politics thing altogether and put your energy into organizing a movement that is able to force Republicans, Democrats, whoever to do what people demand.

I agree that the Democratic Party is irrelevant and the same old guard with a different name, and we will never vote out the bastards--unless we get the vote back, but the Wal Mart story was interesting and I like the fact that these people meet and come up with cool ideas like burying artifacts and getting the land preserved. Keep us posted on this. The machine owns both parties but individuals in every party or in no party can make a difference.

The simplistic notion that Democrats are 'good' and Republicans are 'Bad' is laughable to say the least.

Its time to distance ourselves from the republican lite party. Its time for us to start thinking as Cascadians not as Amerikan idiots that see their politics as a spectator's sport favoring red versus blue uniforms or country music versus rock music. We need to start seeing "political" thought and action in a bioregional approach. We need to start seeing things as interconnected systems and dynamics with reactions.

 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Cascadian_Bioregionalism/

Bioregional democracy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State is a set of Electoral Reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.


The best known examples are the Great Lakes Commission of ten American states and the Canadian province of Ontario, which governs the largest fresh watershed in the world, and the cooperation by nations with Arctic Ocean boundaries. These are democratic entities cooperating in a international body, giving up some sovereignty by definition. This is the simplest form of bioregional democracy—cooperation to defend a single watershed.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioregional_democracy

You resort to a sweeping overgeneralization when you lump all Democrats together. This particular group of people seemed open to new ideas and sincerely wanted good ends to be brought about. Yes, the Democratic party is a leaky boat, but it's the only one I'm willing to row in right now.
Also, keep in mind that this group openly welcomed a gay couple into their midst. This is not something you would see in a Republican meeting.

I want to serve my country, Cascadia.

I'm proud to be of disservice to the Americans. They don't love it, I want them to leave it.

America just wants our stuff; our resources, our long hours and our minds thouroughly
placated and enslaved by thier stupid television and sports. The only thing they don't want,
is for it to rain.

I'd really like to see the patriots in our region start to develop some creative ways
that we can just begin to blatently and rudely ignoring the U.S. out of our country. We
need to seperate.

To make Cascadia a reality, I think we need to get a better grip on our culture and heritage
and start rejecting American culture at every turn. This is our saghlie illahie, not thiers and
if we don't protect it they'll continue to rape it.

We have our own bio-region, our borders can be defined. We have our own culture and we even have
our own language, which is rapidly making a comeback. We need to embrace these things much more
tightly before we can seperate, before they start manipulating more of the American population into
moving here and ruining more than they already have. We need to start making them feel like what
they are, unwelcome foreigners.

I think it's OK to work within the Democratic Party while simultaneously criticizing its flaws, namely, pandering to the right wing. Dennis Kucinich understood this all too well. Even Ralph Nader (don't quote me here!) said that he would vote for Kucinich if nominated, verifying what I have felt all along: it's not that the entire Democratic Party structure is a lost cause, just the neoclassical/pro-war/anti-labor/pro-censorship wing of the party. If we could find a way to put the left wing, not the right wing, of the Democrats back in power while simultaneously defending these liberals against corporate fascist criticism, then I think we could do a great deal. I, for one, will definitely vote Democrat for President in 2008 unless:

*The Republican candidate is poised to win by at least three light-years.
*The Democrat is truly no different from the Republican.
*The Democrat is way ahead in which case there's nothing to lose by voting Socialist.

The big question is how can we support the short-term efforts of the Democratic Party while still fighting toward a more radical long-term goal? But more importantly, in order to stop right-wing pandering on behalf of the Democrats, how can we defeat and discredit the Milton Friedmans and Ludwig von Mises of the world? This latter question is my biggest personal concern.