REVOLUTION- TO TURN AROUND
Across this great nation and I would argue across the world today the hard working people who form the ranks of the poor and middle class are disgusted by the status quo, the abuses of the powerful and the lack of upward mobility that robs us of the time we could be spending with our families and pursuits of happiness.
The poor & working poor have been used as a cheap labor force, excluded from the massive gains of increased automation & corporate globalization, and lied to by the political-media elite class all to keep the donor class which is America’s modern day aristocracy happy and rich.
The donor class ie those who run the boardrooms that vote to keep our wages low so their bonuses will be high, hedge fund managers, and others have very different interests than the majority of U.S. working families.
The majority of us earn $50,000 a year or less and can’t attend these fancy fund raisers and give politicians donations so we can pickup a phone and let them know what we want. But across party lines we working families want much of the same thing and we are not getting it.
We all want affordable accessible healthcare, education and housing.
We want to stop wasting money on the failed war on drugs and costly bloody unending wars.
We want bankers politicians and other powerful people who break the law and abuse the public trust to face justice in the courts same as any of us would if we did the same.
We want safe and good quality schools and safe streets for our children.
We want retirement security and dignity as we get old or our parents do and more and more of us have to take care of them, our kids and sometimes our siblings who have been displaced from the previously secure blue collar workforce.
We want our rivers & streams where we fish and parks where we recreate to be free of industrial pollution. Our skies clean so our children don’t get choked by asthma. Our drinking water & water used to grow our food on our lands safe from toxic spills.
We want our government free of corruption.
We want a kinder gentler more civil society and political system that respects each others differences and acknowledges that dissent is not disloyalty.
But the big donors of the two monopoly political parties the Democrats and Republicans, the one’s who get invites to fancy $3,000 a plate or even $300,000 a plate fundraising dinners with politicians seeking professional sponsorship, they don’t care much about our issues. And if they do, it’s not as much as they care about things like lowering corporate and inheritance taxes so they can buy yet another house or whatever shiny object they think brings them happiness.
Look, Donald Trump exists today because our society since the presidency of Ronald Reagan has allowed itself to idolize the rich as virtuous and demonize the American government as the source of all of our problems. We used to idolize the teacher, the inventor, the scientist, the astronaut, and successful small business person.
Nobody used to idolize a guy who skipped out on taxes or didn’t honor his contracts not paying his laborers for a fair hard days work! Or a person who sits in a penthouse apartment in gold plated furniture looking down on the little people. We used to think people like that were sad pathetic horrible villains. We’d never imagine making them the President of the United States of America.
The donor class has itself been taken over and ruled by the anti-government Libertarian mega-billionaires like the Koch brothers who are massively vested in the fossil fuel extraction industry who exceed even the power and corruption of the Goldman Sachs Wall Street types that go back and forth from Wall Street into the halls of government to write laws that enrich their bosses.
They’ve used their money to gain ownership and influence in the small handful of radio and television networks that now control the media in order to repeat their greed is good government is bad world view every day with fiery rhetoric and FOX’s pretty blonde “news” personas.
They funded a takeover of the Tea Party that emerged out of sincere and righteous indignation of working people against the big banks whose greed collapsed our economy and ruined our prospects for a better life and turned it into an anti insurance reform (ACA) protest movement.
Then they used the insurgency to gain access to the House Of Representatives and the United States Senate to filibuster and block any attempts to help the working poor and middle class rebuild our economy and made sure they could claim that government doesn’t work.
The majority of American working families are still full of righteous indignation at how we are all being lied to, our wages being kept low by trade deals designed by the lawyers of the donor class, and our debts rising to enrich the banking sector. All this while Congress people and presidential candidates throw fancy dinners for movie stars and other rich people so they can keep their power and wealth in tact to pass down to their kids and staff members in a new American Wall Street-Political Aristocracy.
Our first war of Independence was in part fought to get away from the abuses of the English aristocracy and corporate monopoly control of the the likes of the East Indian Trading Company (See the original Tea Party). Our founding fathers who fought in this war and wrote the U.S. Constitution warned us against the rise of powerful corporations and political parties using factionalism to enrich themselves at our expense of blood, treasure and liberty.
Today’s Republican party often proclaims that government is too big and our solutions should best be solved by local interests. But I see little to no evidence of their calling for an expansion of public citizen participation in city, county and state political solutions.
The Democratic party although it asserts its beliefs that government can and should serve the greater good itself does little to empower the grass roots instead participating in a system of donor class patronage, heavy handed party rule making, and I’ll scratch your back you scratch mine nepotism that excludes the voices of the reformers.
Until both of the two monopoly political powers are broken up like we broke up Ma Bell AT&T and Standard Oil, and the voices of the working class and reformers are allowed to be heard and voted on nationally, this nation will head down a dangerous path that leads to rule by a “strong man” dictatorship by the likes of Donald Trump or a Oligarchy pretending to be a liberal democracy by people like Hillary Clinton or another Bush.
We have to democratize our democracy. If the voices of working families are not heard in the halls of power where life and death decisions are made every day and only the voices of the donor class rule the day then anger and fear will lead our nation to a very dark place indeed.
The people must have a voice and be able to participate face to face in advocating for the society we want to live in together. Be it rising college loan debt, black lives matters, rural American blue collar job insecurity, a culture that permits sexual assaults or reckless pipelines and energy policies, people need the freedom to speak out and work for a better world.
We must have enough financial freedom through access to rising wage careers and small business success and other poverty fighting measures so we can participate in our own local and national self governance.
We need to reduce income inequality and poverty so that we have the time and energy to actually participate as citizens in bettering our own lives through education and travel, improving our kids schools, and participating in our city’s public choices and in our nations great challenges.
Without a well informed participating citizenry our Republic will continue to create a divided nation of the haves and have-nots, the working poor and country club politicians. And we can’t be well informed and participants in our democracy if we don’t have good work-life balance granted to us by access to rising wage jobs and meaningful careers.
We must have a massive reinvestment in education and public health. Workers, small business people, those with environmental expertise and concerns, childcare and senior care advocates, and patient advocates among others must have a prominent seat at the table in the decision making processes from our cities to our states and to the latest trade negotiations of our national government.
I’ll write more soon about how we can all participate in grassroots local economic solutions to retake our power together. For now I want to conclude by saying power in the hands of two few is too dangerous and it’s time to break up all the monopolies that exclude fair competition including the Democratic and Republican parties. We cannot break up the monopoly political parties from the top down as Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and even Donald Trump are learning this election cycle. We the people must get involved in growing numbers in city, county and state electoral politics.
I want to end here by telling you my brothers and sisters that you do have more power than you may believe. We all do. It is not on Twitter or Facebook. Though those tools can help us organize our power. Our power is in our neighborhoods, our libraries, our school board meetings, our main street shopping areas, our public parks, our civic club meetings and our wallets. It is in our ability to think for ourselves and decide moment by moment where we invest our time and money and whether we choose to help lift each other up or spend our time putting each other down.
