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Thursday, December 22, 2011

THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC







Fundamentalists in the US, Iran and elsewhere have a point in saying that the US is the cause of the world's moral decline. As the place where modern "democracy" was born, the United States has been a testing ground for the experiment to determine whether it is possible that a free People can rule itself. Plato warned us in his Republic how easy it is to manipulate the masses, most of whom have no concern for anything but their immediate needs and wants. Democracy is not possible in a nation that cannot put the needs of the least among it above those of the elite that inevitable arises to control them if not prevented from doing so by the majority. 



America is in decline precisely because its citizens have lost faith in their ability to govern themselves. In good times it seemed enough to take advantage of America’s unique opportunities and turn a blind eye to the fact that its prosperity was the result of international corporate terrorists who had caused the World Wars and who were quietly assuming control of all the levers of power in the US government. We are now paying the price of complacency and must again engage ourselves in the messy business of electoral politics if we want the children of the world to know the blessings of freedom for which so many good men and women throughout the world have died to defend.
When an ostensibly democratic society becomes rich from the spoils of war, its people forget to protect themselves against their own government and the men who control it. In times of  prosperity as in the decades following WWII, it was easy to think of oneself as an “American” without stopping to think about what that meant. The “greatest” generation was given a reward for fighting fascism that should be the birthright of every person in a democratic society: A free education, medical care and an equal opportunity to share in the American dream of individual prosperity as the result of their own hard work. Now the survivors of that generation and their self-absorbed children of the next have given away democracy to the very fascist powers that the West mobilized to fight in WWII.

It is in adversity that Americans have traditionally come to the realization that if they are to have a government of, by and for the People, they must do so together. When the Robber Barons controlled the US government the union movement began. Workers put their lives on the line for their families and their fellow workers. In 1901 an assassin’s bullet thrust Theodore Roosevelt into the Presidency, from which he fought for the rights of the common man and recognized for the first time the right of workers to be represented in negotiations with their corporate adversaries. It is because that realtionship remained adversarial that unions became ever stronger until a degree of parity was reached such that the worker eventually earned a fair day’s wage for a fair days work. A thriving middle class created a market for the goods that used to be manufactured in America with pride.

During the Great Depression, the great mass of Americans awoke to the fact that the Roaring Twenties had been an illusion of wealth for all. With 25% of breadwinners out of work, homes foreclosed by the millions, family farms lost and Washington insisting that things would work out through the magic of the free market, people emerged from the Matrix and experienced reality one again. They responded by rejecting the lie that workers rights and a social safety net were “communist” ideas. They elected a man who would put the interests of Main Street over those of Wall Street and the greatest period of prosperity in American history followed.

While true that ultimately it was the boom in jobs created by WWII that pulled America out of its depression, the more essential truth is that deficit spending had been working until Roosevelt became nervous about the growing deficit and acceded to Republican demands to scale back government spending. This was at a critical time before the private sector was prepared to pick up the slack and keep the economy moving forward with robust job growth. The predictable result was that unemployment began moving upward while Republicans of the time claimed this was proof that stimulus spending to create jobs did not work and that therefore the nation could not afford to take care of the poor created by economic policies designed by those who were elected to make the rich richer.



America is going through much the same problems now that it experienced during the Great Depression. Once again, Republicans in Congress are claiming that the deficit is the result of the costs of the social safety net and stimulus spending that they made sure to water down with tax cuts for the wealthy. Corporations are argued to be the “job creators” and therefore deserving of keeping as much of the wealth produced by workers as possible. They defend the costs of the military-industrial complex as if the jobs it produced were worth the cost in lives and human misery of what has become endless war for corporate Empire. They continue to have faith in the free market that they have made sure will never exist will guide America back to prosperity. They argue that government must shrink small enough to be drowned in a bathtub so that it cannot get in the way of the corporate vultures that are determined to strip the bones of America’s once vibrant economy.

Each of these myths is demonstrably false, so why do Americans continue to accept that they still have the ability to pull themselves up by the bootstraps when the economy has been destroyed by international corporate terrorists not loyal to any nation or its Peoples, souless creatures that exist only to increase their power and wealth? The reasons are plain, but the corruption of the the elected representatives of both major Parties that manage our nation ensures that until the American Revolution is complete, ours will be a government of, by and for the corporations rather than We the People.

Plato’s warned that self-interested men by their nature would seek power and influence in a democratic society. This assumption is directly contrary to the assumption that a free People are good enough to govern themselves. As he predicted, Sophists have twisted language so that free men and women have chosen to live in the Matrix of this false reality instead of the realworld, where the only way a nation can survive is to assure that the rights of all are ensured. This then is the crux of the problem: Can citizens of the US achieve the Tectonic Paradigm Shift in American consciousness that will be necessary to end fascism in America for good, or will they miss the historic opportunity to free themselves and the world from economic slavery forever?

The answer lies in whether Americans can learn to think of themselves as each a part of a seamless whole that is the world society. If we can first learn to abandon false distinctions among ourselves, we will inevitable come to see that the best interests of every person on the planet are best served by assuring liberty and justice for every inhabitant of the planet, an Earth whose fate hangs in the balance. Only when we achieve this will we have proven ourselves worthy of self rule.

Let us consider the major obstacles that must be overcome to reach this state of transformation of human civilization into one that will be able to guarantee our posterity wil live in a free world, secure in the belief that they need never fear war or poverty again:

Americans must start by recognizing that our so-called leaders in Congress and the White House are Puppets of the international corporate terrorists that control them by choosing who will represent them in Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court that gave them personal rights that were endowed only to humans by their Creator. We the People are the creators of corporations and it is our God-given right to control them. It will take a constitutional amendment abolishing corporate personhood to establish for the first time a true democracy in the United States.

Next, partisan supporters of both corporate Parties in the Duopoly that rules America in the interests of the economic elite must abandon the delusion that any candidate with a D or R after their name will best serve their interests. In some cases this may be true, but in the vast majority of cases they will succumb to the lure of power offered to them by their corporate masters. The only way to end this system of fascism is to abandon party distinctions and put aside ideological differences in order to elect members of Congress willing to support a constitutional amendment that will end corporate power over the US government and create a new one that will truly be of, by and for the People.

In order to achieve such a coming together of the Left and Right to close circle around the economic aristocrats who would make us economic slaves in a permanent fascist New World Order, we must learn to speak to those with whom we differ politcically. We must recognize that we are all in this together and each of us shares blame for letting democracy nearly slip from our hands. Only when we begin to regard each other as fellow Americans and citizens of the world will we reclaim the power of a People united to determine their individual and collective destinies.

A key piece of the strategy must be to create a worldwide ecumenical movement dedicated to the twin causes of justice and peace for every man, woman and child on Earth. With over 80% of Americans and the vast majority of the rest of the world professing to believe in God, we simply cannot ignore the obvious fact that we must have these believers on our side. We must convince them that in each of us there is a spiritual side that compels us to seek liberty and justice for all, even when it conflicts with our selfish animal nature. If we achieve this, the message of all the great prophets will be clear and the hate-filled fundamentalists will have no sway over the sheep they have led willingly toward slaughter.

Fundamentalists in every religion have always used the pulpit to advance whatever ideas serve them. The Bible can be interpreted in many ways and has been used to justify capital punishment, war and other acts that Christ and other revered spiritual leaders throughout history would clearly have condemned. The basic message of all religions is the same: We are all one People under God and our individual and collective fates are interdendent. Only by recognizing that each of us has inherent value and a duty to serve the interests of all can the worldwide Revolution succeed and the destruction of human civilization averted.

We know that the corporate media and politicians manufactures crises to deflect blame from their own corruption. Wars are said to be fought for the freedoms our so-called “enemies” hate and our children are sent to war to expand and defend the corporate Empire that will eslave us all if we cannot unite now. The Puppets in Congress and the White House each blame "the other side," pitting American against American and delaying the inevitable: the culmination of the Revolution and the dawning of true democracy in the United States and the world. If we can learn to see beyond the self-imposed artificial distinctions that we allow to divide us, we can ensure that liberty and justice for all will be preserves for the rest of human history.

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