A PEACEFUL GLOBAL UPRISING

Those of us who long ago realized that human civilization itself is on the brink of collapse should take note of the mass protests in Brazil, Turkey and Egypt that are actually having an effect on governments. Having begun to make progress in gaining liberty and economic justice within living memory, they value them more deeply and are prepared to fight for the right to continue to create more just nations.  This willingness to combat forces many would have viewed as undefeatable before the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement gave them hope, they are showing the peoples of nations around the planet that a new world is possible.

Citizens of Western nations are failing to respond adequately to the threat to the economic, social and environmental destruction that will devastate human civilization. They have not yet realized the urgency of finding a way to use the power of our vastly superior numbers to seize power from the few who would enslave the many in a cycle of endless war, increasing economic inequality, mass starvation, pandemic, loss of basic human freedom and dignity and ultimately, the destruction of the environment that sustains us all. The protests in Greece, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria and Canada among others have not produced real change, leading many to conclude that the grip on the power over government held by the global elite is too strong to be broken, so have given up trying. If we feel any sense of responsibility to our children, we must reject this self-defeating attitude and do all that we can to end the enslavement of the vast majority of Mankind in what is rapidly becoming a fascist New World Order. Resistance is not futile. We can crush the corporatocracy, but the world revolution will begin only when we accept that it is not only possible but imperative.

Whenever the subject of mass revolt is brought up in the United States, one hears a chorus of familiar excuses for why it cannot be done. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that has led to the US going from having the highest standard of living in the world to being a nation with economic inequality greater than the United Kingdom, from which the people who created the US separated so that they might not be subjugated by a nation long corrupted by the depredations of an economic aristocracy. If Americans can awaken to their collective power they can take back America for the People and create a democracy that will then spread naturally throughout the world. Only when injustice is resisted everywhere will it be possible anywhere. The task may seem unattainable, but the difference between the impossible and the merely improbable is the will to do the hard work that makes the improbable possible.

Though few realize it, poverty in the US is at record numbers. Americans remain ignorant of the fact because it is obscured behind government statistics that few understand. The majority who get the information that is the basis for their political thinking from a media that has become presstitutes for the government and the plutocrats it represents. The official poverty line is $11,000 for an individual and $23,000 for a family of four. Using the more realistic figure of $17,000 as the poverty line for individuals, fully one third of Americans are poor, more than half of them children. It is clear that the Puppets in Washington have decided that the era of shared prosperity for Americans is over.  It is up to average Americans, with the support of others who are suffering from the actions of their corporate-controlled government, to show that we demand a new era of social and economic justice.

The Puppetmasters of Washington have made clear they have no intention of tolerating the sharing of their wealth produced by workers and expropriated by them. The mass of Americans are falling into poverty as the American economy descends into a self-destructive spiral must organize and united to force them to relinquish the power over us that we have given them, despite decades of growing complacency and ignorance born of affluence. Today’s economy is built on financial transactions that amount to a rigged game of Monopoly, where the .1 percent are gaining not only at the expense of the poor, but even the 1 percent. After all, there is only one winner in that game. Of the 90% of wealth that has gone to the top one percent in the last 10 years, the vast majority has gone to those at the very top who are the real rulers of America, through their ability to pick who Americans are allowed to represent them in Congress and the White House. With the right message, it is possible that we may even get the support of the majority of the one percent who do not yet realize the true nature of their self-interest.

Americans are well aware that millions of Greeks, Spaniards and Italians have taken to the streets, if only sporadically. They realize they are protesting austerity measures designed to destroy the welfare states that protected average Europeans from the worst excesses of capitalism and assured a decent standard of living for every one willing to work and those who could not do so. They were shocked to learn about 25% unemployment rates in Spain and 50% of youth unemployment, never realizing that the real rate of unemployment in the US is over 40%. That statistic is masked by Obama’s triumphant proclamation that the official rate has dropped to “only” 7.5%. Even though most know that figure does not include those who have given up seeking jobs in the new economy, few realize that the shrinking middle class has created a lower class that is growing in numbers and potential power. One of the advantages of knowing that you have no hope for employment is that it frees time to join in mass protest, as Occupy showed. The problem is that Occupiers stubbornly resisted prioritizing objectives. Anyone with military experience would realize that we cannot win this class war without a strategy that leads to clear objectives. Brilliant tactics are meaningless if not based on objectives developed with a clear strategy in mind.

The greatest virtue of Occupy is that it raised the consciousness of Americans that the only real democracy is direct democracy. The greatest danger it presented is that in failing to lead to a growing, sustained movement, most will conclude that democracy is not possible. The truth is that it is possible if Americans can learn to understand that there is more to democracy than the ability to speak and vote on collective decisions. However, it will take a new willingness to listen to those who are focused on a strategy to peacefully overthrow the existing political and economic order by creating a mass movement, one that is international is scope, organization and strategy. It must include those in other nations who have already taken up the struggle for freedom. They need the support of Americans willing to put pressure on their government to act in the interests of all rather than the few on whose behalf they feel they owe their positions of power and privilege. If they realize that their real interest is served only in working on behalf of average Americans, we will have at least a Republic, one in which government represents the People.  Such a government would stop wasting national resources on wars that serve only the corporate interests. The entire world would then be free to reorganize itself into a stable society.

The task then in creating an international front against fascism and war will most importantly depend on a change in the collective consciousness of Americans. While only part of a general global awakening to the fact that we need not submit to slavery if we can work together to end it, it is the most critical component. Americans, and to a lesser extent those in other highly developed nations, have to awaken to their collective power and the urgent need to exercise it. It is citizens of these nations whose representatives in government are the chief builders of a New World Order. That structure is designed to accommodate the whims of the global economic elite who are its architects.

The citizens of NATO nations that have known only relative prosperity for generations have the most to learn about the reality of deprivation. When the majority come to understand the need to consider the good of all if democracy is ever to be more than an illusion promulgated by the rich to keep the rest of them complacent, democracy will be possible. As long as they play defense within the existing political order, they are bound to be defeated. It is only in becoming part of a movement that stretches beyond international borders to fight for liberty and justice for all that they will become responsible citizens of a planet fit to pass on to their children.

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY 2012

Today, we celebrate the sacrifices of the American colonists whose belief in self-determination was so unassailable that they put their lives on the line to prove that democracy was possible. A small minority of radicals reached out to those who sensed the oppression of the economic aristocracy of the day but who lacked the clear vision to see that the problem was inherent in a system where a few are given the power to determine the lives of the rest. They convinced growing numbers that only the overthrow of this system could end the threat of economic slavery. When enough colonists understood that it was their God-given right to rule themselves, the resistance was born out of which came the American Revolution.  

The Revolution was not merely a reaction to taxation without representation. The spark that lit the fuse was a special corporate tax break for the East India Company that benefited only the English aristocrats who controlled the British government and used it to advance their own narrow self-interest. When the good of all was threatened by the fascism of its day in 1775, We the People of colonial America arose to fight the tyranny of crony capitalism, giving birth to a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all white men with property were created equal.

In the decades since, there has been a continuous battle between those who understand that democracy is based on equality of all persons and those who would preserve the advantages of a fortunate few. Americans fought a Civil War where brother murdered brother to pay in blood for the original sin of allowing slavery to persist in the newly united states of America. Women won the right to vote only when the men who loved them stood at their side demanding that their rights be respected by the ruling class. It took unseating some of the lying men in Congress who claimed to support suffrage to make the point that liberty for women was not to be denied because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We are now engaged in another form of civil war, one in which Americans are divided between those who fear radical change and those who understand that only a peaceful democratic revolution can ensure that the American experiment in democracy does not fail and the last, best hope for Mankind does not perish from the Earth. American must help their fellow citizens realize that to save democracy we must once again come together as one with the common purpose of ensuring liberty and justice for all. To engage now in divisive politics where those with whom we disagree are regarded as the enemy is to forfeit our right to rule ourselves by consensus to guarantee that our children will not be enslaved in a fascist New World Order. If we do not come together in a spirit of universal concern for the rights of all, we will not only have failed those who have willingly given their lives in the belief that they were fighting for freedom. We will have failed in our responsibility to our own children to assure that they will inherit a world better than that into which their parents were born.

The rights of former slaves were assured not by bloody civil war but by a constitutional amendment declaring them citizens with equal rights and a unified movement by a rainbow coalition to assert those rights when they were threatened by racism and hate. Similarly, the voting rights of women were assured only through constitutional amendment and the struggle by men and women who understand that democracy depends on equality and were willing to stand together to ensure those rights and that America would continue toward true democracy where liberty and justice for all were more than just a reassuring myth.

Following a senseless world war between corporate Empires, in the 1920s those sickened by war came together in an international effort to declare that war was illegal. They succeeded only by putting aside differences in strategy and working simultaneously in the League of Nations and through efforts to ratify by treaty the principle that every nation has a right to self-determination without the threat of unprovoked war by powerful alliances of governments operating solely for the benefit of a privileged few. This is the only way to ensure that the American dream of democracy will spread to the world at large. In the end there will be no democracy in America until all Americans stand for liberty and equality for every citizen of Earth.

The task for Americans is to free themselves from corporate rule by unifying behind a constitutional amendment that will make it forever illegal for themoneyed class to buy politicians who put their interests over those of We the People. Such an amendment can be passed if Americans ask of candidates for federal office whether they will support an amendment that will undercut the current source of funding that has entirely corrupted the electoral process in the US. They cannot be paralyzed by the fear of failure. If they believe in the ideal of democracy they will find a way to bridge the vast chasm between those who choose to identify with the imaginary tribes of conservatives and liberals. If they can agree that they will not be willing slaves of corporate Puppetmasters who control the US government, they can free themselves and the world from the grip of fascist tyranny once and forever. When we do, we truly will have won the war to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy for the first time in human history.

WE ARE THE WORLD

From anarchists to Tea Party supporters, everyone in the US who senses something terribly wrong in the world wants to build a movement to change the course of history. They will fail until they realize that every day wasted fighting each other instead of the real enemy is one more day that will see the deaths of thousands of innocents at the hands of the international corporate terrorists who control the US and UK governments and by proxy, most of the other governments of the world.

Most Americans who are just waking up to the havoc wreaked by their own greed, complacency and despair believe that it is their fellow citizens who have led the nation down a path to self-destruction. This causes them to aggregate into groups bound only by superficial attributes that isolate them from others. This is a natural human tendency but one that must be fought if we are to bind together enough people to form a movement that can claim to truly represent the 99% who are the victims of the class war that they are losing in battlegrounds around the world.

Those of us who want to help form an a leaderless movement to take back America in time to save human civilization must begin looking for the values and beliefs that can unite us. We can make common cause to pursue liberty and justice for everyone of our fellow citizens of the Earth. We all share and depend on the natural resources of the planet for our individual and collective survival. We must learn that all of us are more alike than different. What we have in common is much more important than our differences. Our diversity is necessary for the survival of human civilization.

None among us is without fault. We cannot say that others are the problem if we deny that we are each part of one human society, because that makes us part of the problem. The infighting between those on the Left is the reason that they have not succeeded in forming a unified front since the Vietnam era. Focusing on differences in strategy and tactics rather than supporting all nonviolent means of change has kept them weak and divided. On the Right, the opposite is true. In discouraging individual thought and following self-interested leaders propped up by their control of the corporate media, the Right has destroyed any hope that genuine conservative leaders can help stop the madness of the neocon assault on humanity.

Even while those on the Left begin to unite by tearing down the walls between them, they can begin to bridge the gap between the Right and Left. We all share disgust at the betrayal of the middle class by the millionaires in Congress who put corporate interests above those of We the People. We all laud individual responsibility but must recognize that the collective good comes from recognizing social responsibility. If we can agree that it is money in politics that is at the root of the assault on democracy in the US, we can begin to move forward together. We must recognize that a nation that was created by people of different beliefs must put aside its differences in the cause of justice. This is how we can forge a new sense of American identity as citizens whose government is one of, by and for the People and not merely the 1%.

Although the media is not reporting it, there is already a movement to heal the divisions between the Left and Right. In Occupy encampments around the United States, Ron Paul supporters began to talk to their counterparts on the liberal Left who share their outrage at the theft of our children’s future by the banksters who crashed the US and world economies. They are united in calling for an end to wars of corporate Empire. While they differ on the political means to achieve this, they stand together to promote these values. This is the first step in unifying the voices of the Left and Right to create a chorus of demands for change rather than the discordant cacophony of those focused solely on issues they see as directly affecting them. When health care reformers join hands with antiwar activists, environmental warriors and those fighting lonely battles for their pet causes, our collective strength can build a groundswell for change that will change the collective consciousness to one in which our interdependence is recognized by all.

Liberty and justice for all are only secured by democracy. The people of the United States must form a consensus in order for their leaders to understand that they will no longer tolerate being enslaved by a corporate elite. When Americans abandon the notion that the constitution was formed not by God but by imperfect men forced to compromise by the urgent need to fight fascism in Colonial America, they will understand the need to amend the constitution to ban corporate contributions in elections. This is the only way to assure that corporate money will no longer dictate to the Puppets in the US government what course the nation will take.

When Americans create a true democracy in the United States, they can help spread democracy to other nations not at the barrel of a gun but through the example they will set. The US can once more become a shining beacon of the hope for self determination of all nations when its citizens act on the recognition that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are all in this together. None of us will escape alive. During our short time on this planet we have an inescapable duty to those who have died believing that they sacrificed their lives for freedom to assure that the last, best hope for Mankind will not perish from the Earth. More importantly, we have a duty to our children and generations yet unborn to assure that they will grow up in a world free from the twin threats of want and war.

HOW TO BUILD A MOVEMENT

Soldiers For Peace International was conceived as a model for how to build a movement capable of ending war. It closely parallels the mass movement after WW I to make war illegal by international treaty. That was spearheaded in the US by a war hawk turned diplomat and supported by groups around the country and then around the world who realized that if the vast majority of the citizens of developed nations worked together to make their will known, their governments could not easily refuse.

One of the key constituent groups of this movement was the religious community who all agreed that offensive war should officially be made an international crime. They put aside doctrinal differences and came together in the cause of liberty and justice for all of the Peoples of the world, which is of course the message that all the founders of the great religions of the world tried to impart to the billions of their followers. It is this kind of unity upon which a successful mass movement depends.

The movement was divided at one point when those who wanted to pass the law through the League of Nations butted heads with those who wanted to do it outside of the League by treaties ratified between individual nations. In the end it was the latter strategy that succeeded, but only because the two sides put aside their differences and supported each other as they pursued their individual strategies in parallel with each other.

We know of course that a strategy to end war that tries to use the United Nations as its vehicle is doomed to failure because of the undemocratic nature of the UN, where the most powerful nations retain the right to veto the will of the majority. The token representation of the rotating members of the Security Council is thus a sham. The only benefit of the Security Council is that the major powers provide a check on each other’s excesses. Even that was not enough to stop the rape of Libya, the weakening of the Russian sphere of influence that is one leg of the balance of power or the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like the Occupy movement that came two decades later, Soldiers For Peace International was designed to be anarchical. Contrary to the popular perception, that merely means that there are no designated leaders. The advantages of this structure should be obvious by now. Without designated leaders the movement is not subject to being co-opted. Leaders can arise only on the strength of their ideas, which is their only source of support. They become in a sense a natural “aristocracy” but one which can only retain leadership by consistently putting the interests of the 99% over ego and personal interest.

Soldiers For Peace also depends on the leadership skills of those who understand military strategy and tactics, whether they are veterans or not. Make no mistake: We intend to go beyond mere protest and create the conditions for a peaceful, democratic Revolution that will free all people from the threat of enslavement in a permanent fascist New World Order. That can only happen if we develop a consensus behind each step in the strategy that develops in this way. Our Army is not dependent on imposing the will of a few leaders on those who volunteer to serve but on the willingness of foot soldiers to fight for a cause they believe in, regardless of the strength of the opposition of their corrupt governments or the divisive infighting of self-appointed leaders within the movment.

We are seeing a point in the budding American and world Revolution where we have to choose whether to proceed together or in tandem. We have no hope of success if we cannot agree to work together on our mutual goal. If we compete with each other for money or for “followers,” we will find that we have none. As the Occupy movement has shown, in this worldwide democratic Revolution each of us must aspire and be given the opportunity to become leaders in our own right, to the best of our ability.

Millions of Americans have already decided that the key to establishing true democracy in the United States is passing a constitutional amendment that will cut off the source of corporate power at its root: The ability to choose the Puppets of their choice to represent their interests over those of We the People. That power rests on their ability to pay for the obscenely expensive political campaigns of those willing to sell their independence in exchange for working for the international corporate terrorists or at best to fight a losing battle against the endemic corruption that corporate rule has created.

The largest coalition in the abolition movement is Move to Amend, a hierarchically structured organization controlled by a few self-appointed “leaders” who dictate strategy and tactics to the huge coalition of groups they claim to represent. They have rejected all efforts of constituent groups and individuals to persuade them that depending only on their strategy of passing resolutions at the local and state level has no chance of success. Their most active spokespersons have repeatedly argued that Congress is so corrupt that it is useless to try and persuade its members to introduce and fight for an amendment that will accomplish our mutual goal of moving us a giant step forward in ending corporate rule.

There is a second coalition forming that has a different strategy. It is to make support for a strong constitutional amendment a campaign issue in every race in 2012 and beyond until we elect enough servants of the People to get the amendment passed. This strategy has been embraced by groups as diverse as Take Back America for the People, Abolish Corporate Personhood Now, Move to Amend of Ohio, Public Citizen, Free Speech for People, People for the American Way and Demand Progress. Take Back America and Abolish Corporate Personhood Now are working to develop a common strategy, while each of the other groups is encouraged to promote the Pledge to Amend campaign in any way of its choosing.

One of the other problems confronting those of us who are working for unity in the abolition movement is that some groups have chosen to back a particular amendment and bicker and backstab supporters of other versions. Move to Amend for instance backs an amendment that the Steering Committee wrote without allowing constituent groups to criticize or debate. Once more, the ugly head of elitism is threatening unity of the movement. The amendment they produced has been criticized by a number of constitutional lawyers and other experts on the topic, yet their response to this criticism is to ignore the concerns until they feel that their positions of influence are threatened, then attack the critics and attempt to isolate us.

The persistent disregard and outright rejection of the will of the members of a coalition that voluntarily puts their names in support of the efforts of those who start the coalition is the sure sign of a failed leadership. That is what all of us are fighting: failed leadership in Washington. If we cannot move forward together to create the critical mass needed to succeed in this nonviolent democratic Revolution, we will fail. Those who divide us are agents provocateurs, whether that is their intent or not. Those who challenge their autocratic ways are seeking to unite, not divide. As sovereign citizens we will continue to demand that our voices are heard so that others may have the knowledge of the variety of strategies and tactics they may choose to put their efforts behind.

There is no reason that we cannot choose to work on parallel tracks to get to the same objective. In choosing to dissociate Move to Amend from the rest of the movement, the Steering Committee risks undermining its own authority, which depends on the consent of those they purport to lead. I fully expect that in the end all will be forgotten in the flush of victory, but in the meanwhile I encourage the foot soldiers of the Revolution to choose for themselves what path to take. We are all headed to the same objective, after all.