THE HIGH COST OF FREE TRADE

Earlier this month, 600 representatives of multinational corporations completed the latest round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been called The Mother of all Free Trade Agreements. Since 2008, industry representatives have been secretly discussing this lucrative trade agreement that will be binding on all nations that sign. Currently believed to include about a dozen nations, it is designed to be a multilateral agreement that an unlimited number of countries can be bound to by unelected "representatives."

All we know of TPP is through leaked documents that indicate that under the agreement, nations can be sued by individual corporations in a kangaroo court of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Not even Senate Trade Subcommittee Chair Ron Wyden has been allowed access to official negotiation documents.  If that is not enough to send alarm bells ringing, then Americans have forgotten the meaning of national sovereignty.

Free trade agreements are championed by Democrats and Republicans alike as the key to opening up export markets and producing jobs in manufacturing, but the promise has not lived up to the hype. The reason is that all free trade agreements are designed to benefit the multinational corporations that back them, regardless of the cost to workers, consumers and ultimately, taxpayers. We have seen that trading national sovereignty to regulate trade for the illusory benefits of “free trade” has not created jobs in the US, but in China and nations where workers are treated even more poorly.

Under current rules governing the WTO, if a nation complains of “unfair” laws or trade practices that limit in any way the ability of corporations to conduct trade in that nation, the corporation can ask the government in which it is incorporated to file a complaint. The dispute is decided by an unelected three member panel representing the interests of multinational corporations that profit by subverting the ability of a nation to enact laws to protect consumers, workers and the environment. Under the FPP, corporations would no longer have to file complaints through a government, making nations increasingly irrelevant in a world economy controlled by corporate CEOs in their own self-interest.

As one example of the power of the WTO under current agreements, it recently ruled that a US law protecting consumers by requiring country of origin labeling was an “unfair” restriction on the right of foreign corporations to dump their potentially tainted agricultural goods on an unsuspecting US market.   Even if these foods are safe, American consumers lose the right to know if they are buying American.

Imagine how much worse it would be if deep-pocketed corporations could demand that the US and Pacific Rim nations that sign on to TPP can force these governments to face judgment by a small panel of hand-picked lawyers representing their interests. We cannot allow this naked power grab to succeed.

Most Americans do not want to be dictated to by multinational corporations that have no allegiance to any nation or its people. The TPP is the next step in corporate control of the US and world economies supported by a majority of US politicians who never met a free trade agreement they didn’t like. The only way that we can fight it is to do what we should have done when Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress gave away our sovereignty to the WTO: demand transparency and that our elected representatives do what we elected them to do. That means putting the interests of the American people over the profits of multinational corporations that pay for their election campaigns.


We cannot allow an unelected international body to rule on the legality of US laws designed to protect consumers, workers and the environment. The WTO exists only to maximize profits to corporations that are shipping our jobs overseas.   Please contact your members of Congress. Let them know that you want them to fight to drag this monster out of the dark and into the light where it can be killed.

GOOD GOD! ENDING THE WAR BETWEEN ATHEISM AND RELIGION

Today's blog is by Robert Austin. It originally appeared in his blog Robertlovespi on July 15, 2012.







My Favorite Passage from the Bible, and How One Atheist Thinks We Just Might Use It to Avoid Extinction.

You may already know I am an atheist, and may be unaware that some of us have favorite passages from the Bible which were not selected for purposes of ridicule, nor of criticism of the Bible, nor because of dislike of any religion. This is my favorite passage because it contains excellent advice. I do not need “faith,” as that word is commonly understood, nor a literal belief in the devil, to recognize, and appreciate, good advice.  

What’s not to like about self-control? Or being alert? Those things can keep us all alive. They are important. I used to only cite the first sentence here as my favorite part of the Bible, but have decided to include two complete verses, for context, and elaboration through metaphor, as I interpret this passage. I see no reason not to.

Atheists (only capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, by the way) don’t have denominations, nor creeds, and there are as many different types of atheist as there are atheists. Atheism isn’t a religion — the word simply describes existence without religion. Everyone is born an atheist, albeit an unconscious one. Also, those who remain, or return to, atheism, change, during the course of our lives, just as theists do. The only people who do not change are the dead.

In defiance of stereotype, we are not all angry and bitter, although some of us, it must be admitted, are. (I used to be far more bitter than I am now, although I am working hard to change that.) Many of us even believe in non-theistic ideas which make absolutely no sense, such as, for example, 9/11 conspiracy theories. We only have one thing in common: we lack belief in deities. You almost certainly lack belief in at least some deities, ones which others fervently believe in. If you are a theist, well, atheists just take things a bit further than you — that’s all. We don’t all hate theists, and (thankfully) not all theists hate us. 

The ability to respectfully disagree is at least one of the keys to peaceful coexistence. Universal agreement among humans simply will not happen (and would be horribly boring, anyway), until the death of the penultimate person, at least. Even if there is a “last person alive” scenario in the (hopefully very distant) future, this unknown last human being will still have internal disagreements, and will almost certainly disagree with remembered ideas of the dead. In fact, given human nature, and history, such a disagreement might even be the cause of the next-to-last person’s death, at the hands of the last man, or woman, ever to live.

I do not want homo sapiens to end this way.  I’d like us to continue, for many generations, until evolution, and speciation, replace us with successor species, a long time from now — still people, but different, in ways we cannot now know, and, hopefully, people who have long ago learned to live without constantly killing each other.  Isn’t it about time we left this nasty habit called “war” behind, along with murder, rape, and the rest of the litany of human horror?

I’m a big fan of John Lennon, but I’d far rather imagine no war than “imagine no religion,” and I no longer accept the idea, common among atheists, that the second is a prerequisite for the first.

Since we have, as a species, figured out several ways to self-destruct, we cannot afford to wait for evolution to “teach” us how to coexist peacefully.  Evolution is far more efficient at destruction than creation, after all, being a random process.  Far more species have gone extinct than exist today, and the process of evolution simply does not care whether we live or die.  Entropy happens.  It took 3.85 billion years of natural selection to get here, and we will not get a second chance to get it right.

We must figure out effective ways to live with our differences now.  I do not mean that we should somehow erase our differences, for I have no desire to live in a world of clones of myself, and I doubt you want to live in your version of such a world, either.  We do, however, need to come to terms, as a world-wide society, with the inescapable fact that people are different.  We have a right to be different, it’s good that we are, and the fact that we vary so much is certainly is no excuse for killing, nor even hating, anyone.

There is another part of human nature that is on our side in our struggle for survival, and this is the hopeful part of this essay. We are good at figuring things out. We actually enjoy trying our best to solve puzzles. We pay hard-earned money for them constantly! Some of us absolutely obsess over single problems, for days — or years — at a time. Well, this is the best, most important problem we have ever faced, with the highest stakes imaginable:  how to avoid our own extinction. The world isn’t a casino with no exit, though.  It has been mostly a game of chance, so far — and we’ve been lucky to have made it to the present.  However, it doesn’t have to be the way it has been, with us stumbling through history, like drunk monkeys in a minefield — which we pretty much are, right now.

We have minds, and it’s time to use them. We can stop playing roulette, especially the Russian variety, and sit down at the table to play chess, instead. We can figure this out.

If this Big Problem isn’t solved soon, though, there may not be a long wait for extinction.  It could very well be later than you think.  Therefore, I encourage everyone to, in the words of the Bible, “Be self-controlled and alert.” That’s a good place to start.

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 ALL SPANIARDS NOW

   


Spain is joining the effort to oppose austerity measures that have sent shock waves throughout the European Union. The lesson from the voters in recent elections to governments that accepted austerity as the price to pay for subservience to European banksters was not lost on government leaders in Madrid. In Italy, Greece and other nations where leaders submitted to Merkel’s IMF-inspired austerity measures, those politicians and there parties lost power when the people resisted.

Spain is in a unique position to resist attempts by the European titans of banking to impose the Shock Doctrine throughout the EU. In this case, the idea is to extort taxpayer money by lending it the funds to pay back debts resulting from the fallout from the derivatives scam that these bankers profited handsomely from. The quid pro quo is the adoption of economic "reforms" that benefit international investors at the expense of the citizens of those nations who are then made to pay tribute to them in perpetuity. These payments constitute an ever-growing proportion of the GDPs of these nations because the austerity measures cripple the economies of debtor nations.

Spain’s rejection of the “generous” offer of the Central Bank of Germany and other lenders to provide loans at low interest in exchange for crippling austerity measures is a milestone  in the fight against austerity and the war against the workers of the world. It falls short of the daring open revolt against austerity in Iceland but may be the first step toward renouncing debt by other nations.

With the fourth largest economy in the European Union, Spain can put real pressure on European banksters to lend money without austerity conditions that have proven a disaster in Greece, Ireland and elsewhere. It is a simple maxim of economics that the only sane response to economic contraction in the private sector is expansion of the government’s role in providing jobs. That is a notion that seems difficult for banksters and other international corporate terrorists to understand. To them, life is a game of Monopoly and helping others achieve and maintain a decent lifestyle at the expense of their bottom lines is cheating.

The Greek economy is collapsing and with it Greek society is falling apart. With soaring unemployment and a shredded social safety net, the suicide rate is dramatically increasing. Those who can afford it are hoarding money in anticipation of default and a return to a drachma drastically reduced in value by the debts a profligate government has accumulated. It is ironic that in the birthplace of democracy the People’s voice has been drowned out by the cries of foul of the banksters in other EU nations. The same is true in the US, the birthplace of the experiment in modern democracy that appears to be failing since corporations were handed the reins of government there.

It can truly be said that we are all Greeks now, at risk of having the wealth produced by the worker stolen by the parasite class who control government in nations around the world. Those who profit from the sweat of others do so by bribing politicians to put the interests of multinational corporations over those of their own citizens. In the US and some other nations, this has been accomplished by financing the campaigns of those willing to be their Puppets in return for wealth and power. That is why the people of the United States must come together to Take Back America for the People, if not for the sake of the Peoples of the world then in their own self-interest, which are in the end are one and the same.

It will require constitutional change to ban all expenditures by special interest groups in American elections. That is why we are all Egyptians now as well. Egypt’s bid for democracy has been stymied by the military rulers’ defiance of calls for fundamental constitutional change that would allow for democratic elections and lead to a government of, by and or the People. Having become dependent on US taxpayer money used to bribe them to guard Israel’s southern border, the leaders of the Egyptian military are understandably reluctant to allow real democracy to undermine their privileged positions.

The only way that the Peoples of Earth will ever gain sovereignty in their own nations is for them to come together to build a united international front against fascism and war. Having suffered decades of fascist rule, Spaniards have a special responsibility. Descendents of the victims of the massacres in the Spanish Civil War have a moral responsibility to lead the effort to create a democratic New World Order. Together we can end the dreams of the international corporate terrorists who seek to establish a permanent fascist New World Order in which we are all economic slaves of a small cabal of elites.

There is hope that we will be aided by the blindness of those who would become Masters of the Universe. It is clear that they cannot foresee the imminent demise of their plans for conquest in the global game of Risk as the long game of Monopoly winds down to its predictable end. The leaders of the war against the workers of the world do not seem to understand a fundamental principle of warfare: The aggressor has no real allies, only other nations that will play along when it suits the purposes of their leaders. As the global economy collapses, expect to see these self-appointed Masters of the Universe turn on one another in a feeding frenzy.  As in any game of Monopoly, there is after all only one winner. If we refuse to play by their rules, it is we who will come out winners.

It may be a good time to invest in popcorn. It should be quite a show.

THE BLAME GAME

The first thing a family therapist learns is that to resolve conflicts leading to the need for intervention, everyone concerned has to let go of the need to assign blame for the problems. Understanding that very bad things can happen from the actions of essentially good people caught in a dysfunctional system is the first step necessary to create a strong family that can solve its problems without outside help.

This lesson applies to societies as well. Like a family, members of a society depend on each other to help deal with problems affecting each of them and society as a whole. In an increasingly complex society that is failing to meet the needs of more people every year, it is critical to remember that societies are formed to meet the needs of their members. As in a healthy family, in a sane society members do their best to ensure the safety and well being of all other members.

Across America and in many parts of the world we are witnessing the breakdown of families. As the global game of Monopoly winds down to its end, wealth continues to accumulate in the hands of the few, causing mounting pressure for the many. The strains of daily living are such that we are seeing a rise in alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, homelessness and the abandonment of the ideal that it is our moral duty to care for one another. As a result, abuse of children is rising, incarceration of youth is reaching alarming proportions and the current generation of children seems destined to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, abandonment and nihilism that threaten society as a whole.

In such circumstances, it is natural for responsible adults who recognize the problem to first look for causes. In doing so, some are singled out for blame. However,  the accusers often fail to recognize their own roles in maintaining the dysfunctional system. Those who think themselves conservatives blame the problem on “socialism” while many who think of themselves as liberal blame creeping “fascism.” The response of those who think the “mommy society” is too permissive is to demand more control over the behavior of others. Those who think the “daddy society” is authoritarian and controlling naturally rebel at restrictions on their personal freedom, leading to behaviors that frighten those who have a psychological need for order and control.

In families and societies where those in power limit choices of individuals, the result is members who do not learn to think for themselves. They do not learn to question whether what they are taught by parents or learn from society makes sense when compared to their own experience. Because of this, they may accept the fallacy that each of us is responsible for our own destiny when the fact is that in a society where the powerful are allowed to prey upon the weak, opportunities to succeed are limited by a system set up by those who profit the most from inequity.

In families and societies where personal responsibility is not taught, there is chaos because members lose sight of their collective responsibility just as surely as those who only value personal responsibility. Both fail to recognize that a society, like a family, has a responsibility to take care of its own. In either case, selfishness is the rule and all suffer as a result. When members of a family think only of themselves, there are no familial bonds to help members weather the inevitable storms life. In the same way, members of societies in which it is believed that each of us is interested in only what we can get by outcompeting each other are lost when that society begins to unravel. Thanks to our worship of those who have fared best in the game of Monopoly that we accept as a given, we have failed to recognize that we can change the rules anytime we choose. However, changing the rules requires consensus. That requires that we talk to each other in a spirit of compassion born of brotherly love.

When families break down, it is often the result of one member being labeled as the “black sheep,” who becomes the scapegoat for conflicts in the family. In a sick society where brother turns on brother, the “black” sheep are often those of color who are different only in appearance from the white majority. In the US, a nation dominated by white-skinned Europeans, the scapegoats are currently African Americans, Hispanics and Arabs. In European nations themselves, Muslims and African immigrants are often blamed for the unrest in those societies.

Now that people around the world are falling victim to the depredations of the international corporate terrorists who have seized control of the US government, we must all realize our common interest in standing up for each other to establish liberty and justice for all. We are one human family and together comprise one society of Mankind. Our commonalities are much more important than our differences: they are what make us human. Our differences provide the variety that is the spice of life. More importantly, it is our diversity that gives us the ability to evolve as a people into one which will create a rational, sustainable world in which our children can not only survive, but thrive.

SURVIVE OR THRIVE?

 

Since the beginning of the Obama administration the US has seen a rise in the number of survivalists. These are men and women who are so frightened by the prospect of the imminent collapse of American civilization that they are stockpiling food, guns and ammunition to prepare to fight for their survival in the event of the failure of government and the corporations that control it to provide for the basic needs of their consumption-driven society.

While we can understand their concerns given the performance of both government and corporate leadership over the last three decades, we cannot give in to their cynicism and hopelessness. There is a way out of the crisis that our government has created by its abdication of its duty to protect the nation and provide for the general welfare of the people. It requires us to use the power of the vote to elect member of Congress who understand that their duty is to the people of the United States, not to the corporations who fund the obscenely expensive propaganda campaigns that today determine who represents us.

Many Americans have given up hope that such politicians exist, failing to recognize that some are currently serving in Congress. These are an endangered species because they are the first targeted by the special interest money in elections that the Supreme Court has equated to speech. If we can elect enough men and women who will work for us rather than national and international corporations in finance, oil, coal, weapons manufacturing, medical insurance pharmaceutical and medical delivery industries, We the People can take control of our own government.

The only way to overcome the power of special interest money in elections is to make candidates pledge to amend the constitution to ban such expenditures as a condition of earning our votes. Americans are awakening to the fact that the two major parties have both sold out to special interests whose wishes have nothing to do with the needs and desires of the rest of America. 80% of both self-identified conservatives and liberals are opposed to Citizens United. The only thing they need do is abandon loyalty to the two corporate parties and vote for candidates who refuse to be bought.

It is easy to know who funds congressional campaigns, and thus the special interests these candidates represent, generally to the exclusion of the interests of their constituents. Part of the problem is also the presumption that a member of Congress only represents his state or district. Voters who accept this notion vote accordingly, in the mistaken belief that the function of their representatives in Congress is to fight for the interests of their state over those of the nation as a whole. This makes them special interests too. The truth is that what is best for the nation as a whole is what is best for the individual.

The unhealthy competition between states to get back as much as they can of the general fund we all rely on has led to the constant re-election of corporate tools with the clout to bring home the pork. However, the source of their power is money from their corporate benefactors, which is repaid with interest by American taxpayers. While the corporate Puppetmasters ship our jobs overseas, financial geniuses who engineer stock market bubbles that inevitably collapse walk away with record profits, leaving average Americans holding the bag while facing the prospect of another Depression.

These financial manipulations affect the global economy on which the American economy depends. Transnational corporations do not care about how their economic depredation of Americans and citizens in developing countries affects others. They respect no nation. They control the world economy through the World Trade Organization, a nongovernmental body whose chief function is to set the rules of global trade and to punish nations that attempt to protect their own economies through violations of what they call “free” trade, in an Orwellian twist of the meaning of freedom. The effect is that nations such as the US who are part of this one-world government of corporations have surrendered their sovereignty for the benefit of a few powerful men who will not stop until they rule the world. 

Stopping this vicious cycle will require both rethinking politic and setting up localized, sustainable economies based on environmentally sound principles. When we stop competing for our dwindling resources and all nations begin to work together for the benefit of all rather than a greedy few, we will find that there is wealth enough for all. This is the means by which we can set the stage to see the end of war. This is the mission of Soldiers For Peace International, an all-volunteer Army of advocates of freedom whose mission is to work for liberty and justice for all.   

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.