My inspiration for political belief for decades is a man who was a Federal prisoner who decried our involvement in the Great War. He was a third party candidate for President as he sat in a cell in Atlanta. Previously, he stopped the rail barons dead in their tracks and in effect idled commerce in this country until the White House called out the National Guard to break his fledgling union. His Brotherhood embraced the concepts of Socialism as espoused by this modest self effacing man, one the greatest overlooked leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Here are a few quotes, as true today as they were before Orville and Wilbur had ever forsaken gravity.
“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.”
“With either of those parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.”
-Eugene V. Debs
In thrall as I have always been of this gentle man, this gentleman and the hope he came to represent to millions of Americans in grinding poverty, I tried to imagine what speech he would give today to a Sunday afternoon assemblage in a shady park. Of course Mr. Debs was loquacious to a fault at times, so in the interests of bandwidth, I’ve tried to keep “his” remarks short.
My Friends,
We continue to be exposed to the wearisome circus of elected officials doing their best to adhere to the bidding of their masters while paying lip service and providing inaction to their district’s constituents. And granted, the charade has been going on far too long.
As long as money and politics are interchangeable, there will be corruption. Political “donations” are bribes. Whether the originator of the bribe is Monsanto or a millionaire, it’s still a bribe. Lawmakers spend much of their time working the phones, expanding their “war chests” so they can be re-elected. That’s time they are not using to minister to the national needs.
When an elected is forced from office, there is usually another job awaiting him in the private sector, a corporate reward for valuable service while in office. This is why our representatives are largely deaf to the pleadings of the private citizen.
It’s the money. It’s always the money. You know it and I know it. Our “free” press broadcasts the platitudes mouthed and espoused by our leaders. These comments are carefully scripted and arranged by professionals, and the memes and sound bites are distributed to party members for their “interviews.” No one steps off the path. You’ll get the same story from anyone in the same political party. However, it’s the paymasters that write the outlines.
This is not leadership. This is not advocacy for the greater good. This is not entering good judgment for the common weal. The acts now being perpetuated on the American public reflects a broken and self serving system.
This utter contempt for the citizenry will not willingly be abolished through Congressional or Senatorial fiat. Those empowered promulgate the rules and change them whenever convenience serves.
In a recent popular documentary from a brother in Flint Michigan, a former British MP made an unusually candid observation that in Europe, the governments fear the people and in America quite the reverse is true. Although this film was a splendid commentary on our broken health system, that one line was the loudest tolling bell.
Built into our Founding Documents is the prescription and behest to remove a government that abuses its citizenry, one that tramples the rights of the ordinary and has become remiss in its primary purpose to serve the common good. This is not an area to tread roughshod, rather only to be undertaken when all other remedies are doomed to failure.
The remedies include a Constitutional Convention. Because of the organized financial firepower of elite interests, any positive action would be thwarted before any serious momentum could be achieved. The array of media, the overflowing coffers of the untaxed multinationals would tie any meaningful action up in the courts for millennia. Indeed, the conservative court itself would not lend itself to a speedy implementation of the people’s will. We only need to look at recent rulings to once again see the shining gold laid at the feet of our august jurors.
The gorilla in the room is a putsch. It is insurrection. Some say it is the last resort of a populace that can no longer afford the whims of the masters. It is the forcible removal of those inured to the pleas of the governed, the apparent callous disregard for the less fortunate and disenfranchised and the lobbyists of class warfare to divide and yet conquer again.
As Time has demonstrated, the most dangerous entity in creation is the hungry man with no options left in which to provide for his family and only Stygian bleakness clouding the future. It is a time drawing well nigh in America as it did before the events in Concord, the storming of the Bastille and the slaughter in the snows of the last Tsar and his heirs.
In the end if there is not armed revolt, if there is not a period of anarchy during which societal robbers and their minions on the Hill swing from lamp posts then our organization of states as we know it will cease to exist. But with the advent of violence from desperate men so also would the Shining Beacon be extinguished and Liberty could only be an epithet screamed in derision by disorganized mobs taunting National Guardsmen. In the end Washington would burn. So also would burn the lairs of the idle rich and their possessions. It would be a doomsday from the self anointed, replacing the gilded gentry with thuggery.
We are on a collision course with an unendurable future. Our children will face the once unimaginable. Dispossession and deprivation are even now breaking on our shores. And amidst these dangerous shoals there is not one Captain, not one noble soul in view to assume the mantle of Protector. There is yet not one Avenger unassailable by the nattily attired scum that slither through the corridors of power replete with Senatorial elevators.
We approach 2012 in vivid contrast to only four short years ago. Our hopes were wrested from us in short order, those of us that truly believed in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Then there were those amongst us who yearned for the flame of Martin’s post 1966 proclamations to affirm the Great Society, to bring dignity to all regardless of creed or color. We placed these dreams of what could be at the feet of a pragmatist, a gifted orator, but in the end- a very, very ordinary man.
Now we watch appalled as the last of the Sacreds are suborned and bargained away to prevent cuts in Defense, to prevent imagined slights to the tax codes of the wealthy and to appease the IMF. The rapacious grip of the talons of international finance are decreeing austerity the world over. The dress rehearsal is the current sideshow which completely ignores the real needs of our nation.
It is a trying time, a vexing time and an era that never needed to be. This epoch has become partly a repeat of the Gilded Age interlaced with a foreboding of a coming Kristallnacht for Labor and social contracts, with a leavening of the panic of 1893. It is bewildering to watch all the doors slamming in unison. It is stunning to realize the process is speeding up. And it’s horrifying to find no one’s at the helm. No one.
It is my fervent hope that we learn the lessons from our brothers in Iceland to peaceably dissolve that which no longer works. Let us remember once again the effectiveness of a general strike to return the capitalist dragon to its lair. Wisconsin is a bellwether; naysayers might say only a microcosm, none the less, spread state to state- a mighty tool. The tool may be dusty and rusty, but as a hammer it shall still drive the nail! If tyrants with their tanks and jets can be suppressed and caged by unarmed peoples in the northern sands of Africa, so to can we reclaim our own sovereignty.
It must be our collective will for the betterment of all that drives such noble purpose. Nothing less is acceptable, nothing more is needed.