In The Streets

For several years I have been asking: Where are the demonstrators? Where are the outraged feminists who should be fighting the Republican Party’s attacks on abortion, birth control, and health care? Where are the workers who should be fighting the Republican Party’s attacks on labor unions, the minimum wage, and unemployment insurance? Where are the senior citizens who should be defending Social Security and Medicare from the Republican Party’s attacks on those earned benefits programs? Where are the disenfranchised voters who should be demonstrating against the restrictive voter registration laws the Republicans passed in states that were foolish enough to elect Republicans? Where is the outcry of consumers who are being dispossessed by the shell game of toxic loans? Where are the knowledgeable consumers who should be fighting back against the commodity traders who are over selling futures on gasoline and food thereby creating artificial shortages that are driving up the cost of those commodities? Where are the expressions of outrage from people who know that doing away with regulations is what permitted the reckless behavior that caused the crash in 2007 and allowed some companies to become too big to fail?

At last a significant number of people are taking fight for social and economic justice into the streets. People in states where the Republicans are passing laws against collective bargaining are demonstrating and fighting back. There are also people on Wall Street demonstrating against the reckless and unfair practices taking place there, and those demonstrations are spreading to other cities as well. The movement has finally begun. The people are saying enough. Such demonstrations are what it is going to take to get this country moving in the right direction again. In order to save the middle class informed people are going to have to raise such a ruckus that it will pull the low information voters out of the fog of Republican flatulence to reveal the greed and arrogance of the powerful few who are destroying the opportunities and the equitable distribution of wealth that has made this country so great. The anger of the demonstrators is not pretty but neither is the rule of money that has made our government, and particularly the Republican Party, so unresponsive to the suffering of the people and the best interests of this country. Is this class warfare? You bet your ass it is! The middle class of this country is tired of being ground into the dirt by the special interests and the political minions of those interests.

Even no drama Obama has finally come to the realization that he cannot deal with a Republican Party whose benefactors will not be satisfied until they have it all and no one else has anything. President Obama is finally embracing the label of warrior for the middle class. He is finally taking his battle for jobs and equitable taxes to the people. That he should have to bypass the Republican controlled House of Representative and the Republicans who will filibuster any reasonable jobs bill in the Senate just shows the nature of the class war being waged against the middle class by the wealthiest people in this country and by the Republican Party. This is a war the middle class must win if America is going to remain the land of opportunity. The pundits who are arguing about whether President Obama should try to capture the middle ground or run to the left in the next election are missing the point. In their opposition to making the rich pay their fair share of taxes the Republicans are pointing out that half of the adults in this nation pay no income tax. What the Republicans are not saying is that this means half of the adults in this nation have seen their incomes slip so low that they cannot afford to pay income tax. The high unemployment is not just hurting the unemployed. The decreasing employment opportunities are hurting everyone. The vast majority of our citizens are being squeezed by high prices and stagnant wages.

Our economic and political system is broken. We no longer have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We now have a government of the money, by the money, and for the money. Both parties are culpable but they are not equally culpable. The Republicans are now opposing measures they supported in the past when they were responsible enough to acknowledge that those measures work. By saying that the stimulus bill did not create any jobs and that the American Jobs Act will not work the Republicans are dipping so deeply into the Bandini fertilizer bag that they are wearing it as a hood. President Obama’s first goal in taking this issue directly to the people is to put enough pressure on the Republicans to get them to the pass the jobs bill. It is increasingly obvious, however, that this will not work. The Republicans have been defying the will of the people since the very day that Mr. Obama was elected President. The Republicans won the mid-term elections in spite of doing this, and they are arrogant enough to think they will win the elections in 2012 as well. The billions of dollars the special interests have provided for campaign advertising have given the Republicans a false sense of security. They honestly believe they can use that money to buy enough perfume to mask the odor of the crap they trying to sell us.

The demonstrations now taking place are unsettling to the Republicans because they can see where this movement might go. They know they have to try to put an end to the demonstrations before the demonstrators find a political focal point. What the demonstrators are expressing now is simply their anger over the disparity in wealth that has grown to such an intolerable level that it is causing a great deal of pain to the majority of our citizens. This expression of pain and anger is a small start, but it is not insignificant. By expressing their anger and their pain the demonstrators are pointing out the need for reform. The next step is to take the political action needed to bring about meaningful reform. If the Democrats are smart they will embrace the demonstrations and draw a clear line between what they are willing to do for the middle class and what the Republicans are willing to do for the wealthy. If the Democrats are smart they will point out that we must start from where we are at, and that the first step must be to relieve some of the suffering by creating jobs and stimulating the economy; they will point out that in order to do this they will need the voters to crush the Republican Party and give the Democrats a large enough majority in Congress to ram the jobs bill through. The Democrats also need to express their willingness to sacrifice something they have not been willing to give up thus far; they need to express their intention to get rid of the filibuster rules the Republican Senators have been using to prevent the passage of any legislation designed to get this nation headed in the right direction again.

An overwhelming Democratic victory and the passage of the American Jobs Act, however, are only the first steps we must take. We must greatly decrease the role money plays in our political system. Reforming our campaign financing laws will not be easy. Unless we remove from our Supreme Court the unethical corporate lackeys that form the majority of the justices there or we are fortunate enough to have a few of them suffer fatal heart attacks, it will require a constitutional amendment. Passing such a constitutional amendment will require a ground swell so great that our politicians will be powerless to oppose it. It is time for the people of this nation to wise up and rise up. It is time for them to oppose the insatiable greed of the few and take control of a political system that is supposed give us a government that works for us! There is no question about whether we are in a class war; the only question is whether we will become the impoverished and whimpering victims of the attacks on us or whether we will defend ourselves. Doing this does not mean destroying capitalism. What it does mean is the restoration of a regulated system that prevented capitalism from turning into social Darwinism and gave us the most stable and prosperous economy the world has ever known.

It is doubtful that we will ever be as economically dominate is we were following World War II, but that does not mean we should not remain a major economic power. Nor does it mean that we should give up on the American dream! We are at a critical time in our history. If instead of defending ourselves we surrender and give up on the American dream, we will have no one but ourselves to blame.