(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
An Antemdius entry uses a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said in his speech announcing the Second New Deal in 1936:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
Sound familiar? We are repeating the past. Roosevelt went on:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
What was true in 1932 is true today, and has been for going on thirty years now, but especially the last ten. We saw 9/11 happen on the Shrub’s watch, with the election-stealing chimp sitting on his ass and let a major terrorist attack kill nearly three thousand people. We saw that same dictator brush off warnings that hurricane-wrecked levies, allowed to deteriorate for years, would not hold up under the weight of rising floodwaters, and New Orleans drowned. The Shrub presided over the largest financial meltdown since the First Great Depression, and the current dictator enable the bailout of the very same corporate criminals who caused it. Barry Obama, Hopey McChangerton himself, sat by and let the Gulf of Mexico die from BP’s criminal negligence. Now the Obamassiah is waltzing through the devastation left behind by ever more extreme tornadoes as a result of Global Warming, spouting empty words, as is his pattern, but fully intending to do absolutely nothing to help the survivors.
When it comes to oppressing people, the U.S. government – at the behest of Big Money – has no trouble at all getting intimately involved in the lives of citizens. But when We the People need a hand up, when we are poor and downtrodden and need the government we pay for with our hard-earned dollars to come through for us, we are left to suffer on our own. There’s always money for more wars and more police state bullshit, always more money for endless corporate bailouts, but never so much as a single penny for ordinary folk.
And it’s all because we let organized money back into politics. For a brief moment in our nation’s history, we thought we had broken its influence. We were wrong. The corporate bosses who were defeated in the 1930s regrouped, re-organized, and slowly but steadily chipped away at the victories we fought for and won, until today there is almost nothing left – and what remains is likely to disappear within our lifetimes.
I had planned to continue my college classes over the summer. Now, because of federal and state austerity measures, I have to wait until the Fall. Being unemployed, this means I am pretty much screwed unless I can find a job before what little money I have runs out. That is not going to happen without a miracle. I’ve been unemployed too long, my credit history too disastrous, my lack of reliable transportation the nail in the coffin. I have no idea what I’m going to do to support myself. I am one of the millions of Americans left out in the cold because of the rule of organized money.
It does not have to be this way. More Americans than not support the things progressives and liberals support. We want single-payer health insurance, a cleaned up environment, clean energy, protection from unsafe labor conditions, protection from unsafe food and drink, protection from outsourcing and mass layoffs, protection from employers when those employers try to prevent us from organizing to defend our rights, and a whole host of other things that are crucial to all real democracies.
We are not going to take back our country through the right-wing Democrat Party. They are the Washington Generals to the Republicans’ Harlem Globetrotters, and both political organizations are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporations that now control this nation lock- stock, and a million smoking barrels. The best and only way we’re going to take back our country is through the twin prongs of massive protests that shut down the centers of power and running candidates from alternative political parties (like the Greens and Progressives) that actually represent us. Pretending to oppose the Democrats, all the while knowing that one is going to cave in and vote for them anyway, is a betrayal of everything one claims to stand for, and it does not help the rest of us fight back against the monstrous system that has grown so far out of our control.
Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.