Sunday, August 25, 2013

Remembering the speech that changed the world for the better

I Dare To Dream



The march of economic inequality, from which springs the source of racism, poverty, crime, violence, and lack of access to healthcare and higher education, has become the new civil rights issue of the 21st century. (I like to call it Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. 2.0.) King's dream of unconditional equality throughout the country can finish becoming a reality when the economic barriers that we all face on a daily basis finally come down for good, like an economic Berlin Wall circa 1989. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the masses during the 1963 civil rights march on Washington and said, “I have a dream...”. By writing and publishing these words it is my intent to help take up where King's Dream left off, and to do anything I can to help finish the job that he started. And so let me slightly change that to, “I dare to dream”.


I dare to dream of a world in which the gap between rich and poor is gone forever. We all deserve to live in a world where wealth has been redistributed in a peaceful and orderly manner and not by the barrel of a gun. I dare to dream of a country where wealth has been redistributed in 4 ways. First, every worker earns a living wage so poverty can be eliminated. Second, free higher education and vocational retraining must be available to every worker for life, including daycare available to all, that would be based on the worker's or student's ability to pay on a sliding scale, because everyone has the right to better themselves at will. Third, I envision an America where quality health care is available to every worker at nominal cost for life. Single-payer healthcare based on the current Medicare model must not be reserved only for those who can afford it, but it must be a fundamental human right for all ages. I dare to dream of an America where there will be no such thing as someone without health insurance, where every citizen will have lifetime healthcare and prescription drug coverage without qualification, and where there will be the fewest sick days for American workers and their children of any country in the developed world. Fourth, “we the people” demand the abolition of the federal tax code, including elimination of the despised federal withholding tax, which would give every American worker or business owner an immediate 18% pay raise. 
 


I dare to dream of a new America with a robust and viable economy. That is why I have been insisting on a $12.00 per hour minimum wage since 2010. I dare to dream of a new America where education will be subsidized from the cradle to the grave so that the US develops the most formidable work force the world has ever seen. I dare to dream of an America where all workers have the right to organize, to a flexible work week and to paid family or maternity leave. Most other developed countries already do this. The US is the only exception and that has got to change. The only remaining question in my mind is whether we can accomplish this peacefully or otherwise, and it looks more and more to me like it will be the latter.



I dare to dream of an America where affordable housing is the law of the land, where home ownership becomes a right and not a privilege so we can wipe out homelessness, and where the price of a house is limited to the sum total of ten years income of any given individual or household purchasers. I insist on a country where home ownership isn't part of an exclusive club with the highest “credit scores”. It is, and must become, a basic human right. Even the cave men lived in caves of their own!



I dare to dream of a country with new public works programs that put an end to unemployment forever so the USA can have full employment all the time. America's infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, and its inner cities are in dire need of an overhaul. What a better way to accomplish this!


I dare to dream of a new America with an all-new public school and university system that has an Internet-based curriculum that can be updated at will, and that is second to none in the developed world, with a new and more intensive school year, and that has viable replacements for standardized testing, and where class size is limited by law. I dare to dream of a country where teachers make what their Congressional representatives make, and vice versa.


I dare to dream of a new nation where unconditional equality is the law of the land for every citizen without exception, and this will include economic equality. I dare to dream of a new America where there is no more income tax, no capital gains tax, no alternative minimum tax, no estate tax, no self-employment tax, and where families and businesses can have a tax free income unless they are very wealthy. In its place would be a national sales tax, such as a Consumption Tax, where everyone pays proportionately the same tax rate on only what they consume, plus an “excess wealth tax” for persons with annual incomes exceeding $3 million, and for businesses with annual proceeds exceeding $300 million, so America's budget can be balanced and fair.


I dare to dream of a better USA where personal privacy is the law of the land, where identity theft is a thing of the past, and where it will be illegal for employers to obtain the credit files or credit scores of any job applicant.


I dare to dream of a more compassionate America where children have the right to a challenging and progressive learning environment, and where kids will be legally guaranteed freedom from hunger, sickness and violence, and where all God's children will have the right to safe adoption, foster care and day care.



I dare to dream of an all-new voting system, including the abolition of the elitist Electoral College, that is Internet-based, paperless, and that can be accessed from any location using any computer or wireless device, instead of wasting our time and fuel and losing work time going to polling stations, and instead of using unreliable and unsecured voting machines.



I dare to dream of an America of integrity where all of the dirty corporate money and all the filthy lucre is abolished from our political process. I dare to dream of an America where the Wall Street shysters who crashed the US economy are brought to justice, and where the keys to all of the fraudulently foreclosed homes are returned to their rightful owners.



I dare to dream of the end to America's sinister war on drugs, where all convicted nonviolent drug offenders can qualify for alternative sentences for their offenses so they may obtain early release, and where all the currently illegal drugs are legalized, regulated and taxed by appropriate legislation.



Finally, I dare to dream of a world in which all this is easily financially achievable because all the money that is being wasted currently on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere will be redirected towards all these dreams that I have just mentioned. The money is already there, its just being budgeted in all the wrong places. Let me tell you why.



If the US military took all the money it spends occupying Afghanistan for just one day and put it into an interest-bearing account, there would be enough money available to send every American school kid from the first grade up to senior year in high school through 4 years of college fully paid for, including tuition, dorms, books, food, access to the Internet and to public transportation. Here's another example: If the US government took all that money set aside from one days worth of military expenditures in Afghanistan alone, there would be enough money to build a 2,500 square feet house, fully furnished and stocked with groceries, with all the utilities already turned on, for every homeless person in the US including all the homeless kids. That's how easily we can end homelessness in the richest country in the world.



Just as surely as there was an Arab Spring beginning in 2011 that is still ongoing in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Syria, to name a few, uprisings of the people throughout North Africa and the Middle East that toppled one dictator after another, so I am telling you that there will be an American Spring no later than 2014. Beginning in 2011 with the start-up of the “Occupy” and “99%” Movements, of which I am proud to be a part, this uprising of the American people against the top 1% will explode like an atomic mushroom cloud over the American political and economic elite, obliterating them all without anyone having fired a single shot so that the remaining 99% of us can peacefully take back what has been stolen from us over the last 100 years. We can only accomplish this by uniting together as one and acting as one body to break free from the shackles of oppression that have us all enslaved.


You have just read the end of chapter 9 of my book, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” (Salt of the Earth Publishing, 470 pages, $14.95) To order your copy, go to www.sotepublishing.com. Thanks so much. Shalom!

Monday, August 19, 2013

"Occupy America", arguably one of the best books yet on the Occupy and 99% Movements, gets reduced to $9.95 with free shipping!

Occupying America: We Shall Overcome”. Written in the style of an investigative reporter, this 290-page book is simply the latest, most exhaustive and most comprehensive book about the growing “Occupy Wall St.” and “We Are The 99%” movements. It offers the clearest explanation to date about what these movements are trying to accomplish and what they stand for, and it ends with a prediction of mass civil unrest in the US and other developed countries for the remainder of 2013 and beyond due to extreme economic hardship and what amounts to enforced austerity. This is the definitive book on the state of American political dissent in the early 21st century, and it ends with a prediction of mass civil unrest (dare I say revolution?) in the US and other capitalist countries due to the extreme concentration of wealth in favor of the top 1%. Learn more

Sunday, August 18, 2013

My government is treating me like a mushroom, and I'm fed up

Our Leaders and Our Media Keep Us
in the Dark, Living in Fear


The civil unrest and rioting in Egypt has been in the headlines all week. The Obama administration and the Lame Stream Media are finding themselves in a lose-lose situation. If they choose to back the democratically elected president Morsi, they risk Egypt turning into a Muslim fundamentalist state. In that event, Morsi's government stands to inherit a stockpile of military weapons like jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and a whole host of advanced hardware like cruise missiles supplied by none other than the United States. So the Obama administration's next move could be to cut off all aid to Egypt, including military aid, in a frantic effort to keep these American weapons from being used against innocent civilians. Unfortunately for Obama and the US military, the proverbial cat is already out of the bag in this regard. If the Muslim Brotherhood gets their hands on those weapons, it will be civil war for sure. If they don't, or are prevented from reaching them, then they will be slaughtered by the Egyptian military. Either way, American weapons will be used. Shame on us for not standing up to Congress and the President, and for not voicing our outrage soon enough.


I also watched a video on my computer this past week where the news reporter referred to the Egyptian and Syrian rebels as ‘freedom fighters’. It led me to ponder why so many people were willing to accept at face value the agenda in the current US administration as well as the British government. It also led me to conclude just how easy it has been to manipulate ordinary people into backing imperialist ventures abroad, which are fought on behalf of rich people's interests. At a time of biting austerity in Europe (or its American code word, 'sequestration') and attacks on workers and the middle class, billions of dollars of ordinary people’s money was used to fund the illegal bombing of Libya, the Syrian civil war, and the ongoing drone attacks of America's clandestine wars.


The justification sold to people for such militarism is that dictators are bad. The justification sold to people for attacking or destabilizing countries resulting in mass death is that democracy must therefore be forced through by the barrel of a gun. Isn’t it terrible, the politicians and media say, that Syria's Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who is preventing democracy by putting down the rebels? The Assad regime undoubtedly has its faults, but nothing is ever said by the corporate media about the authoritarian ruling clique in Saudi Arabia, which has even given its name to that country (House of Saud). Nothing is ever said about a western backed dictator in Bahrain who has been in power for 52 years. Nothing is ever revealed about the brutal ongoing crackdowns on protestors and dissenters in those countries. When Bahrain used Saudi troops to put down uprisings in 2011, the resultant death toll was proportionally much larger than was the loss of life in Egypt during the uprising there. In fact, if the death toll in Bahrain were taken as a proportion of the population, the equivalent death toll for Egypt would have been 12,000.


Where was the outrage from the US and its client states? That’s right, there was none. The King of Bahrain was even invited to attend Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee celebrations at Buckingham Palace. As it did in Libya, repressive Saudi Arabia is playing a big role in facilitating the rag-tag rebels in Syria to destabilize a sovereign state that stands in the way of NATO and Israeli interests. And far away, back in Britain and the US, the public is being fed a pack of lies by politicians and the mainstream media about the situation in Syria, just as it has been over other military adventures over the past decade. The majority of westerners don’t have much of a clue about what is really happening. They are unaware that Syria forms part of the greater game in the region. They fail to see the links between Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, which are all part of a Washington-led wider geo-political strategy hell-bent on global domination, controlling the world’s mineral resources, its pipeline routes, and lining the pockets of western financiers and oil, armaments and logistics companies. Too many remain confused or ignorant thanks to duplicitous politicians and the compliant corporate media.


The public cannot know the reality. They will not be allowed to know, or at least for as long as the powers-that-be can get away with it. We are being kept in fear and in the dark and deceived by politicians and the media that churn out increasingly tired-sounding clichés about a war on terror or humanitarian militarism to justify murderous brutality. And the result is that too many people accept the lie that rag-tag forces made up of vicious, faction-ridden fighters, illegally armed by NATO terror governments and unelected regimes in Saudi and Qatar, are fighting for freedom and democracy. Those forces and nations wouldn’t know about freedom and democracy if they were hit in the face with it. Sorry, my mistake, they would and they do. That’s why they seek to crush it out of existence as soon as it appears. And that applies whether it appears within the borders of the US, Britain or Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere in places that are of strategic importance to them. The US track record of crushing democratic governments is well documented by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and historian William Blum. And look no further to see the attacks on WikiLeaks or the Occupy Movement to see how democratic movements are treated at home. Look no further to see how democratic workers’ movements that took hundreds of years to build in Britain and elsewhere, and for the last 100 years here in the US, and in Europe are under sustained attack. Giving the people the opportunity to vote every four or five years, while in the meantime deceiving, misinforming and lying to them, has no more to do with democracy or freedom than what is happening in Syria right now.


If more ordinary folk were to turn their attention away from glossy sports events, cheap Sunday morning political debate, reality shows, talent contests or all other forms of comatose infotainment on our TV's for one minute, they might well realize that the billionaire criminal elites that take their taxes and dictate national and foreign policy are in many cases a good deal worse than any number of the regimes they seek to demonize.