Reject materialism this holiday season, starting with black Friday

Please Join Me in Observing

Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday

Is there a tradition any more backward or disgusting practiced across America today than that of Black Friday? Hordes of consumers mob stores for frivolous deals on ridiculously overpriced "goods" like flat screen TVs, Playstations, Xboxes, the latest gadget from Apple, boatloads of useless trinkets of dubious quality made in China and other countries you may have never heard of, or clothes manufactured by Chinese, Southeast Asian or Central American children in dangerous sweatshops. The top 1% of America's wealthy have exported our jobs to the third world for pennies on the dollar, and they're laughing at the rest of us as more and more formerly middle class Americans wind up homeless and with no job prospects.

We're in an insanely messed up place politically and environmentally. Multinational corporations and financial firms pretty much own the US government, they control Wall Street, they set the retail price people pay for anything from groceries to cars, and they are making real sure that nobody from the bottom 99% – which is us – gets their hands on any of “their” money. The use of fossil fuels is rapidly ruining our one and only planet Earth, while the development of clean-burning power plants, cars and trucks that run on electric or natural gas power, and alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, is being deliberately held back in its development by the same mega-oil companies that profit from fossil fuel use. As a result, global warming is not only a real and present danger, but it is rapidly accelerating. There is a plastic "raft" in the Pacific Ocean bigger than Texas – that's how badly polluted the world's oceans truly are. And as people we're constantly being taken advantage of to make this situation last longer so that corporate profits and bonuses can climb even higher than they are now.

The strong link between these two things – our society's consumerism and the terrible political, social, environmental, and economic situations we're in – demands action. By buying things from these corporations and feeding into this model of an economy, we only encourage it while enriching only a select few at the expense of the many. So I'm asking you: please join me in buying nothing this Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving. I can't say it any better than this: this November 29^th and 30th, I and many others like me are calling for a Wildcat General Strike. We're asking tens of millions of people around the world to bring the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding – if only momentary – halt. I want you to not only stop buying for 48 hours, but to shut off your lights, televisions and other nonessential appliances. We want you to park your car, turn off your phones and log off of your computer for the day. We're calling for a Day of Atonement-like fast. From sunrise to sunset we'll abstain en masse, not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our materialistic lifestyles. Those who are healthy enough are encouraged to go on a 24-hour hunger strike on Black Friday as well.

You know what they say: a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You feel that things are falling apart – the temperature rising, the oceans churning, the global economy heaving – why not do something? Take just one small step toward a more just and sustainable future. Make a pact with yourself: go on a consumer fast. Lock up your credit cards, put away your cash and opt out of the capitalist spectacle. It's all rigged anyway, so why bother with it? Some people may find that it's harder than they think, that the impulse to buy is more ingrained in us than you ever realized. But you will persist and you will transcend – perhaps reaching the kind of epiphany that can change the world.

Ideally, everyone will shut off their electricity for the day and just enjoy some time with their family or friends or both. If you can't do that, at least refrain from the Black Friday madness. Don't go to a store for some kind of deal. Don't shop at the big box stores - in fact, don't shop anywhere. Just take a break for one day. If you must use your electricity, then to avoid the barrage of advertisements we are exposed to constantly, don't watch television. Stream videos from the Internet instead, there's tons of free stuff you can watch. This is what I do instead of subscribing to cable TV, and it saves me nearly $100.00 per month just by doing this simple thing.

Some might criticize me for publicizing this idea during such tough economic times. "We need people to consume in order to drive the economy!" It is an established fact that 70% of America's economy is dependent on consumer spending – retail sales of products and services. Since American wages continue to wither and dry up, this is obviously unsustainable. To that I say this: it's not good if we need people to buy useless crap in order to maintain our economy. That needs to fundamentally change. And the only way towards fundamental change is to stop buying useless crap. So will you join me? Will you take the plunge and break the chord from your normal consumerist ways? Liberate yourself this holiday season!

To all those spiritual people who don't attend church, this one's for you.

The 'Spiritual Not Religious' Gospel of

Progressive Christianity Continues to Spread

They are called “unaffiliated,” as in a recent Pew poll, or “nones” – or even just “not very religious.” A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute divides these groups further into “unattached,” “atheists”, “agnostics,” and “seculars.” One thing is for sure; this ever-growing cohort of non-churched Americans made up, at 23 percent, the single largest segment of Barack Obama’s “religious coalition” that helped him win reelection in 2012 (compared to the 37 percent of white evangelicals who supported Mitt Romney). As a result of this, the unaffiliated clearly had their moment. Media analysis, however, did not go very deep – there was a story that went beyond names and numbers.

I first published this website after I began to understand who the current crop of unaffiliated people are and what they do and believe in. Yet we have precious little historical understanding of this critical and growing demographic. What are their roots? What religious, cultural, economic, demographic, and political processes shaped their sensibilities, habits, and makeup? In order to understand these still-believing “nones,” we need to understand that much of the religious dynamism in the United States happens outside the church walls, and has for some time now. The “rise of the nones” is but the latest phase in the long transformation of religion into what we now commonly call “spirituality.” In my case and that of my peers, it is Christianity and the strongly held belief in Jesus Christ, not as a distant and mysterious god, but the Son of God who we can develop a relationship with on a personal level. So if you want to get closer to God, just get one-on-one with Jesus. By the same token, spirituality can mean many things to many people. The language of spirituality is used by traditional religious adherents as well as the religiously unaffiliated. But only the “nones” have made it into a cliché: “spiritual but not religious.”

The history of American spirituality reveals that our commonplace understanding of spirituality — as the individual, experiential dimension of human encounter with the sacred — arose from the clash of American Protestantism with the forces of modern life in the nineteenth century. While religious conservatives fought to stem the tide, giving rise to fundamentalism, religious liberals like myself have adapted their faith to modernity, often by discarding orthodoxies (such as my strict Catholic upbringing) in favor of evolution, psychology, and meditation. It looks to me like the majority of today’s religious “nones” – those who claim no religion but still embrace some form of spirituality (here in the US it's mainly Christianity) – are engaged in the same task of renovating their faith for a new historical moment. I am convinced that this moment has in fact arrived in the form of the debacle over the shut-down of our country because of disagreement about the debt ceiling, among other things. Because this has occurred, and particularly since it was the neo-con Tea Party and their ultra-conservative friends who were the instigators, right-wing conservativism and the religious right have been dealt a blow from which it will take them a long time to recover, if ever. The liberals, or more properly Progressive Christians as I have been calling folks like us for years, have been given the proverbial football. It's up to us to score, so let's get started.

Today’s unaffiliated, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is truthful, genuine, practical, psychologically attuned, ecumenical and ethically oriented. This liberal spirituality, or Progressive Christianity as it has evolved over time, has become entwined with media-oriented consumerism. Of course Americans of all religious varieties have allowed themselves to be deeply influenced by consumerism, but media and markets have particularly shaped the religious lives of those without formal institutional or community ties. The religiously unaffiliated might not attend services, but they “do” their religion in many other ways: they watch religion on TV and listen to it on the radio; find inspiration on the web; attend retreats, seminars, workshops, and classes; buy candles and statues, bumper stickers and yoga pants; take spiritually motivated trips; and, perhaps most significantly, buy and read books. Books have been the most important conduit for spreading the “spiritual but not religious” gospel.

This dependency on the consumer marketplace, and especially books, has had significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans, especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within American religion toward a therapeutic understanding of the spiritual life. The profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods, and seized on the non-creedal, nonsectarian, and psychologically modern forms of faith advanced by religious liberals as a common American religious vernacular. These trends have only accelerated from the 1920s to the present, such that now the line between religion and self-help sometimes disappears in the spirituality section of Amazon. Second, spiritual consumerism has fostered books that allow some readers entry into religious worlds to which they have not been previously exposed. Since the invention of the printing press, the lines of denomination and tradition have gradually mattered less and less. The political and moral imperatives of World War II provided the greatest stimulus to such interfaith reading, and before long even the Protestant-Catholic-Jew formulation of the era could not contain American readers. What matters to the unaffiliated is not imprimatur but inspiration.

Progressive Christianity's rise and liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory. The cultural victory happened not because more Americans joined liberal churches, in other words, but because liberal religious values and sensibilities became more and more culturally normative. And no single cultural force has been more significant to this profound religious shift than the unabashed consumerism of the religious book business in the twentieth and 21^st centuries. Even as religious affiliations decline, religious books sales continue to rise, as they have steadily for more than a half century. In this ultimate spiritual marketplace, American religion displays its full shape-shifting vitality.

The politicians who shut down our country have torpedoed their own careers

Right-Wing Evangelicals Like the Ones Who Shut Down Our Country Had Better Start Seeing the Light

I have known a few evangelical pastors and far more Christian ultraconservatives in my 57 years on this great planet Earth. They were all sure they were right and that every other person not of their faith was going to burn in hell forever. They teach that we as Christians should take this nation back, but I have long since concluded that we never really had it to begin with (one example of that would be the electoral college). After decades of teaching their homophobic, divisive message that has driven away so many millions of the same people whose souls they should have been winning over to Christ, I have similarly come to the conclusion that some of the “religious” people need to think of something else to do with their lives. Let the truly committed and dedicated people do the works of faith and perseverance in spreading the Gospel of Jesus. Instead, maybe they could try selling cars, especially since some TV evangelists have only slightly more credibility than that. Or better yet, they could become truck drivers – you know, see America and all that jazz.

I once did something like that back in 2008. I left Atlanta, where I had been living for the past 25 years, for a job in Texas. Since Atlanta and Odessa, Texas are 1,500 miles apart, I did get to see some of America. But the country I saw was very different from the one I was taught about in Catholic school as a kid and from my mentors in early adulthood. What I found instead was that this nation is filled with people from all walks of life, and from every different culture. To me – and I'm speaking from experience – I have met thousands of people of widely divergent faiths, and I found that these folks are not the wicked sinners I was taught about. They are just good-hearted Americans from all faiths and cultural backgrounds, trying to pay their bills, care for their families and have a few good times with their friends and lovers. I also began to notice a change in me and my perspective as well. I gradually came to the realization that all the Latino immigrants I saw in Texas (the population there was about 30% Hispanic) weren't invading hordes of so-called “illegal aliens” from south of America's border. In point of fact I have since concluded that there is no such thing as an illegal human being. Every man, woman and child on the entire earth has a right to be here because we are all made in the image and likeness of the same Lord God ever since Adam and Eve. But the Latinos were economic refugees from the third world who apparently working furiously to better themselves. And that, dear readers, is why I have admiration rather than prejudice for Latinos the world over.

Texas wasn't a particularly good experience for me, but it was a great second education. After four months I decided to return to Atlanta and work to help all of the people I could by warning them and taking affirmative measures for protecting them from the oppression of right-wing conservatism. I created this website for that very purpose, and that's why I call it “progressive Christian”. Progressive Christianity means it is focused sharply on Jesus Christ without all the added dogmas of religious denominations, without condemning any faith or group of people whether Christ-based or not. That leaves a lot of maneuvering room for me as far as how my web site's content is presented. I want everyone to know that the Christian fundamentalist political movement is the beginning of a cultural revolution that will take our nation to a very dark place. You have to understand that this has been methodically planned and is being carried out with the utmost vigilance. In accordance with their world view, conservatives do not in the least care about what anybody else thinks. They are against democracy, they are in the process of turning our country into one big minimum-wage sweatshop, and those who comprise this top 1% of America's economic pie are seeking to end the rule of the majority in our great country. When they are finished, they will own all the property that is left in the US and we will all be paupers.

They truly believe that those who have not been “saved” are living under a curse. Due to this curse of theirs, they expect us to believe that we are incapable of knowing what is best for ourselves, and that because of this we are in need of supervision by more enlightened people. You should also know they do not believe that even centuries-old Christian communities (Catholics, Anglicans, Greek Orthodox, etc.) are “saved,” only those who think like they do. I've seen this first hand, and it's not pretty. You might be thinking that a minority fundamentalist group of zealots can’t really take over the direction of a society, right? Well, just look at the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, that's exactly what the Communists did. They pulled it off with just a few thousand soldiers and some other mercenaries. In modern times, look at Iran or the countless other places (until recently Hugo Chavez's Venezuela) where people have allowed this to happen. Are you all really going to sit back and watch this occur without wanting to jump up and do something about it? I should think not! They have already begun to attack all sources of accurate information. That's the reason former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura fled the United States and now resides in Mexico. Public radio was first, next will be museums then school textbooks. Just listen to them argue against the scientific facts about the peril our planet is facing, because it does not fit in with their ideas. They represent a clear and present danger to our union.

If I told you that the Amish in Pennsylvania were running for public office in record numbers with the intention of outlawing electricity and forcing others to act, dress and think like them, you would not believe it. Well, that is exactly what is happening in America, only it is not the Amish, it is the Christian fundamentalists. It is not outlawing electricity, it’s placing limits on being a human with free will. Enjoying art and music, loving the person of your choice, dancing – the things that fundamentalists call “sins” – are a big part of what it means to be a human.

The good news is that we are witnessing the beginning of a new era in human existence. While we watch the revolutions across the Middle East such as the civil war in Syria, the riots in Greece and in Spain last year, and the growing exasperation and anger of the American people we are seeing a great truth: that people have within them the natural desire to be free. It is so sad that as the people of the world are fighting for freedom, we here in the United States are going in the opposite direction. The far right, under the control of Christian fundamentalists, is declaring an all-out war on human progress. We absolutely, positively must fight back. After all, the consequences of not acting are very serious. We are not just fighting for ourselves. We are struggling to protect the future generations of Americans who will suffer from these ruthless actions of the far right. We are speaking out against the measures being taken against those in our community who can least afford to be marginalized. This system of enforced inequality is going to fall one way or the other because it is unsustainable. As the late President John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable”.

A prophecy against America's leaders unless they stop what they're doing

A Word of Warning From the Lord For All Who Read This

I'm going to do something that I've never done before on this website; exercising one of the chief gifts of the Spirit as taught by the apostle Paul, gift of prophecy. First, let me point out that prophecy doesn't mean being able to foretell the future. That's called divination, which is based on sorcery, which is essentially Satan worship. Prophecy, on the other hand, simply means affirmatively declaring the Word of God, or of conveying the will of God and letting it be known with precision. For example, if I say, “Jesus will return on Christmas Eve”, that's a prediction of the future, and in this case a pretty bad one. But if I say, “Everyone act, think and live as if Jesus will return this Christmas, because it is the Lord himself who reminds you to keep yourself ready for His return, for He will return at an hour when many do not expect him”, then I have prophesied the Word of God by allowing myself to be used as a vessel for God's Word to mankind, or as a conduit for God's awesome power (which is beyond all human imagination). And so allow me a few paragraphs and yourself several minutes to relate what I believe is this important Word from the Lord God Almighty through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Lamb that was slain and yet lives.

As it was in the times of the prophets of old, so it is today – my people perish due to a lack of knowledge. America's days as a superpower, both militarily and economically, are just about over. Do my children not see what is happening all around you? Your government is printing money at maximum speed to keep your rigged capitalist economic system, a system based on greed that is a laughingstock both here in heaven and down in hell, from imploding. It is as plain and bright as the daytime sunshine I created that your pyramid-shaped economic system has run its course. It will soon be exactly as it was written by my beloved son and apostle John, “In her heart she boasts, 'I sit as queen, I am not a widow, and I will never mourn'. Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning, and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry, 'Woe! Woe, oh great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!'” (Revelation chapter 18, verses 7-10, NIV)

Is there anyone who still doubts that this passage of Scripture was written about our country, the United States? Go back and read that again, or better yet, read Revelation chapter eighteen in its entirety, it's all right there in black and white. So how else is the US government sinning against God? Our dollar, or more accurately the rate they are being printed, makes a major devaluation of your form of currency likely, possibly even in the near future. If the US does not repent of this egregious sin and get its house in order, God will punish our country with more economic hardship, natural disasters and plagues. I know there are those who will not take my warning seriously, but I remind you that the future of our country is at stake. I do not speak for myself, but I speak for the Lord through Jesus Christ his Son.

We have taken the earth that God created and ruined it. Everything is polluted, even our own bodies. Oil residue still exists on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and western Florida, the seafood is contaminated with mercury, our livestock are catching deadly new strains of the flu, and our IQ's become ever more diminished due to ingesting fluoridated water for decades. Autism, once thought to have originated from childhood vaccines, is now being more correctly understood as having environmental rather than medical causes and origins. We're doing it to ourselves.

Hard times are coming, of that we can all be sure. God has shown me that gas rationing and food rationing are both on America's horizon. Poverty will increase by leaps and bounds, creating a permanent underclass of Americans who will become the spearhead of a Second American Revolution. Civil unrest is coming, the likes of which haven't been seen since the 1960's. Rioting may occur in (hopefully) isolated areas, and people will stay barricaded in their homes and apartments for days and weeks at a time. With 70% of America's economy dependent on consumer spending, this is ominous to say the least. If and when the dollar collapses – a frightening possibility – all these things will be much worse (God forbid). The Bible warns us that “a day is coming when no one will be able to work”.We have been taking our privileged lives for granted for too long. God is a patient and loving God who is slow to anger but swift and sure regarding his punishment for those who willfully disobey. When we take a look around us, we see our neighborhoods, subdivisions, schools, churches, businesses, and industries, and all the infrastructure associated with them. Yet I am warning you all that even the tallest tower – which here in Atlanta is just over 52 stories – will not be left standing upon the arrival of the great and dreadful Day of the Lord. It is only then, when the arrival of Christ Jesus splits the Mount of Olives in two, that every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. You children of mine are just about out of time.

Happy anniversary to "the 99%" and Occupy wall st.

Happy Belated 2nd Anniversary, Occupy Wall Street

While I was rebuilding my computer and repairing my Internet connection these past few days, and as fall begins, I found myself reflecting on the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse induced by Wall Street and the mortgage industry. I was there for the first three days of Occupy DC at Freedom Plaza in October 2011, and again later that month for a day of Occupy Atlanta in Woodruff Park in the heart of downtown, and I have some fond memories of being part of something much bigger than myself or the sum of my experiences.

There are reasons to celebrate Occupy, as well as the loosely affiliated “We Are The 99%” Movement which is also still ongoing, despite continued economic stagnation and growing debt. The culture of resistance in the US is here, it’s having an effect, and it's growing slowly but steadily. There are cracks in the pillars of power, they're starting to get a little bigger, and it’s up to us to pry them the rest of the way open and shine the light on the lies and corruption that have been used to steal our future. I look back over the events of the past two years and feel cautiously optimistic, because I see a movement that is steadily building momentum. As we met at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, on Oct. 6^th, 2011 there was a strong sense of suspense in the air. Some said that Americans weren’t feeling enough pain, that we hadn’t reached the tipping point. Similarly, the organizers of Occupy Wall Street acted out of anticipation. They staked out a place in the heart of the monster and held it. At first there were only a few hundred, but by holding that space courageously, more people were inspired to join them. Excitement and wonder were in the air. Could the people really take on Wall Street? Obviously Wall Street thought so because they ordered excessive and constant police protection. They must have seen something brewing because Wall Street firms had donated unprecedented millions to the NYPD over the previous year. It was police aggression towards peaceful protesters that grabbed public attention and sympathy. A few weeks after the start of Occupy Wall Street, an amazing 43 percent of Americans supported Occupy, a figure that remains largely undiminished to this day.

Two years later, the physical encampments are gone, but the Occupy Movement remains. Occupying public space was a tactic, not an end in itself. It was a way to make the issues visible, a place for people to gather, a model for a new way of doing things based on respect, mutual aid and democracy and a metaphor for claiming what has been taken. The ‘public’ is disappearing, not just public space but also public services, research and resources have been privatized, expropriated for the profits of a few. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, there was an expectation that the government would respond appropriately to stabilize the economy and that we simply had to weather the storm. What we saw instead were massive bailouts of the industry that caused the crash and greatly inadequate steps to secure jobs, housing and health care. This turned some already catastrophic financial crises caused by runaway private speculation into an immense source of private gain for the same very financiers responsible for the catastrophe to begin with. Even worse, it made those catastrophes so much more catastrophic than they really needed to be in the first place.

As a result of all this mess, we’re not heading toward greater income equality. We’re not building up the middle class or supporting unionization. We’re not eradicating poverty and hunger. We’re not expanding educational opportunity. We’re not rebuilding infrastructure. Nothing we’re doing looks anything like the society we built from the New Deal through the 1960s. We’re not doing any of the things that would lead to a more stable and just economy. In fact, we’re doing just the opposite, which means the billionaire bailout society will become even more firmly entrenched. This means that if left unchecked, the trends towards greater inequality and suffering will not only continue, it will accelerate as well. But the billionaire bailout society went too far. According to a Stanford study, “animosity toward the financial sector reached its highest level in 40 years in 2010” which probably fueled the Occupy and 99% Movements, and anger remains high. A majority of Americans believe that “not enough was done to prosecute the bankers.”

When drowning in so many crises it is sometimes hard to see above the surface of the water, but the anti-globalization movement and its offspring, the Occupy and “the 99%” Movements, are having an effect. Since 2000, the World Trade Organization has been unable to advance its agenda and 14 free trade agreements have been stopped by public pressure. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and its sister the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership known as TAFTA, are being negotiated in secret as a way to pursue the WTO agenda through the back door. A recent study found that the TPP will reduce wages for the bottom 90 percent of people in the US while significantly increasing the wealth of the top 1 percent. The AFL CIO passed a resolution opposing the TPP and Teamster President James Hoffa wrote, “Workers on both sides of the deal get screwed while corporations rake in record profits. Like low-wage workers in the fast food and retail industries, workers must join together to let Congress know that the TPP is not the right path for the U.S.” A broad coalition of groups have come together to stop the TPP. At the Occupy Wall Street protests recently in New York, the TPP was a top theme. In addition to marches and teach-ins focused on the TPP, the Money Wars street theater group performed its epic battle of Princess Laid-Off and the rebels against the TPP Death Star, Emperor Pipeline and Dark Banker. Actions are taking place this weekend and next week in Washington. If we are successful, this will be a huge victory against transnational corporate power.

There have been a number of wins recently against top corporations. The Nez Perce tribe and their allies took on General Electric and won a case to stop truckloads of tar sands from crossing their land in Idaho. Exxon was charged for illegally dumping toxic fracking waste in Pennsylvania. And JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon admitted that the bank broke the law. Another important win that is inspiring many in the US took place in Colombia where farmers went on a prolonged strike to win back the right to use their own seeds. The anti-Monsanto and anti-GMO movement is strong here. Thousands of people marched this week in Kauai for a law to protect themselves from pesticides. And, despite an outpouring of money, a vote to label GMO products in Washington State is still holding strong. And stopping the imminent attack on Syria was a win for people everywhere and a loss for the military industrial complex. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin in particular were set to make hundreds of millions from it. We must be vigilant though because the current diplomatic path could be used to justify an attack in the future.

It is important to recognize these wins and to build from them. It is also important to remember that we never know how close we are to achieving significant change. The occupy movement spawned the “idle no more”, workers’ rights and climate change movements. Our eyes are open and we can’t ignore what we now see; we know that it is the plutocratic system, not individual inadequacy that is causing poverty in America. We know that the $1 trillion given by the Federal Reserve to private banks could have created 20 million desperately-needed jobs. We know that the 400 richest people in the US have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries like Canada and Mexico. And we know the names of those who control the wealth and exploit people and the planet for it. We no longer expect “leaders” to create the change we need. We are all leaders and change depends on our actions and ours alone.

The culture of resistance necessary to create the kind of world we want to live in is here. Actions are taking place daily in the US and around the world. You won’t hear about most of them in the mass media. This week alone, more than one hundred women, most of them undocumented, were arrested in Washington, DC to protest the ways that immigration policies harm their families. Dairy workers in New York protested their abusive working conditions. Protesters in Vermont, ages 65 to 94, chained themselves to the entrance of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant to demand its immediate closure and Marylanders protested outside an ‘arms bazaar.’ The Cascadia Forest Defenders scaled the capitol building in Oregon to drop a huge banner to protest clear-cutting.

Resistance is not all protesting, it also includes building alternative systems to meet our basic needs. Many who are active in OWS have been hard at work at this since the physical occupation was shut down. This week the Occupy Money Cooperative announced its launch with a fund raising campaign. They will provide low-cost financial services to the millions of Americans who are unbanked and under-banked and who are preyed upon by banks, check cashing services and payday lenders. It will be an opportunity for all to opt-out of big finance. Just as OWS created the infrastructure that was used to organize Occupy Sandy and continues to provide services to those affected by Superstorm Sandy, occupiers in Colorado responded to the needs of people in the Boulder area who were hit by massive flooding.

Hard work is being done every day to take on entrenched corporate power and create a new world based on principles such as mutual aid, community, equity, solidarity and democracy. It is appropriate to stop and celebrate this work and what has been accomplished so far. Things are changing. Justin Wedes of OWS writes, “Sure, we face an uncertain future, but we embrace the chaos that defines our time. Because, there is no alternative but to challenge the status quo of ever-increasing debt, shrinking job opportunities and disappearing civil rights.” We can’t say what the outcome will be or whether we will live to see the world we hope to create. Can there even be an endpoint? Perhaps the most important piece of social transformation is not a goal but rather is the process of living in a way that is consistent with our values. We live in the culture of resistance which requires constant nurturing to bend the arc of time towards justice.

I can think of at least seven reasons not to attack Syria

The Insanity of Another Mideast War

In 1939 and 1940, Hitler conquered the great majority of Europe. You will no doubt recall from your high school history classes that he did very well in his military excursions, or at least at first. Austria and Czechoslovakia fell first, then Poland, followed by Holland, Belgium and France. By that time Spain and Italy were already aligned with Hitler's Germany. Then, Hitler attacked Great Britain but failed – twice – and things started going downhill from there for Nazi Germany. Failing to conquer the British Isles got Hitler flustered. So, by the summer of 1941, Hitler decided to attack Russia, a country more than ten times the size of Germany, whose military prowess was more than a match for the German armed forces. That December, Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, which got America involved in WW2. Germany then declared war on the US, and vice-versa. So, Germany found itself fighting a war on 2 fronts: one East of Germany with Russia, the other West of Germany with America. Germany ended up getting obliterated when it took on more military opponents than it could handle.

I find it more than a little disturbing that our country's military is in the process of making the same mistake Hitler made over 70 years ago. We have troops and so-called “contractors” – a barely concealed pronoun for “black ops” mercenaries – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, plus the Balkans and Germany in Europe, and that's not counting more than 100 countries globally. As of this coming week, president Obama is going to take his case – or more accurately that of the US military-industrial complex – to Congress and to the American people. Speaking as a person who is opposed to waging warfare, and having concluded long ago that war is obscenely immoral, I am vehemently opposed to any so-called “limited” engagements with Syria. President Bush and his advisers either didn’t know or didn’t care about the probable consequences of their decision to invade and occupy Iraq back in 2003. This resulted in the following:

• Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans dead;
• Millions of Iraqis and Americans wounded physically and psychologically;
• Legions of young men of the region now experienced in warfare and for hire moving from Iraq to Libya to Syria;
• The Iraqi “democratic” government, which is evidently unable to control the whirlwind of sectarian violence that is now killing and maiming hundreds each week.

Although the U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan under a different rationale, it is very important to acknowledge the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens who have been killed or wounded in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The further consequences of the Afghan war was several thousand Americans dead and tens of thousands maimed, wounded or injured. Let's now fast forward to the present day, where President Obama has not spelled out the possible consequences of a military attack on Syria, but U.S. military leaders are repeatedly warning about the risks. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey wrote last month said, “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome.” “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.” General James Mattis, who retired recently as head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full throttle, very, very serious war.” That's right, general. An all-out brawl in the Middle East which could easily trigger World War Three. We can make some educated guesses of what the “unintended consequences” could be:

1. Syrian anti-aircraft batteries will fire their rockets at incoming U.S. missiles.
2. Many Syrians on the ground will die and both the U.S. and Syrian governments will say the deaths are the fault of the other.
3. The U.S. Embassy in Damascus will be attacked and burned, as may other U.S. Embassies and businesses in the Middle East.
4. Syria might also launch rockets toward the U.S. ally in the region—Israel.
5. Israel would launch bombing missions on Syria as it has three times in the past two years and perhaps take the opportunity to launch an attack on Syria’s strongest ally in the region – Iran.
6. Iran, a country with a population of 80 million and having the largest military in the region untouched by war in the past 25 years, might retaliate with missiles aimed toward Israel and toward nearby U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Turkey, Bahrain and Qatar.
7. Iran could block the Straits of Hormuz and impede the transport of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

“What is the political end state we’re trying to achieve?” said a retired senior officer involved in Middle East operational planning who said his concerns are widely shared by active-duty military leaders. “I don’t know what it is. We say it’s not regime change. If it’s punishment, there are other ways to punish.”

Could there be an underlying reason to attack Syria that is being concealed from the American people? There sure is. Let me give you the short version of what's being done and why. In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo, columnist, journalist and blogger Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. The cynically named “end-game” would require not just coercing support among World Trade Organization members, but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. As of this writing, the only one of those four countries still standing is Iran. In most Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned, and usury – charging rent for the “use” of money, hence the name – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Not all these countries were Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — which house forty percent of the global population. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the cross-hairs of the powerful US military. In this August 22nd article, Greg Palast posted a screen shot of a 1997 memo from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then Assistant Secretary of International Affairs under Robert Rubin, to Larry Summers, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner referred in the memo to the “end-game of WTO financial services negotiations”.

The game then in play was the deregulation of banks so that they could gamble in the lucrative new field of derivatives. But the plan required more than just deregulating US banks. Banking controls had to be eliminated globally so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The “endgame” was to achieve this global deregulation through an obscure addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization, called the Financial Services Agreement. Palast wrote:

“Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" – toxic assets like financial derivatives. Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products." And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives. WTO members were induced to sign the agreement by threatening their access to global markets if they refused”.

That was the fate of countries in the WTO, but Palast did not discuss those that were not in that organization at all, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. These seven countries were named by U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) in a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview as the new 'rogue states' being targeted for take down after September 11, 2001. He said that about 10 days after 9-11, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What did these countries have in common? Besides being Islamic, they were not members either of the WTO or of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries later identified as 'rogue states' that were also not members of the BIS included North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan. Does everybody else reading this see the pattern that has developed here as clearly as I do? I am sure of it! There was a nonfiction book published a couple of years ago titled, “War Is A Lie”. As you can see from the above facts I have gathered, that is absolutely true.

This leads to a loaded question, maybe even literally. Having learned what the American public is currently learning about all of the above, the endless wars, the NSA spying, the unauthorized military actions overseas, and the inescapable fact that our entire government has been bought and paid for by corporate America as well as Wall Street (even to the point that our country is becoming dysfunctional?), could opposition by a war-weary American public to US involvement in Syria lead to another series of antiwar protests such as what America experienced from the mid-60's until the early 70's? When we add to this mix the multitudes of unemployed, or grossly underemployed, American workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas for pennies on the dollar, the millions of pensioners who got cheated out of their retirement savings when their former employers closed down, and still more multitudes of unemployed young adults, some with Masters degrees, who are stuck living with their parents while trying to pay off student loans costing more than a typical mortgage, then you have a recipe for civil unrest of the highest magnitude. The March on Washington in August 1963 would seem like child's play by comparison. To those who may disagree, I would only tell you to look around you, and check out what's been happening since the 2011 Arab Spring. What started in Tunisia spread east to Egypt, and then north across the Mediterranean to Greece, and then west to Spain. During the Movement's crossing of the Mediterranean, some embers fell over Syria, and that entire country has become engulfed, and it has been burning out of control for quite some time now. The exact same scenario is poised to play out here in the US. All of the identical ingredients are already there. The only remaining question is, what will be the spark that sets it off? If not another war that nobody wants, then it will be something else that is currently not foreseeable. But you can bet the very shoes on our feet that it will.

Americans will have to decide for themselves who will represent them once they recognize and accept that both major parties are in the employ of the corporate interests that fund their campaigns. We may as well include the possibility that we may start all over again, with just the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the framework upon which it will rest. When they do, they will abandon the myth of the two-party system and realize that solving the problems threatening the viability of the American experiment in democracy is more important than ideology. How one wants to describe the system of government will be unimportant if we hand complete control of it to a police state that operates exclusively in the interest of the economic elite.

Events are conspiring that seem to be leading inevitably to the kind of awakening among average Americans that we have been working towards since it became obvious that the Anglo-American Empire is no longer afraid of public opinion in the US or anywhere else. Just as the power of the banks was revealed by the immunity for the crimes they committed that crashed the US and world economies, the threatened assault on Syria is leading to outrage throughout the majority of the American public. The lies are so transparent that even the Washington Post began to refer to the "alleged" use of chemical weapons by the Syrian military in a story about the decisive defeat in Parliament of a vote to support an illegal, non-UN-sanctioned US attack.

It is becoming easier to help newly alert citizens to connect the dots that have been obvious to some of us for some time. The furious reaction to the revelations of NSA spying have interrupted the ongoing partisan nonsense of pundits representing the two sides of the corporate duopoly long enough for them to agree that the abridgment of civil liberties has gone on long enough, prompting even Congress to act. The furor resulted in the near-passage on a bipartisan vote of the 'Amash amendment' that would have restricted NSA spying. Such resistance to Presidential overreach of authority to strip Americans of basic constitutional rights would have been unthinkable even six months ago. It is only a matter of time before Americans collectively grasp the idea that war abroad, economic disaster, and suspension of civil liberties at home are all symptoms of the same problem: corporate control of the US government. When they do, they will be ready for the solution. The only question remaining here is, will the top 1% give back the huge chunks of America that they have taken over the years, and will governing power be peacefully returned to “we the people”, or will we have to take it by force? Remember the wise words of President John F. Kennedy who once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

There is no doubt that corruption of the US government by corporations and wealthy individuals is at the root of the problem. There are many proposals to do something about it, but the one with legs is the movement to pass a constitutional amendment to effectively reform campaign finance and abolish corporate person-hood. When America has the discussion about why we need such an amendment and what form it should take, we will be ready to elect representatives who are willing to cosponsor and vote for it. It is not hard to see that the mood of the country is shifting away from helpless acceptance of the theft of what they have assumed is our democracy. Surely a politician as brilliant as Obama can see it. That raises the interesting question. Is it possible that he knows that we will not "be the change" he told us we have to be in 2008 unless things get so bad that we finally have no choice but to act? Is that why he seems to be doing nothing to counter the trend toward fascism in America? We can always hope that those we have accused of blind faith might have been right in claiming that Obama is playing three-dimensional chess with a bunch of checker players. Only time will tell, and only if the movement to take back America for the People continues to grow. For more info visit http://www.sandlministries.org/political_activism and http://www.sandlministries.org/national_strike_movement

Back by popular demand, and in honor of Labor day and the striking restaurant workers, I offer "Battle Cry of the American Worker"

The Battle Cry of the American Worker

(excerpt from, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” by Rev. Paul J. Bern)

When in the course of current events the constituency of the United States finds itself oppressed and hemmed in by that political body which governs us, and when the working people of this great country which I love so much finds itself with its backs against the wall due to circumstances and situations which are beyond our control, it naturally become the patriotic duty of every concerned American to stand up to and to oppose that which suppresses and restricts the God-given freedoms spelled out in our US Constitution, and to draw a line in the sand of civilization that guarantees the health, wealth and prosperity of us all. As peaceful and law-abiding citizens, we have been governed by the rule of law which is summarized in a document that working Americans continue to revere, none other than the Constitution of the United States, in keeping with the time-honored traditions passed down to us by our founding fathers. But lately our sacred Constitution has been bastardized and prostituted not only by those in power within the federal government, but more directly by the armies of corporate lobbyists who have invaded Washington and seized control of our executive, legislative and judicial branches of government for the sole express purpose of engineering a bloodless coup de etat that is being carried out not by bullets but by vast sums of money that are at once immoral, illegal, and a veritable avalanche of green and greedy corruption. The sole express purpose of this financial invasion is to forcibly liquidate the middle and working classes in this great country of ours. This is being done deliberately and with sinister calculation by the wealthiest Americans from Wall Street to a myriad of corporate boardrooms all across America, orchestrated by the unconstitutional Federal Reserve and its minions, for the sole express purpose of focusing and concentrating all available wealth into the kleptomaniac-like hands of the top 1% of wage earners and big business owners all across America. In fact, I further submit and assert that this is all being done at the expense of the US middle and working classes, the result of which is to force an ever-increasing number of working Americans from all walks of life into ever-increasing poverty.

With mass unemployment, a veritable storm of foreclosures, increasingly unaffordable healthcare, and with higher education rapidly becoming ever further out of reach for the US middle class and particularly for the poor, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the middle class and working people here in the good old USA finds themselves surrounded and besieged by an army of the usurpers of power in our country. As a direct result, more and more working Americans, the people who are the backbone of the US economy, are forced into moving in with friends, family members and strangers to stave off what would otherwise be a pandemic outbreak of homelessness and despair. And it's all because people can't find jobs.

In point of fact, the are now more college-educated people living in homeless shelters, under bridges or in their cars – if they are lucky enough to still own a vehicle – than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930's. And that is a social injustice and a moral outrage. Indeed, the circumstances and situations that the middle and working classes in the US find themselves today are a series of gross social injustices that demands a sharply focused and well-coordinated response from the entire populace, a rebuttal and decisive counterattack designed and intended to right, correct and re-balance US political power back into the hands of the overwhelming majority of American citizens to whom it rightfully belongs. There can be no doubt that class warfare has been declared in the US, perpetrated by the wealthy against the middle and working classes, for the sole express purpose of eliminating from society the constitutional majority of working Americans, with the end result being the complete and merciless liquidation of middle and working class wealth, general prosperity, and even our health. This has been accomplished by the largest transfer of wealth in all of human history, and it has been manifested in four different ways.

First, the employment of American workers has been decimated by closing down manufacturing facilities and shipping jobs overseas to the third world for pennies on the dollar. The result of this has been mass unemployment of many millions of American workers, and those jobs in the American manufacturing sector, which was once the world's largest and whose direct result was victory in World War Two, are very likely to never return. One direct effect this has had is the gradual elimination of labor unions in this country, and the US labor movement is now on life support as a result. All the wages of the blue collar sector of the US economy are now redirected into the pockets of the top 1% of the American populace in terms of net wealth, not to mention the benefits and retirement pensions of these same people who made these corporations into the mega-companies that they are today.

Second, the retirement savings of the middle and working classes have been severely compromised or even liquidated altogether by the crooked and devious manipulations of Wall Street bankers, market speculators, hedge fund managers and corporate boards of directors who engineered the largest swindle in human history back in 2008. This criminal act resulted in the US government bailout known as TARP, an $850 billion bank robbery of the US Treasury conceived and carried out by the same Ponzi schemers who ran the US economy into the ground in the first place. The cost of this bailout has been put on the backs of the middle and working classes, their children and grandchildren, and has generated a federal government budget deficit that has exceeded $17 trillion dollars as I write this, a staggering sum that threatens to bankrupt the country and destroy the formerly good credit rating of the United States. 

 

As a matter of fact, in only one generation our great country that I love so much has been transformed from the world's greatest lender to its greatest borrower, with the majority of this debt being financed by China. One of these days China is going to get tired of lending us money and will at that point call in the debt, which America will likely not be able to repay, particularly if China refuses to accept US dollars as a form of repayment. If the value of the dollar were to collapse for any reason, that is exactly what would occur. I shudder to think of what would happen next, with China taking large chunks of American collateral to satisfy this crushing debt load. This could even lead to Chinese troops on our western shores in a worst case scenario. The final collapse of the US economy would inevitably follow, descending into another American civil war that will make the current conflicts in Syria, Egypt, Spain and Greece look like a day care center in comparison.

Third, the largest transfer of wealth in human history is being enforced by runaway prices for college and university tuition that are being deliberately engineered by wealthy elitists for the sole express purpose of putting higher education financially out of reach for an increasing majority of the American middle class. And those who do make it into colleges or universities are finding themselves buried under an overwhelming pile of student loans, some of which are so huge that they end up well into six figures, larger even than some home mortgages. These student debt loans are so enormous that an increasing number of graduates find themselves moving back in with their parents, or sharing living quarters with friends and acquaintances, when they finally do graduate. These same hard-working graduates are now increasingly finding that they can't find suitable employment upon graduation, or are winding up in menial jobs that pay so poorly they can't repay their student loans. This ruins their credit ratings, making it even harder for them to find employment. What good is a four-year degree if you wind up flipping hamburgers, selling shoes or digging ditches? Meanwhile, the best jobs, the best educations, and the best incomes are reserved for the wealthy and their families.

Fourth, the largest transfer of wealth in human history is being reinforced by a healthcare system that has become so expensive that over 54 million Americans can no longer afford health insurance. This has left an increasing percentage of working Americans one accident or catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy, and all without remedy. Worse still, the average cost of medical care for US senior citizens from the time they retire until their death is $250,000.00 as of 2012, the latest year for which these statistics are available. As more and more US workers find themselves unable to afford health coverage, an increasing number of people are putting off doctor and/or dental visits and not refilling needed prescriptions for purely financial reasons, and the physical and mental health of these hapless individuals slowly erodes away as a direct consequence.

There are tens of millions of formerly middle class people just like me all across the country who find themselves in similar circumstances to varying degrees of severity. Many have not been as fortunate as me. They have lost jobs or entire careers like I have, been forced out into the street due to the ongoing epidemic of foreclosures throughout America, had their cars repossessed leaving them with no way to get to work assuming that they are lucky enough to still have jobs, and are hounded by collection agencies for debts great and small. They have no access to health care except to show up at the local emergency room with no way to pay the bill, putting them even deeper into debt than they already are. They have watched their pensions and their retirement savings evaporate due to market manipulations by unscrupulous “financial managers” who earn obscene bonuses whether they succeed or fail, and all at the expense of their clients. Either that or they have spent their savings during interminably lengthy periods of unemployment after their jobs were downsized or out-sourced overseas to the third world, never to return again.

The same goes for the best health care, the nicest cars and boats and even airplanes, and the best retirement plans. All of this and more are systematically being procured by the top 1% income bracket at the expense of everybody else. It's steak for them and beans for the rest of us, and the portions for the middle and working classes are getting ever smaller each day. There is no question whatsoever that class warfare has been declared by the rich, powerful and well-connected, and all at the expense of over 99% of the rest of America. I think it's time to fight back, and that is why I began researching this in 2010. My books and this author are the new voice of protest and dissent in middle America. It is not right-wing nor is it from the left, but rather it is written from from the standpoint of middle America and from the vantage point of the oppressed multitudes who are crying out for relief and rescue from the perilous circumstances and life-threatening situations that working Americans from all walks of life find themselves in.

This book is a wailing civil defense siren ringing out across the land that I love. It is a warning buzzer on the basketball court of life signifying that a new middle class team of endless depth is now taking the court, sending the wealthy and powerful to the showers so that the stench of corruption can be washed from them because they so desperately need it. It is the national anthem of true American patriotism being played before the start of a baseball game signaling that the new expansion team from middle America is about to take the field. This book is an air raid siren sounding out across the land of the rich and powerful as a warning that the middle and working class counterattack is about to commence. (My latest book, “Occupying America: We Shall Overcome”, takes up where the first one left off and predicts mass civil unrest in America in the near future.)

No more will we stand and stare or sit and grumble about having our houses, jobs, cars, savings, health, higher education and our retirements forcibly taken away wholesale while an ever greater portion of American wealth is concentrated into the hands of a small minority of multimillionaires. It is time for the middle and working classes to put our collective foot down and say “no more”. The time has arrived for us to take back our country by any and all means possible. It is time for political power to be taken out of the hands of corporate America and their invading hordes of lobbyists and Wall Street bankers who would presume to take over our country by means of economic warfare, and to place it back into the hands of “we the people”, the true owners of this great country of ours. And we will do so knowing that history and our founding fathers are on our side, because they left us with a sacred document known as the Constitution of the United States that guarantees us that right. Our free speech and freedom of expression that are guaranteed under the First Amendment, as well as our right to keep and bear arms and to form militias that are guaranteed under the Second Amendment, will not be compromised or trampled upon. We will demonstrate in the streets, we will besiege government buildings, we will bombard our congressmen and women with phone calls and emails, we will form new political parties, we will organize and build labor unions and worker-owned businesses, we will blockade wealthy neighborhoods, we will organize peaceful public events and non-violent sit-ins, we will call general strikes and consumer boycotts, and we will not stop until the balance of power in this country undergoes a paradigm shift back into the hands of hard-working Americans, particularly those who want full time jobs and can't find any.

We will fight from the highest mountains, from the lowest valleys, from the rooftops of buildings, we will fight in the cities and in the countryside, from the Jersey shore to the beaches of the west coast, and from the Canadian border down south to the border with Mexico. We will not stop until we get our country back, and we shall never surrender. If the abusive government authoritarians label us as domestic terrorists, which we most certainly are not, then we will “remind” them that we are freedom fighters and American patriots. We shall fight with non-violent civil disobedience, we shall – so far as it is possible – demonstrate and march peacefully throughout the land, until we get our country restored to us, the workers of America, to whom it rightfully belongs. 

 

Let there be no mistake, America is past being overdue for mass civil disobedience, and it is ripe for outright revolution. If our First Amendment rights continue to be taken away, then we will fight back using our the Second Amendment rights instead. The conditions and circumstances in which the US middle and working classes find ourselves has become intolerable. President John Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful protest impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

Personally, I am a very patient and thoughtful man. I work hard each day to be slow to speak and quick to listen because I know from experience that there is much wisdom to be derived from living my life this way. But by the same token, I am a Christian man whose patience is at its end. Just as surely as Jesus preached against the political and religious establishment of His day, in like manner I will do the same in the present day in order to emulate the man I regard as my personal Savior. So, if you truly care about the deteriorating state of our nation, if you are really concerned about the issues that we are faced with collectively as a people, and if you want to make a stand against social and economic injustice and inequality, you owe it to yourself to read these books. It is my sincere hope that, after reading it, you will be inspired to take decisive action against the rich and powerful who are slowly enslaving us all.