"I said hey and the time is right
For a palace revolution
But where I live the game
To play is compromise solution""
Street Fighting Man, Rolling Stones.
Bernie Sanders' 2016 Presidential campaign is the vehicle for long overdue revolution in America.
Consider the circumstances in which we find ourselves:
1) Decades of neoliberal economic policies have eviscerated the once flourishing American middle class. In fact, the wealthiest 400 Americans now possess more wealth than the bottom fifty percent combined! (1) Globally, these policies have so concentrated wealth that the richest EIGHTY FIVE persons possess more wealth than the bottom three and one half BILLION persons combined! (2) This means that inequality in today's America exceeds that of ANCIENT ROME! (3), (4). As this process of increasing inequality is actually accelerating, the need for revolutionary restructuring of the political and economic system of the USA exceeds comprehension. Metaphorically put, the red alert alarms of impending catastrophe are, and have been ringing for some time.
2) The planetary environment is beginning to spiral out of control. This will lead to, at best, mass deaths and civilizational collapse; at worst, human extinction. (5) The Pacific Ocean is overheating. (6) This is because about ninety five percent of all anthropogenic (human caused) planetary warming is sequestered in the oceans"until it reemerges into the atmosphere as is happening now. This stored warming is now emerging from the Atlantic Ocean as well. (7) Any system will fail at its weakest link. By far, the most rapid warming is occurring in the Arctic. This is destabilizing trillions of tons of underwater methane ices (hydrates and clathrates), as well as up to a trillion tons of surrounding permafrost. Methane, in the short term (10 years or less) is up to 100 times more powerful of a heat trapping gas, than is carbon dioxide. Rapid release of this frozen methane will doom us to a fast extinction--5 to 30 years until humanity is no more forever. (8)
I could go on and on and on listing the various ways in which doom is accelerating towards us all. Instead, however, I will move on towards a SOLUTION to ALL of these problems.
Global change must begin in America. We are central to the planetary economy, and are the planet's largest polluter--worse yet when the effects of off-shored production by American flagged multinational corporations are taken into account.
The difficulty with implementing needed change lies in the reality that BOTH major US political parties have been effectively captured by large multinational business and financial corporations. This is empirically proved by well-known American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page in their seminal study "Testing Theories of American Politics." Their research demonstrated conclusively that the US Congress ONLY responds to business-oriented interest groups--that the USA is an oligarchy--in plainer words. (9)
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