This same story and similar stories are repeated every day and in every town in this country. We view them through the lens of partisanship and drained of their humanity. In Oakland an 83 year old woman was put out of her home after the city had sent warning letters to the wrong address. The city was more interested in collecting fines from the widow than in rectifying their own error.
These are our people, they are our parents and grandparents and even our own children and they are homeless, jobless and overwhelmed by poverty. Move On says I should support Barack Obama. The Republican's cry less taxes and regulation and the Tea Party shouts, but who cares what the Tea Party thinks!
People are dying needlessly; they are suffering needlessly living in the land of economic terrorism and living in a nation of political violence. In this nation you might be forced to murder your ailing sister one day because you have no money and no place to live. Recently protestors took bags of yard debris cleaned up by neighbors from a property foreclosed upon by the Bank of America. Their plan was to leave the bags in the lobby of the bank. Instead they were met by a branch manager with a policeman at her side. She told them no and the policeman just pointed. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people, I think not.
"You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell yuh
That you ain't a-got no friend" -- Bob Dylan
Indeed, we have no friends in Washington. We have show business, we have student council. A show where actors pretend they care for the well being of the public.
"The history of this country is being written in the blood of the childhood the industrial lords have murdered." -- Eugene Debs 1918
Same as it ever was, another century and an another wave in an economic storm to swamp still more of the populous into poverty. Michael Bloomberg is more a student of history than soothsayer. New York has seen job riots and labor riots and food riots in the past. Most American cities have seen such outbursts public rage a generation or so ago and the Hearst Newspapers in that era called their leaders "Communist agitators" and perhaps this time around Fox News will call them "Domestic terrorists."
They are in fact refugees from their own homes fleeing from economic terror and from a callous unthinking government which hears but doesn't listen, sees but does not feel and a government which knows better but does not care. Now the Republicans have climbed upon their tired mount traversing the country side shouting out the absurdity of "Class Warfare."
These Republicans are so put upon by calls of higher taxes while their Democratic cohorts sit silently waiting to take their side when the roll is called. Yet is begs several questions, If this be class warfare why are we the victims? Why do banks receive bailouts and homeowners receive doubletalk from the banks left in charge? Why are the unemployment lines so full and why are our people killing themselves to escape from economic terror and financial treason?
A government must govern all of the land without occupying every inch of it. Class warfare is a dangerous idea for the prosperous to shout for it gives us, its victims, our own ideas. Ideas about just how unnecessary the wealthy are to our society. We don't need their television, their fast food or their politics and indeed the idea of class warfare commends itself to us.
William Tecumseh Sherman once said the following, "I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy." Now substitute "wealthy" for "South" and understand this, I am not calling for violence, only an appropriate response to economic terrorism, and an appropriate response to a society that murders its citizens, bargains with the lives of the sick and elderly and then as it begins deficit reduction talks by calling for tax cuts.
"If you make peaceful revolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable" -- John F. Kennedy
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