Money is not speech. Public service is NOT for private gain. Our civil rights are non-negotiable. Corruption will not be tolerated. Due process, right to privacy, freedom of speech, assembly, organization to redress grievances and all our rights are sacrosanct. Our right to vote must be protected and expanded. There is no proof of systemic voter fraud, but there is evidence of election fraud and massive voter suppression. Church and state are separate, and the government has NO right to dictate to us what we should or shouldn’t believe. Our nation is built on the idea of the consent of the governed not the other way around where the governed consents to the will of the few, oligarchs, corporations, and venal politicians. The former is a representative democracy. The latter is a representative oligarchy.
Our government’s primary job is to serve the people and promote the general welfare. During the period from 1945 to 1975 the government played the role of subsidizing the costs of education, health care, communication, utilities, transportation, and other natural monopolies (a market where it is more practical and cost effective for one regulated entity to control a market) for the purpose of lowering the cost of living so businesses could earn a reasonable profit, and citizens can enjoy lower costs and better service. Under regulated industrial capitalism finance was restrained, production was emphasized over predation, monopolies, and cannibalization as we see with hedge funds and private equity firms today, and taxes were high on the wealthy and corporations to restrain excess and reward behavior that supports American labor, consumers, and society while protecting the environment. During this period the US enjoyed its greatest GDP gains and created a robust middle class that by the seventies began questioning the remaining radical anti-democratic elements of our political and economic system, namely imperial foreign policy, exploitative, pollutive, and dangerous business practices, and systemic inequality and racism. Unfortunately, the blowback at the behest of the neo-liberal Milton Friedman school backed by the radical right attacked government and labor as distortions on markets and as revealed in The Powell Memo’s paranoid attack on the movements of the sixties claimed the masses were threatening the economic order and the ruling class. This had to stop. What ensued was a rolling back of the government’s role in the economy, movement politics, and labor rights. Markets were deregulated. Anti-trust legislation was no longer enforced. Taxes were cut on the wealthy and corporations. Government support for infrastructure and social spending was cut, and to pacify labor the nation was deindustrialized under the pretext of globalization and pipe dreams of democratizing China. In the ensuing years upwards of 60k factories and 20 million good paying manufacturing jobs were lost and with it all the technical knowledge and manufacturing prowess. To better propagandize the masses the fairness doctrine was ended and media consolidation commenced. By the early 2000s the plan had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The coup was complete. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the billionaires, and corporations controlled our nation. The people were pacified, divided, and all spending power per the Citibank memo of 2005 was in the hands of the plutocrats. There was no need to worry. The United States was not a representative democracy, it was a plutocracy of, by and for the 1%. This is exemplified further by the 2025 RAND report, not a liberal organization, which concluded if income distribution had remained the same at 1975 levels the working and middle class would be 85 trillion dollars wealthier. In other words, if tax policies, industrial policy, regulatory policies, and the shared prosperity between labor and capital where wages rose with productivity as they had between 1945 and 1975 remained, the United States would not have had a 2008 financial crises, the nation would not have a 37 trillion dollar debt, the working and middle class would not be living a precariat existence and struggling to pay bills, and we would still be the world’s premier manufacturer. There would be no massive wealth and income inequality. The working and middle class would be 85 trillion dollars wealthier, and we would not be a nation where hundreds of billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley control our political and economic system. Yet here we are. One may conclude that this was an attack on the American people, or as Warren Buffet himself admitted, “There is class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Indeed. This transition could not have occurred without the radical right supreme court legalizing political bribery culminating with the Citizen’s United decision. This slow-moving coup culminated in the present-day full-fledged oligarchy and corporate takeover of our government as witnessed with the implementation of Project 2025. The people over these last 50 years have been ignored and dismissed. They have been told that the elite make history, and we the “little” people are spectators. The people have been propagandized with lies as we saw with the war in Iraq and the deregulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis when the geniuses on Wall Street told us, “Trust us. We know what we are doing.” They didn’t. And as if we didn’t know it, researchers such as Gilens and Page have proven our government serves the billionaire class and the corporations and NOT 95% of people. Now it is time for us, we the middling-sort, the little people, who understand living within our means, restraint, and fairness, who strive for one lifetime worth of wealth, to take back what is rightfully ours, the reins of power. We must do this because these Veruca Salts have driven our country to financial ruin, drained our nation of blood and treasure with unconstitutional wars, destroyed the middle class, devastated our environment, exploited us, indebted us, and made us wholly dependent on the rest of the world for most of our manufactured goods. We the adults in the room, not driven by greed, not driven by a two-year-olds egocentric thinking, or a morbid drive for control and wealth, cannot allow our political system to be controlled by billionaires, multinational corporations, Silicon Valley and Wall Street any longer.
Our nation must begin to act like a mature nation that cooperates with the rest of the world to solve problems and functions under laws and declarations that reflect our adult values like in the UDHR, for which we are a signatory. To do this we need a new metaphor, not America first, unilateralism, or a unipolar world, but the nation as a family. As a family living in a world of other nations, we must respect our neighbors and treat them respectfully as equals. We can disagree with those who live under authoritarian undemocratic systems, but before we do this, we must clean up our own affairs and create a more just society. We must among other things reinvigorate government agencies to protect and sustain civilization in the sense that its citizens can live a fulfilling, peaceful, and joyful life where they can express love and their artistic and aesthetic qualities while pursuing self-actualization within a society that promotes the general welfare, protects the environment, and cooperates with other nations. For this to occur the CPFB, the EPA, and all the regulatory agencies that protect citizens from predation, fraud, monopoly, and violence and protect the environment must be reinvigorated and supported so that markets can be transparent and fair, and people can exercise their freedoms without surveillance, oppression, and exploitation. We must end all endless wars especially Gaza and Ukraine.
