The Way the Future Blogs

A few months ago some fed-up Americans decided to let Wall Street know that they were a bunch of greedy, conscienceless pigs, and so they marched down that short, narrow — and crooked — street. It made the papers, and the next day there were a few more of them … and then more still … and then other cities caught the fever, and where it will stop no one can say. And I personally could not be more pleased.

Think it over. When was the last time you saw a spontaneous mass movement in America? We have seen plenty of the cooked-up kind, as where two super-greedy billionaire brothers give in to their appetite and hire experts to start a mass movement to cut their taxes — or a TV network beats the drums 24 hours a day for a “spontaneous” mass meeting.

This is the real thing. It’s the real people, the 99 percent of us, whose incomes are faltering or falling — or gone! — while the richest 1 percent among us are bending the laws and brining our legislators to make them richer still. Can that be called anything less than rapacious greed? It is, in truth, class warfare, an unrelenting effort to take away what even the poorest among us have.

Does anyone leaving a job need a $126 million (Gene Isenberg at Nabors Industries) parting gift? And he is by no means the only one — Eric Schmidt at Google got $100 million, and at IBM, Sam Palmisano stuffed his pockets with an unbelievable$170 million to ease the pain of leaving his job.

That isn’t just disgusting, it’s gross whole-hog piggery. It is one of the many battles the 1 per cent’s class war against the rest of us wins day after day.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it is that the very rich don’t care what happens to the rest of us. When Wall Street’s uncontrollable avarice came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the economy in one villainous spree in 2008 — selling people securities that they knew to be worthless and mortgage loans that they could never in this world pay back, and then evicting them for those unpaid loans — our government gave them nearly a trillion dollars — that’s $1,000,000,000,000 — of your, the taxpayers’, money to save them from bankruptcy, ostensibly in order to help the home owners. But the financial institutions didn’t help the home owners. They took the money and kept it for themselves.

What else have they thought up to do? Well, for a long time, American businesses have been pretending to move to another country in order to avoid paying what they owe America in income tax. Now they’ve gone farther. They’ve kept the vast profits of their deceitful offshore actions offshore. They have all the profits of their activities in overseas banks, where the U.S. can’t tax them for what they owe. (That’s another trillion or so.)

Think you’re poor just because your annual income is below the poverty level? What about the people with less than half that? Why, they’re the fastest-growing class in America, encompassing some 20.5 million people, or 6.7 percent of all Americans.

That’s an all-time record. But keep going, Republican House of Representatives and Supreme Court. You can get that number bigger!

 

The most hopeful sign I have seen for the future of America is the flash flood of Occupiers that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, all over our land.

See, that’s what the Common Man in the Street is supposed to do when somebody tries to destroy the American system that guarantees his freedoms. With no help from any leader, that perfectly ordinary Man (and Woman!) in the street figured out for himself some important facts. First, that the Republican Party was committed to the job of making things very nice for the very rich and fornobody else. Second, that the only other party that ever got a chance to govern, the Democrats, were a lot more interested in protecting their individual cushy Washington positions than in what disasters were happening to the average voter. Third — sadly — that our president, although he certainly is a highly intelligent and well-meaning man, just doesn’t have the stomach for the rough and tumble of protecting the rest of us in America.

What all that added up to was that there wasn’t any person or group with any real power at all who was willing to put up a fight for the Common Man (and Woman!).

Lacking a defined target, the Occupiers struck out against Wall Street. We’re just lucky that they didn’t — as did many a European citizenry facing the same unbearable slicing away of every existing right, privilege, protection or source of income — didn’t do it with weapons in their hands. No, that’s too optimistic. They didn’t do it so far. We should bear in mind that if attention isn’t paid to their urgent needs the weapons might yet come out, as they did at Bunker Hill, long ago.

But we can avoid that. There is something we can do that doesn’t need deadly weapons. It doesn’t need a political party or a fire-breathing leader to make the mob go wild. We can do it at home, in a short evening’s time, at the cost of a few postage stamps.

We can use the tactics of the right wing to destroy those evil-doers who are now trying to destroy some sacred and essential parts of our political system, including the ability — and requirement — of Congress to cooperate fairly with members of opposing parties.

Sign the pledge! Send a copy to every elected Republican in your district! Teach them a lesson!

Grover Norquist (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)

Who is Grover Norquist?

He’s the lobbyist who invented the “I Swear I’ll Never Vote for Any Tax Increase Ever” pledge, which is now paralyzing Congress.

How does his pledge do that?

Congress was created by the founding fathers as a place where representatives of the people of all parties and from every state could get together to work out agreements for the conduct of the country that were fair to everyone. With nearly every Republican legislator now bound by Norquist’s pledge, Congress can’t function even in desperate emergencies.

We’ve just seen that with the failure of the “Supercommittee” to work out an agreement in time to prevent mandatory slashes of funds for almost every part of our government. When the Supercommittee announced that it had failed, Norquist was delighted. He declared it a victory for his pledge and went off on a holiday to celebrate.

But legislators have broken pledges before. If it’s so important. why don’t they just announce they’ve changed their minds?

They can’t if they want to keep their jobs. Norquist threatens to summon alternate candidates to run against them, with dedicated voters determined to kick them out of office. It’s like any other street gang. Once you’re in, you can’t get out.

Then the situation is hopeless?

Oh, no. People that try to govern by force like Norquist only understand greater force. If enough Americans sign our own pledge (below) and thus let the Republican Party go back to sharing in the workings of Congress, he’s licked.

Pledge to the Republicans

Print or type your name
And your home address
All of it

Dear former Republican friend:

This letter is to let you know that your Party’s tactics of destroying the ability of our government to function by means of your no-tax increase-pledge is too recklessly destructive a threat to be taken, even by fanatics.

Accordingly, I now pledge that I, the undersigned, will never again vote for any Republican candidate for any elective office in America until the Republican Party abandons this perilous, un-American and very nearly treasonable action.

Sincerely yours,
(A Registered Voter
At the Above Address.)

Permission is granted to anyone to reprint this item in a blog or publication. In fact, please do!

Dear Readers:

Today is my 92nd birthday, an age which gives me the privilege of asking for the kind of birthday present I would most like to get. That present is simply this: Please take this seriously.

As you can see, the letter below is addressed primarily to our American occupiers, since they’re the ones most likely to climb on and make it move. But it’s also for every American voter who can see that something is crucially threatening our society’s basic needs, and wants to do something to stop it.

Dear Occupier:

You’ve made a wonderful start! Now give the Republican war machine a kick where it hurts them the most. Copy the letter below. Send it to every Republican official or candidate in your state, town or district. Make some more copies and send them to all your friends … and do it quickly, before the Republican High Command finds some way of stopping it.

The Republicans think they own everything, from the Supreme Court to your local school board. They come pretty close, too. But they don’t own your vote — yet. Use it while you’ve still got it!

Print or type your name
And your home address
All of it

Dear former Republican friend:

This letter is to let you know that your Party’s tactics of destroying the ability of our government to function by means of your no-tax increase-pledge is too recklessly destructive a threat to be taken, even by fanatics.

Accordingly, I now pledge that I, the undersigned, will never again vote for any Republican candidate for any elective office in America until the Republican Party abandons this perilous, un-American and very nearly treasonable action.

Sincerely yours,
(A Registered Voter
At the Above Address.)

 

My friend Sherry Gottlieb, who used to run the last surviving science-fiction bookstore in L.A. until she just couldn’t keep up with the escalating rents, sent me the story behind this flyer. I love it. Makes me proud to be an American. I hope you are the same.