http://october2011.org/blogs/margaret-flowers/we-can-no-longer-wait-change-come-protest-october-6thby Udi Pladott
On October 6th, 2011, ten years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, and as the 2012 federal budget goes into effect with its brutal austerity measures, I will join thousands of people who will converge on Freedom Plaza, just a few blocks away from the White House in Washington, DC. We will mount a deliberate, prolonged, nonviolent protest. We will congregate there because we have no other choice.
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The comprehensive control of moneyed interests over our political power structure guarantees that decisions at all levels of government are made at the service of those individuals, groups and corporations who control the nation’s wealth—a steadily diminishing sliver of the general public—rather than the people who actually cast the votes on election day; rather than the people whose life, liberty and pursuit of happiness the government is supposed to serve.
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We the people are left to suffer the fallout:
* War: A prolonged state of war, war with all its attendant atrocities and horrors, war with no regard for congressional (or popular) approval, war with dubious benefits to our national security, war by varied contrived names that drains our national treasury and swells our national debt. War is the hallmark of American foreign policy, whether it is our own troops carrying it out or, or our allies.
* Economy: Unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger. Decades of deregulation, “free trade” and other “pro-business” fiscal policies have rendered large swaths of our workforce idle. Entire industries have moved abroad, and in those that still offer some measure of domestic employment, workers often face a race to the bottom of the pay scale. The middle class—the bedrock of our economy—is gradually evaporating, as more and more of its former members find themselves among the ranks of the poor, even if they still have a job. Multitudes lose their homes to unscrupulous bankers, who then go on to receive taxpayer-funded bonuses. At every turn, the working poor and middle class are asked to “tighten their belts” as the rich get richer.
* Health care: Immense disparities in access to care, skyrocketing healthcare costs, mediocre public health outcomes. American health care providers offer the best care and medical services that money can buy, but more and more Americans can no longer afford the costs. Our society as a whole suffers from clinical outcomes comparable to those in developing countries, and among our peers, we are one of the only nations that does not regard health care as a fundamental individual right. We are still the wealthiest nation in the world, and we allow 45,000 of our fellow Americans to die every year because they could not get the medical care that could save their lives.
* Education: Immense disparities in access to education, ignorance, illiteracy. Government budgets consistently underfund our primary education teachers, ensuring that our children are undereducated. After that weak start, at early adulthood they have a choice of either saddling themselves with insurmountable college debt, or forgoing higher education and taking their chances in the inhospitable economy.
* Environment: Pollution, droughts, floods, famine, disease, mass extinctions. We are compelled to continue to rely on fossil fuels, barrelling down the road to catastrophic climate change, despite wide-reaching scientific consensus about our role in our own imminent demise. The relentless pursuit of more and more oil and coal obliterates our oceans and mountaintops. Despite the recent disaster in Japan, the government still support expansion of nuclear power plants. Like in so many other large-scale enterprises, risk is socialized, while profits are privatized.
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Americans who can no longer tolerate their oppression will come to Freedom Plaza on October 6th, 2011. We will stay there; we will recreate our democracy.
Edit: If you decide to unrec - as I see someone already has- I'd love it if you talked about why. I want this protest to be meaningful and to work. If you share Democratic values, which I assume you do if you are on this board, but you don't support this movement, I think it would be useful to understand why. Thanks.
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