America is rich.
Really rich.
But you would never know it based on how our people live.
Human beings endure poverty so deep “many people don’t believe [it] exists here.” Children go hungry. Brown and Black Americans live crippled by racial prejudice and die young. Uneducated White Americans are getting sicker and killing themselves through suicide and drug addiction. Native Americans are stricken by poverty and murdered by police. The public school system is racist, unequal, and unfairly funded. We bury more people because of gun violence than any other developed nation in the world. Our labor force is abused and underpaid. Our people are sicker than those of any other wealthy country, and we live underneath a prison system that brutalizes people, especially those who are Hispanic, Native, Black, and Brown, a system locking Americans behind bars at a rate seen nowhere else on this earth.
This is no exaggeration. Follow the links. Don’t believe me. See for yourself.
America is a nation of great pain and anguish. We do not provide for our citizens here, nor do allow them to provide for themselves.
Studies show that, in America, income is more heritable than medical conditions, personality traits, or height. That means you are more likely to be as poor, or as rich, as your parents than you are to look or act like them.
In other words, if you are born poor in the United States, you will probably die poor.
The odds get little better for middle class children, only 20% of whom will ever make it into the upper fifth of income distribution.
Social mobility, the root of American pride, is a lie.
From The New Yorker,
What the political scientist Michael Harrington wrote back in 1962 is still true: most people who are poor are poor because “they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents.”
In the United States of America, your fate has a good chance of being sealed at birth.
We are simply paid far too little to move beyond our infant circumstances.
A whopping 90% of us make less than $95,000 a year, and half of us make less than $29,999, while the average CEO takes home $313,461 a week.
You cannot earn yourself a living here. We are underpaid and mistreated, our working hours cut when it becomes profitable for employers.
From The New York Times,
Ms. Woods’s current job has not been meeting her needs. When she began driving a passenger van last year, she earned $9 an hour and worked 40 hours a week. Then her wage was cut to $8 an hour, and her hours were drastically scaled back. Last month she earned just $233. So Ms. Woods, who said that she had been threatened with eviction for missing rent payments and had been postponing an appointment with the eye doctor because she lacks insurance, has been looking for another, better job. It has not been easy.
“I’m looking for something else, anything else,” she said. “More hours. Better pay. Actual benefits.”
These are anxious days for American workers. Many, like Ms. Woods, are underemployed. Others find pay that is simply not keeping up with their expenses.
From The New York Times,
[So] far all of the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent.
Working-class Americans power one of the largest economies in the world. They supply the hard, physical labor to produce the wealth, to create the goods that generate the prosperity— yet see not a scrap from the table, with “the top 1% capturing an alarming share of economic growth.” Instead of going into the pockets of the producing class, America’s affluence gets funneled into the pockets of the wealthy elite.
Land of Opportunity? That is insulting.
We live in The State of Delusion, where the rich do not know they are rich, and the majority (you and me, and her and him) are ignorant of how deeply we are getting screwed.
From The Washington Post,
The wealthy, surrounded by other wealthy people, generally believed the U.S. population was wealthier than it actually is.
From Fortune,
“The Fidelity survey found that 42 percent of millionaires still do not feel wealthy.”
...I don’t know which amazes me more: That so many millionaires (and multi-millionaires) don’t believe they’re wealthy, or that they are oblivious enough to admit it?
From Scientific American,
The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
A majority also thinks that CEOs get paid 30 times as much as workers, when, in reality, it’s over 350 times.
Americans have a dangerously skewed idea of how much money their fellow citizens have.
We do not realize the deep poverty and extreme wealth that exists here.
We do not realize how thoroughly the majority is being taken advantage of.
The wealthy do not think they are wealthy. And the middle-, lower-classes don’t know it, either. Nor does anyone understand the level of poverty that exists here.
Americans actually believe this is a land of equality.
My dear people, no, it is not. This country is filled with great suffering— people born into deep poverty and thrown into prison for committing crime because they have nothing and must take it, children hungry and uneducated, young people suffocating under debt for daring to go to college.
As the The New York Times puts it,
“Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden.”
We are at complete odds with reality, separated from and ignorant of the experiences of our fellow citizens.
People are suffering here. And nobody knows it except them.
As if things could get any worse, we also believe in potential prosperity. Americans think that, if you work really hard in this country, no matter who you are, you will succeed.
It is why we try to survive underneath the system. It is why we try to get ahead by following the rules.
From Scientific American,
According to Pew Research... 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Senator Marco Rubio says that America has “never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it.”
...Perhaps we tolerate such inequality because we think these stories happen more than they actually do.
We may not want to believe it, but the United States is now the most unequal of all Western nations.
To make matters worse, America has considerably less social mobility than Canada and Europe.
We are living in a perilous fairy tale.
We think that hard work translates to prosperity in the United States. We think that, even if you are born poor, you “can make it if [you’re] willing to work hard.”
This is a treacherous lie.
It is the twisted narrative that poor people choose to be poor, that it is the middle-class’ fault they are struggling.
The United States is the most unequal of any other Western nation. The United States is immobile compared to Canada and Europe.
Half of our workforce makes less than $30 grand.
When people cannot reach the middle- or upper-class through work, they cannot reach the middle- or upper-class.
Our people are born into the circumstances they will die in. Our citizens are unable to earn enough money to accumulate any wealth for themselves, unable to lift themselves out of poverty into prosperity.
We are living in a crisis.
If Americans actually understood the deep poverty and social immobility of the United States, if we truly understood how heinous our non-democratic reality is, we would be out in the streets, outraged and protesting, refusing to work until we receive justice.
It is why politicians fill us up with false beliefs about our “nation of haves and soon-to-haves,” fooling us into believing that there is wealth to be earned here, that America is a great land where people can find success no matter their birth circumstances.
If they can convince us that we simply must work hard to be successful, they can prevent an uprising, safe-guarding their stranglehold on wealth and power.
They are succeeding.
Because of our ignorance, because of the political lies, we allow people who will only keep us in this unjust existence to gain power.
We elect politicians who force the poor to pay more than the rich. Every year our elected officials have us writing a fat check for the privilege of living in an oligarchy.
From Salon,
A study from January found that in literally every state, the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the rich. However, in states that disproportionately rely on sales taxes to balance their books, it’s much more dire. In Washington, which has one of the most regressive tax systems, the lowest 20 percent of earners pay close to 17 percent of their annual income in taxes; meanwhile the top 1 percent pay just 2.5 percent.
In the United States of America, it is terribly expensive to be poor, and terribly cheap to be rich. That fact is evident in our taxes as much as anything else.
We elect politicians who waste those unjust and dishonorably taken tax dollars on studies about massaging rabbits, teaching monkeys to gamble, seeing if “hanger” (hunger and anger) is a real concept, and trying to find if mothers love their dogs as much as their children.
Last year, we paid $100,000 for the Coast Guard to patrol rich houses “to stop uninvited guests from crashing private parties,” lost $10 million in tax revenue by allowing “the super-rich to rent their homes for up to two weeks each year tax-free,” spent $4.2 billion in wrongful tax refunds to identity thieves, spent $21 million to rebuild buildings that continue to burn down “because of their shoddy construction,” and spent $1 billion to destroy $16 billion in “unneeded purchases of military-grade ammunition.”
All this waste, all this money spent on the rich, while our children go malnourished and our people live in deep, crushing poverty.
We elect politicians who spend our money on big business— billions and billions of our tax dollars (potential and real) funneled to corporations in tax breaks and subsidies: to oil companies, to Wall Street, to prison companies, to pharmaceutical companies, to gun companies, to the agricultural sugar industry, to Wal-Mart, Boeing, Geico, General Electric, Walgreen, FedEx, General Motors and whoever the hell Netjets and the General Re Corporation are.
Our politicians work for the rich, giving tax breaks and subsidies to wealthy corporations, because they are getting paid to.
There is a reason everybody in Congress is making millions and millions of dollars.
Wall Street, big oil, prison, pharmaceutical, and gun companies pour money into our politicians’ pockets, ensuring the politicians get elected and their corporate greed goes unchecked.
From The New York Times,
There is little question that the enormous sums flowing into candidates’ campaign coffers undermine democracy, breed cynicism and shape policy to the preferences of powerful donors.
Unbridled campaign contributions invite nightmare situations in which those at the pinnacle of society purchase the power needed to preserve the yawning inequities of the status quo.
Our society is no democracy.
Politicians do not work for the people. They work for the corporations drenching their campaigns in cash. They work for the rich individuals buying them an election like a toy in a toy store.
From The New York Times,
Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found...
They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters.
Our government employees do not report to us, the young, women, black, and brown people of this country, but to the rich, the handful of families purchasing these “democratic elections.”
We pay taxes, and in unjust amounts, for politicians to fight against our well-being.
They do not work to remedy the great injustices that take place here. They do not fight on our behalf. They do not care what we think. We have no control over our government— the exact opposite definition of a democracy.
From Cambridge University Press,
...Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Of the people, by the people, for the people?
Of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Big business, not the citizen majority, control the United States government.
Let that sink in.
Let it flow deep, deep down into your soul. Slow your breathing, slow your mind, and let the truth wash over you, submerging itself down into the very core of your being.
We. Do. Not. Have. A. Democracy.
The masses of the United States, the “average citizens,” have no say over what happens to us, while the “economic elites” and “organized groups representing business interests” have “substantial” sway over what laws get passed.
The rich buy elections, pushing “enormous sums” of money “into candidates’ campaign coffers,” money that “undermine[s] democracy,” and causes politicians to “shape policy to the preferences of powerful donors.”
We are living in a “nightmare situation,” where “those at the pinnacle of society” can “purchase the power needed to preserve the yawning inequities of the status quo.”
Rich people buy the power to keep poverty in place, to keep racism and sexism alive, to keep our prisons full so they may profit, to keep our health care system corrupt so they can get rich off the sick, to pass legislation that holds us down, and elevates them up even more.
You should be furious.
You should be welling up with anger, flaring up with rage, your entire mind and body blazing in deep outrage— because you have no control over your government.
The public-organizer that decides what sort of schools your kid goes to, how much you get paid, what happens when you get sick, what happens to your family when you die, where orphans and abused children go, if those born poor can lift themselves out of poverty, the rules corporations have to follow, what happens to the forests and mountains and rivers on this land, how captive animals get treated, how hungry children get fed, what the rules are and what happens if you break them, etc. etc. etc. isn’t working for you and doesn’t give a damn what you think.
They do not have to, because the majority of us, an overwhelming number of our fellow people living on this land and subject to the government’s laws and rules, do not vote.
The political class does not listen to us, because we do not force them to.
And they are doing everything they can to keep it that way.
From The Nation,
The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote.
They are robbing us of the most fundamental right we have— a voice in our country’s governance— because when we vote, liberals win.
Americans are in no disagreement over how our country should look.
We are people who believe in Mother Theresa, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman. We celebrate these individuals because we believe in their teachings of peace, freedom, equality, and justice. We believe in taking care of the poor, the sick, the children, the elderly.
We know, fundamentally, that human beings should be treating other human beings well on this planet we call Earth.
And we think the government should make it happen.
No matter the fear-mongering about big government, about pie-in-the-sky idealism— Americans understand, at heart, that the private sector is for profit and the public sector is for people.
We do not want an economy where people are left to run loose and wild, free to act in their own greedy interests, no matter the cost to the rest of us. We do not want corporations to have control over the media, to be able to successfully lobby our leaders into passing laws that are good for them, but terrible for everyone else. We do not want big business to be allowed to pay their workers poverty wages (even without knowing about the billions that low-wage jobs cost us). We do not want sick people to stay sick, and the poor to stay poor.
We like the idea of a peace-and-justice-organizer that every single person has exactly One say in.
We like the idea of a strong government that is transparent and capable. We like the idea of an efficient, mobile system that brings all the states together and enforces common standards of living for all.
Republicans, Democrats, Independents, people who do not give a crap about the political process because it does not give a crap about them— we all agree on the sort of nation we want to have.
6 in 10 Americans think the government should “do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.”
4 in 5 Americans support government-enforced paid parental leave, and even more support paid sick leave.
7 in 10 Americans want the government to increase the minimum wage.
2 in 3 Americans want the government to enforce trade restrictions to keep jobs here and ensure workers get treated fairly.
2 in 3 Americans want the government to raise taxes on people making over $1 million a year.
1 in 2 Americans want the government to cap the income of top executives at big corporations.
For goodness’ sake, we are bleeding blue!
We want the rich taxed, the minimum wage increased, paid parental and sick leave enforced— the majority of Americans are freakin’ liberal, socialist, progressive, whatever string of syllables you like to describe this marvelous set of ideas!
Because, really, if you entrust the government with your kids for 7 hours a day for 12 years, why the hell don’t you trust them with anything else?
We are actually a Democratic people, but because we do not have a democracy, because our politicians never debate (and when they [finally] do, it’s on Saturdays before holidays), because Election Day is on a work day, because people have to wait hours to vote, because the media is owned by 6 corporations and constructs our opinion instead of reports it, because as children we are taught what to think instead of how to think— we do not vote, and, when we do, we do not vote in our own interests.
So the democracy that never was descends even further into oligarchy.
We must unite to defeat this common enemy.
We must stop looking left to right, black to white, Christian to Muslim, gay to straight, and begin looking at the top.
We must understand how deeply we all agree with one another, how we are on the exact same page.
We must realize that Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street are of the same Movement— a fight to end the “yawning inequities of the status quo,” a fight to end the “nightmare situations in which those at the pinnacle of society purchase the power.”
We are both battling to bring democracy to a nation that has never seen it. We are both fighting for justice and freedom.
My fellow humans, it is time for The People of the United States to do what is in our name, and unite.
It is time for the the poor White people, the poor Black people, the poor Native people, the poor Hispanic and Latina/o people, the poor Asian people, the uncared for sick, the struggling middle-class, the women, the atheists, the Muslims, the disabled, the elderly, the young, the broke students, the laborers, the victims of gun violence, the hungry people, and any 1 percenters who are down with justice and want to join the Revolution, to come together and let the mighty, united voice of The People ring clear and loud, to demand freedom and liberty for all our fellow humans, to send our cries to those in power, to order justice, to command fairness, to demand opportunity, to force the United States to become a true Democracy!
It is time for us to refuse the hate and division of our leaders!
No longer shall they push us apart! No more shall they profit from our ignorance!
The powerful are terrified of the masses, they hide themselves away in gated neighborhoods and on top of hills, they bar the doors of their massive mansions, and hire bodyguards to keep us away— let us strike fear into their hearts for a reason!
It is time for us to take the power that they will never give up!
It is time for a Robin Hood Revolution!
All the suffering peoples, AWAKEN!
Rise together and unite!
Crush the oligarchy, crush the power structure, tear down these oppressive walls and throw this country into another Political Revolution, as we did in 1932, when The People forced the Republicans out and swept the Democrats into Congress and FDR into the White House!
I call to you, my Fellow Human Beings of This Earth— stand up like we have not seen since the 1930s!
Stand up in the name of Justice, in the name of Freedom, in the name of Liberty! Stand up for the children!
Stand up in the vein of France, Egypt, Tunisia, and the United States! Stand up for a Revolution infinitely superior to that of our Founding Fathers by fighting for the rights of ALL humans, not just white men!
Stand up in the vein of the American People in 2015— create the story, mark the books, change the course of history forever!
Flood to the polls on November 8, 2016!
Elect Bernie Sanders, the Leader of Our Revolution, the only candidate who has been decrying these injustices for decades, the only candidate refusing to take money from this evil corporate oligarchy, the only candidate refusing to bend to the will of the wealthy, refusing to sell We, The People out, refusing to abandon his righteous principles from 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2003, to 2010— standing beside us and laughing in the face of those who say it is not possible!
Elect Democrats into Congress! Just as we did in 1932, give Bernie legislators who will actually work with him! Sweep the ballot and push Democrats into the House and Senate!
November 8, 2016— Remember this day! The day of liberty! The day of freedom! The day the American people win ourselves health care, college education, prison that does not punish, paying jobs, a crack-down on Wall Street, gun reform, an expansion of Social Security, a decent standard of living!
My people, it is time for REVOLUTION!
And Bernie Sanders is the human to lead us.
Look at what people from his youth say about him, look at his tenure as Mayor, look at what he has done in the House, look at what he has done in the Senate— and you will have no doubt who you must vote for.
In his own words, speaking way back in 1985—
“I think the reason we win and continue to win is that, increasingly, people are frustrated and angry about a two-party system which is dominated by big money, and which does not pay attention to the needs of working people, or elderly people, or poor people, and I think if you talk common sense to the people, and you say that government is supposed to represent the needs of those people who today are not getting a fair shake—
You know what, they’ll vote for you.”
