Not waving the white flag of surrender.
We have a problem in this country. It is not that President Obama is a weak leader as the conservative talking heads would lead us to believe, it is not even that Congress is, for the most part, useless thanks to Republican obstructionism. No, the problem we have in this country is that, to quote a line from the movie,
Wall Street, "Greed is good." The problem is that while greed is good for a select few, it is disastrous for the rest of us. We see this in arguments about school funding—just a few decades ago there were few, if any, fees to send a child to public school. Now we have fees just to put money in our
child's lunch account (That would be the "small" program fee mentioned on the linked page.)
We live in a country where higher education or an unfortunate healthcare crisis can leave you destitute with little or no recourse. A country where wages have been stagnant while the price of everything has continued to climb. Minimum wage workers who were getting by on nothing are now getting by on even less.
Tone deaf Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) father, Rafael Cruz, said that African Americans "need to be educated" about Democrats, adding that "the average black does not" know that the minimum wage is bad while speaking at the Western Williamson Republican Club.
Well, I guess that proves that the nut does not fall far from the tree.
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We debate about whether or not a community should pay for public education, when our children's future is being stolen from us in front of our very eyes while we quibble over a dollar or two in taxes. At the same time, companies like Burger King look to pay fewer and fewer taxes on the profits they make, while paying their employees as little as possible—knowing that the safety net will end up paying part of their workers' wages.
We have political authors raising the white flag of surrender in the class wars, stating that we only have one side—the rich—and therefore the class wars are over because one side has all the power.
Sorry, but I am not raising the white flag of surrender. I will continue tilting at windmills until my dying breath, fighting the good fight and doing what is right.
The United States looks more like an plutocracy than a democracy today; however, we have been down this road once before. At the turn of 20th century, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, and a few others controlled our nation. It is likely that the presidential election of 1896 was bought and paid for by the industrialists of the day who feared what would come if William Jennings Bryan were elected president. If that sounds familiar, it should. The Koch brothers and others are just the modern-day versions of the robber barons of a century ago.
We beat them back once before with a progressive movement that fought the monied interests of the day. Men like Robert M. La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt created a populist movement that defeated the robber barons. It took time, and some battles were lost along the way, but the progressives did eventually beat back big monied interests.
The big money donors made a comeback in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, and we progressives have been on our heels ever since. However, the tide is turning. The Wisconsin Uprising was the beginning of a new era in the progressive movement. People, fed up, turned out in droves to protest the same failed policies the plutocrats have been shoving down our throats since Ronald Reagan. We failed in removing the plutocrat puppet Gov. Scott Walker from office during his recall, but the lessons learned there went on to feed the Occupy movement, and beyond. Now fast food workers are taking the next step in the fight against inequality by striking and staging civil disobedience actions.
Things may look bleak for us now; however, time, demographics, and numbers are on our side. As a father, I must harbor hope for the future, for my son's future, for all of our children's future.
We have not lost the class war. We have just barely begun fighting it.