Posted by We are told the United States and its system of governance and society is invincible and is the best possible system and that all others are doomed to failure.
This has always been a lie. This country committed genocide of Native people and the holocaust of slavery against African people.
But in the last few decades, we’ve been told that all that is in the past and the system cannot fail.
We have to wake up. It is failing. It is failing on purpose. And it is time to re-imagine what our world can be.
- We are told we have the perfect system of governance, free of dictatorship with checks and balances on power.
Those of us who struggle every day to make ends meet know the real score. There is a group of ultra-rich and their bootlickers that control everything. As a practical matter, it is impossible for a person who is not extremely wealthy to realistically run for even the lowest elected office.
So the ultra-wealthy effectively have a hammerlock on government, preventing any measures that would benefit working people.
As for checks and balances? A joke. The president can and does send the military into war without approval from congress. Executive orders are becoming more the style of executive branch governing in both the Obama and Trump administrations.
The Supreme Court voted along ideological lines to effectively hand George W Bush the presidency in 2000. The justices are essentially political operatives that serve the wealthy, as is proven every time a new justice must be appointed.
2. The right wing is aggressive with its goals.
As we’ve written before, there is a movement afoot among Republicans in state legislatures to convene a new Constitutional convention, in which they no doubt hope to re-write the laws of the US to eliminate any rights or guarantees which inconvenience the powerful.
This is proof the right doesn’t even believe its own lies about the US system of governance being the best in the world.
3. People who live in the United States are increasingly unable to access food, shelter and healthcare.
In 2015, 42.2 million Americans lived in food insecure households. 43.1 million people (13.5 percent) were in poverty. Both of those statistics came from the US government itself.
Some estimates put the number of homeless people in the US at more than half a million.
As for healthcare, the for-profit system in the US kills thousands each year.
These are grim statistics. But what we should keep in mind is that they are proof that we are being lied to when we are told that things are as great as they can be and can get no better.
It is our duty to re-imagine what our world can be. The powerful people in the US are against this idea. They want us to remain with a feeling of helplessness, isolated from each other.
We need to get together – in small groups at first if need be – to begin to talk about what it is we want our world to look like. And then, in increasing numbers, start making demands.
The time for appealing to millionaire and billionaire politicians is over. The time for pleading with billionaire-owned media to hear our stories is over. The time to hope someone else will make a better world for us is over.
The time is now to re-imagine and demand a new world.
The Forge News 