Post by tonydestefanis on Jun 27, 2012 18:57:18 GMT -5
Reflections on the Fourth of July: Will The Real 99% Please Stand Up?
Once again it’s Fourth of July in Philadelphia. I know what you’re thinking. Its just another episode of the same old patriotic flag-wavin’, hot dog-grillin’, beer-drinkin’ water ice-eatin’ festivities that happens every year. Thousands of tourists from far away and deserted places like Minnesota descending on the city, charging out into the streets from their hotels, hoping to communicate with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers or at least, snag a souvenir photo with that obligatory guy in the colonial garb who really looks a lot like Ben Franklin. Maybe get a peek at the britches Betsy Ross wore when Washington came to pick up the first flag, hot off the presses or the loom or whatever the heck you used to make a flag in the 18th Century. Lots of fireworks at numerous corporate sponsored events festooned with odd mixes of various B-list celebrities. Maybe grab a slice of that two-ton hoagie WaWa is building, even though you know that on their best day a WaWa hoagie is a sorry excuse for a sandwich that only resembles a real hoagie in form and not substance. Go ahead, eat it with a Krimpet even though you have to admit in your heart of hearts that TastyKakes haven’t been Tasty in years and the only people that buy them are the poor souls hoping to rekindle some lost nostalgia and pretend that the times haven’t changed and that things haven’t moved on, when we all know they have.
In fact, in the past few decades things have changed dramatically and I am not just talking about lame butterscotch snack cakes, I am talking about the entire social structure of America. I am talking about what used to be called, quaintly, the American Dream. A big part of that dream was the belief that each generation would have it better than the last and that our political leaders genuinely cared about what was best for the country. We believed that the success of everyday people, the factory workers and the family farmers, was a necessary and essential component of the success of the American experiment as a whole.
In many ways the Fourth of July celebrations and traditions that developed in the 20th Century were much more about this modern American dream than about driving a few thousand British colonialists back across the pond after a bunch of slave-holding aristocrats got their knickers in a twist over a few pence worth of tax payments. July 4th wasn’t even made a federal holiday until 1941, which was just in time to latch onto that post-war patriotism and create an admittedly great tradition of searing meat on backyard grills scattered throughout the newly built, and G.I. Bill funded, backyards of ever growing suburbia. All we had to worry about was Scooter’s grades and whether Ward had been too hard on the Beaver last night. Well, that and the fear of being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust just a few days before the cement in your fallout shelter was dry and whether Harvey up the block was now, or had ever been, a communist, but that’s a story best left for another time.
Overall it was a time of hope and optimism. Real wages for real people were growing. The standard of living for most Americans was increasing, despite the fact that, unlike today, the country maintained a presently unthinkable top tax rate of 90% for the wealthiest Americans. Even the Supreme Court finally corrected that fifty year “separate but equal” blunder allowing the promise of unalienable rights to be extended to millions of African-Americans who had denied the rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. The future looked bright. However, for some reason, and I think Fox News may have had something to do with it, we have abandoned this vision. Now we don’t look to the well-being of everyday people as the yardstick for measuring progress. We look with fealty to millionaires, billionaires and multi-national corporations and we use their comfort and success as our yardstick to measure the progress of our nation as a whole and take their need as paramount to our success. As we celebrate another Fourth of July it is time to reflect on how contrary such an arrangement is, not only to the modern American dream, but to the Founding Father’s vision of a Nation founded, by and for the people, with unalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While our nation was conceived in liberty, we now are forced to pledge allegiance to a conglomeration of special, moneyed interests that have, to a degree surpassing any actions by King George III, established unbridled despotism and subjugated us all to unprecedented tyranny that would have been unimaginable to the delegates at either the First or Second Continental Congresses. It is high time for a change.
In just a few decades we have seen the gap between the top 1% of Americans and the rest of the 99% widen dramatically. Between 1979 and 2009, the richest 5 percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 73 percent while the poorest Americans saw their real incomes decrease by 7 percent. From 1979 to 2010, in inflation adjusted dollars, the incomes of private sector workers fell from $32,000 to $29,000 while income among “job creators” rose from $2 million to $16 million. The financial crisis of 2008 drove the economy into a ditch from which we have yet to pull ourselves out of and the reckless practices on Wall Street that fueled the collapse continue mostly unabated. Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. College tuition continues to skyrocket leaving young people saddled with debt with limited prospects for decent employment. Millions of people lost and continue to lose their jobs and their homes. Dramatic cuts in social services are implemented in the name of “shared sacrifice” in response to bad times. We continue to spend billions on overseas wars whose objectives and progress remain unclear, but refuse to invest in needed infrastructure here at home.
Yet the rabid right and the deranged tea partiers have managed to convince too many Americans that if we only continue the Bush era tax cuts and continue to give corporations that already pay no taxes some additional tax incentives, as they ship jobs overseas and cut worker’s benefits, that somehow, miraculously, and eventually money will shower down upon all of our downtrodden heads and we can once again rejoice in the land of milk and honey. That facts show that this has not and will not happen. The 99% of the population is being asked to shoulder more and more of the burden as the 1% get richer and we demonize teachers, police officers and firefighters as unnecessary parasites while overpaid CEO’s are lauded as heroic job creators, even if the only jobs they create are low paying or located in Asia. As if this wasn’t enough, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, now the rich and powerful can spend unlimited money on political campaigns and lobbying to make sure that they continue to get a bigger and bigger slice of the pie. We can’t let this happen. If this is class warfare, in the words of John Rambo, they drew first blood, not us. We are losing any sense of decency and compassion and this is not the way America is supposed to operate. Just the other day Iowa Congressman Tom Latham (R.) laughed along merrily when the host of a talk show he was on suggested pistol-whipping nuns who were protesting cuts in social services. If there is a faster or more efficient method of getting into hell than supporting pistol-whipping nuns who are trying to help the poor I can’t imagine what it could be, but I digress.
There is a profound need for change and this is precisely why this Fourth of July presents all of us in the region with a unique opportunity to reflect on and to seek meaningful change to work toward steering our country not only back to the vision of our Founding Fathers, but back to the vision of the American dream: a dream that must be resuscitated and resurrected. We must take action to remedy this injustice or once again we are just offering to hold the bags of money stolen by the rich and powerful while they make their getaway unscathed. I don’t know about you, but I want some of my money back and I am willing to do what ever it takes to change government policies that consider the interests of the rich and powerful over the needs of everyday American. I would much rather see my tax dollars go to feed a hungry family than to fund some sweetheart tax break deal so Shell Oil can make a fortune while making a large portion of the Eastern Seaboard potentially uninhabitable. If you want to continue to believe that what’s best for billionaires is also best for you go ahead, its ok: we’ll fight for you until you wake up.
Which brings me back to the original topic of Fourth of July in Philadelphia. This year you don’t just have to sit around swilling a Pabst and complaining about Obama Care. You have not one, but two groups in town who are working to fight for everyday Americans just like you: the 99%. The first is the Occupy National Gathering. I know you may still have a little resentment over having been inconvenienced a few times when the Occupation was at City Hall, having to step over tents and so forth, but you should really get over it: some things are more important than grabbing that morning latte and you should get out to see what they are doing and what they have to say. From June 30th to July 4th, the Occupy movement will convene in the vicinity of Philadelphia’s Independence Mall for a week of direct actions, movement building and the creation of a vision for a democratic future. The National Gathering will kick off with a massive march with Healthcare-Now! in solidarity with their fight for the right to health. On July 5th they will conclude by joining Guitarmy for a 99 mile march from Philadelphia to Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. There will also be entertainment, speakers and comedy all with the goal of raising awareness of the many unresolved issues facing everyday Americans today.
There is also a second group of activists, The 99 Declaration or Continental Congress 2.0, meeting at the Philadelphia Convention Center to draft a Petition for the Redress of Grievances that will ultimately be presented to the government. Although this event is not open to the public, over 700 delegates have been elected from each congressional district in the nation. It is the goal of the convention that “these non-partisan locally elected Delegates shall gather to condemn and demand redress from the individuals currently in control of the United States government. I myself am one of two elected delegates to Continental Congress 2.0 for New Jersey’s 1st Congressional District. I won by a whopping six votes, including my own. However, I am not confining myself to participation with the activities at the Convention Center I plan to participate in as many activities as I can, and getting as much information as possible, which is what I recommend everyone who can should also do. I also am making sure I have the time to grill a few hotdogs, drink a few beers and watch a few fireworks, just like 99% of Americans will be doing. However, it is my profound hope that while we all have our BBQ’s and celebrations we take the time to reflect on what the Fourth of July really means and what we can do to ensure that the American Dream stays alive for our children and our children’s children. It has been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing and make no mistake the control of the government for the benefit of the rich and powerful is indeed evil. Don’t let that happen. We are the 99% and we have to stand up and be counted. It’s the necessary and the patriotic thing to do. Enjoy the Fourth and remember: if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
Peace, Tony D.
Once again it’s Fourth of July in Philadelphia. I know what you’re thinking. Its just another episode of the same old patriotic flag-wavin’, hot dog-grillin’, beer-drinkin’ water ice-eatin’ festivities that happens every year. Thousands of tourists from far away and deserted places like Minnesota descending on the city, charging out into the streets from their hotels, hoping to communicate with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers or at least, snag a souvenir photo with that obligatory guy in the colonial garb who really looks a lot like Ben Franklin. Maybe get a peek at the britches Betsy Ross wore when Washington came to pick up the first flag, hot off the presses or the loom or whatever the heck you used to make a flag in the 18th Century. Lots of fireworks at numerous corporate sponsored events festooned with odd mixes of various B-list celebrities. Maybe grab a slice of that two-ton hoagie WaWa is building, even though you know that on their best day a WaWa hoagie is a sorry excuse for a sandwich that only resembles a real hoagie in form and not substance. Go ahead, eat it with a Krimpet even though you have to admit in your heart of hearts that TastyKakes haven’t been Tasty in years and the only people that buy them are the poor souls hoping to rekindle some lost nostalgia and pretend that the times haven’t changed and that things haven’t moved on, when we all know they have.
In fact, in the past few decades things have changed dramatically and I am not just talking about lame butterscotch snack cakes, I am talking about the entire social structure of America. I am talking about what used to be called, quaintly, the American Dream. A big part of that dream was the belief that each generation would have it better than the last and that our political leaders genuinely cared about what was best for the country. We believed that the success of everyday people, the factory workers and the family farmers, was a necessary and essential component of the success of the American experiment as a whole.
In many ways the Fourth of July celebrations and traditions that developed in the 20th Century were much more about this modern American dream than about driving a few thousand British colonialists back across the pond after a bunch of slave-holding aristocrats got their knickers in a twist over a few pence worth of tax payments. July 4th wasn’t even made a federal holiday until 1941, which was just in time to latch onto that post-war patriotism and create an admittedly great tradition of searing meat on backyard grills scattered throughout the newly built, and G.I. Bill funded, backyards of ever growing suburbia. All we had to worry about was Scooter’s grades and whether Ward had been too hard on the Beaver last night. Well, that and the fear of being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust just a few days before the cement in your fallout shelter was dry and whether Harvey up the block was now, or had ever been, a communist, but that’s a story best left for another time.
Overall it was a time of hope and optimism. Real wages for real people were growing. The standard of living for most Americans was increasing, despite the fact that, unlike today, the country maintained a presently unthinkable top tax rate of 90% for the wealthiest Americans. Even the Supreme Court finally corrected that fifty year “separate but equal” blunder allowing the promise of unalienable rights to be extended to millions of African-Americans who had denied the rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. The future looked bright. However, for some reason, and I think Fox News may have had something to do with it, we have abandoned this vision. Now we don’t look to the well-being of everyday people as the yardstick for measuring progress. We look with fealty to millionaires, billionaires and multi-national corporations and we use their comfort and success as our yardstick to measure the progress of our nation as a whole and take their need as paramount to our success. As we celebrate another Fourth of July it is time to reflect on how contrary such an arrangement is, not only to the modern American dream, but to the Founding Father’s vision of a Nation founded, by and for the people, with unalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While our nation was conceived in liberty, we now are forced to pledge allegiance to a conglomeration of special, moneyed interests that have, to a degree surpassing any actions by King George III, established unbridled despotism and subjugated us all to unprecedented tyranny that would have been unimaginable to the delegates at either the First or Second Continental Congresses. It is high time for a change.
In just a few decades we have seen the gap between the top 1% of Americans and the rest of the 99% widen dramatically. Between 1979 and 2009, the richest 5 percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 73 percent while the poorest Americans saw their real incomes decrease by 7 percent. From 1979 to 2010, in inflation adjusted dollars, the incomes of private sector workers fell from $32,000 to $29,000 while income among “job creators” rose from $2 million to $16 million. The financial crisis of 2008 drove the economy into a ditch from which we have yet to pull ourselves out of and the reckless practices on Wall Street that fueled the collapse continue mostly unabated. Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. College tuition continues to skyrocket leaving young people saddled with debt with limited prospects for decent employment. Millions of people lost and continue to lose their jobs and their homes. Dramatic cuts in social services are implemented in the name of “shared sacrifice” in response to bad times. We continue to spend billions on overseas wars whose objectives and progress remain unclear, but refuse to invest in needed infrastructure here at home.
Yet the rabid right and the deranged tea partiers have managed to convince too many Americans that if we only continue the Bush era tax cuts and continue to give corporations that already pay no taxes some additional tax incentives, as they ship jobs overseas and cut worker’s benefits, that somehow, miraculously, and eventually money will shower down upon all of our downtrodden heads and we can once again rejoice in the land of milk and honey. That facts show that this has not and will not happen. The 99% of the population is being asked to shoulder more and more of the burden as the 1% get richer and we demonize teachers, police officers and firefighters as unnecessary parasites while overpaid CEO’s are lauded as heroic job creators, even if the only jobs they create are low paying or located in Asia. As if this wasn’t enough, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, now the rich and powerful can spend unlimited money on political campaigns and lobbying to make sure that they continue to get a bigger and bigger slice of the pie. We can’t let this happen. If this is class warfare, in the words of John Rambo, they drew first blood, not us. We are losing any sense of decency and compassion and this is not the way America is supposed to operate. Just the other day Iowa Congressman Tom Latham (R.) laughed along merrily when the host of a talk show he was on suggested pistol-whipping nuns who were protesting cuts in social services. If there is a faster or more efficient method of getting into hell than supporting pistol-whipping nuns who are trying to help the poor I can’t imagine what it could be, but I digress.
There is a profound need for change and this is precisely why this Fourth of July presents all of us in the region with a unique opportunity to reflect on and to seek meaningful change to work toward steering our country not only back to the vision of our Founding Fathers, but back to the vision of the American dream: a dream that must be resuscitated and resurrected. We must take action to remedy this injustice or once again we are just offering to hold the bags of money stolen by the rich and powerful while they make their getaway unscathed. I don’t know about you, but I want some of my money back and I am willing to do what ever it takes to change government policies that consider the interests of the rich and powerful over the needs of everyday American. I would much rather see my tax dollars go to feed a hungry family than to fund some sweetheart tax break deal so Shell Oil can make a fortune while making a large portion of the Eastern Seaboard potentially uninhabitable. If you want to continue to believe that what’s best for billionaires is also best for you go ahead, its ok: we’ll fight for you until you wake up.
Which brings me back to the original topic of Fourth of July in Philadelphia. This year you don’t just have to sit around swilling a Pabst and complaining about Obama Care. You have not one, but two groups in town who are working to fight for everyday Americans just like you: the 99%. The first is the Occupy National Gathering. I know you may still have a little resentment over having been inconvenienced a few times when the Occupation was at City Hall, having to step over tents and so forth, but you should really get over it: some things are more important than grabbing that morning latte and you should get out to see what they are doing and what they have to say. From June 30th to July 4th, the Occupy movement will convene in the vicinity of Philadelphia’s Independence Mall for a week of direct actions, movement building and the creation of a vision for a democratic future. The National Gathering will kick off with a massive march with Healthcare-Now! in solidarity with their fight for the right to health. On July 5th they will conclude by joining Guitarmy for a 99 mile march from Philadelphia to Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. There will also be entertainment, speakers and comedy all with the goal of raising awareness of the many unresolved issues facing everyday Americans today.
There is also a second group of activists, The 99 Declaration or Continental Congress 2.0, meeting at the Philadelphia Convention Center to draft a Petition for the Redress of Grievances that will ultimately be presented to the government. Although this event is not open to the public, over 700 delegates have been elected from each congressional district in the nation. It is the goal of the convention that “these non-partisan locally elected Delegates shall gather to condemn and demand redress from the individuals currently in control of the United States government. I myself am one of two elected delegates to Continental Congress 2.0 for New Jersey’s 1st Congressional District. I won by a whopping six votes, including my own. However, I am not confining myself to participation with the activities at the Convention Center I plan to participate in as many activities as I can, and getting as much information as possible, which is what I recommend everyone who can should also do. I also am making sure I have the time to grill a few hotdogs, drink a few beers and watch a few fireworks, just like 99% of Americans will be doing. However, it is my profound hope that while we all have our BBQ’s and celebrations we take the time to reflect on what the Fourth of July really means and what we can do to ensure that the American Dream stays alive for our children and our children’s children. It has been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing and make no mistake the control of the government for the benefit of the rich and powerful is indeed evil. Don’t let that happen. We are the 99% and we have to stand up and be counted. It’s the necessary and the patriotic thing to do. Enjoy the Fourth and remember: if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
Peace, Tony D.