Well, here we are, back to the 1930s. The great, mostly white middle class produced by postwar legislation and the boom on which it rode, is now mostly gone. Sixty percent of Americans are again living hand-to-mouth. And yet, our ignoble oligarchs are still not satisfied. And they won't even be satisfied with medieval-style ownership of all us peasants!
Most of you have, courtesy of Faux News and other such fascist media, have fallen for the lie that the political and economic descendants of the planters have been using on us ever since Bacon's Rebellion in the Virginia colony of the 1670s.
One of that rebellion's remarkably rich ironies is, it actually began because enough newly-freed indentured servants thought that the colonial legislature wasn't grabbing enough of the natives' land quickly enough!
But whatever its roots, Bacon's Rebellion terrified the Virginia planters because black and white indentured servants made common cause against the Virginia aristocracy. From then on, blacks were to be slaves all their lives and whites would be indentured for a few years, then used to do the planters' dirty work while being fed the lie that THEY were now part of the ruling class!
How many of you have been told that lie and swallowed it in its current form? That you, too, might be rich one day and it'll all be by your own efforts?
Sorry-not-sorry to tell you that you've been sold a bill of goods! IF your grandchildren are lucky, they'll be doing exactly the same work you're doing now! If they're UNlucky, they'll be literal beggars and some will have their their starved, probably unburied carcasses merging with landfills! And you can guess what your granddaughters might have to do in order to keep breathing, can't you?
One lie you've been told is, y'all, or your grandparents, made it by their own efforts while others (and we know who THAT means) 'had things handed to them'.
THAT lie started the day after the 13th Amendment made technical slavery illegal in the whole country. Some of you may remember that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the 'states in rebellion', not to the loyal slave states. And, since so few of us have known any African-American, LAtino or native individuals, too many of us have swallowed that LIE, generation after generation!
And now, as a pretty direct result of too many of us allowing ourselves to be pitted against other working people of different skin shades, what every president beginning with FDR and ending with Carter has built, fostered and maintained is....gone, gone, GONE! No more middle class majority; too many of us started to think of ourselves as aristocrats! Not a smart move when your family's middle-class prosperity was built on the GI Bill and FHA insured home loans!
This next item is something neither most of you, or parents and grandparents, could have been expected to know or even ask after: those programs were secretly 'labelled' 'For White Men Only, or Almost'. Almost no African-American, Latino or Native applying to those programs got anything from them!
Again, this is something almost none of you could be expected to know.
I know about it because I heard about it and did my homework and because my daddy was also a Southern white anti-racist. And probably mostly because of him I was lucky to grow up in what is still too rare in our country: a successfully racially (AND economically) integrated neighborhood. Three cheers for West Mt. Airy!
This is how I know no person of color ever got anything we didn't get first and out of which they were initially shut out for too long! Yes-sir-ee! Y'all got help and they didn't, at least till the 1960s! And even then they were only added to the list. Which is to say, you were never excluded from help on racial grounds!
But you, and/or your parents and/or grandparents,swallowed the hornswoggle!
Now, if we are to return to the days when there were no billionaires (although there've always been wealthy individuals, and that's OK) we need to TAX the rich according to their ability to pay! Maybe in order to do that, some of you need to understand that the likelihood of your families becoming wealthy is about as likely as being able to reach the moon by flapping your arms!
Most of our current billionaire class is making sure that none of you or your grandkids will EVER be able to join their ranks! If you want our children and grandchildren to have a real chance at better lives, first requirement is: you have to want this for ALL our children of all colors and act, especially vote, accordingly! Don't fall for ANYTHING that tries to pin our problems on some low-power group that can barely hit back OR onto honestly earned, disinterested expertise, but FOLLOW. THE. MONEY. As the citizens of the Roman Republic once asked,
Cui bono? Who benefits?
Our oligarchs try very, very hard to prevent you, or anyone honest and not downright worshipful towards them, from finding the money trail! Every single law that makes following the money harder for ordinary folk has to go into the trashcan!
Organize across the lines of race, ethnicity and faith!
WE now stand on the brink, if we do it together, of creating something that human history has not yet seen: a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-faith, secular, representative, democratic republic!
Until now, we Americans have been pioneers of one form or another! And now history is giving us another chance to be pioneers again--this time for all of us! White, Native, Black, Latino, Asian, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh or whatever! Let's return to what we have been in this respect and NOT let the greedy, ruthless, dam' near psychopathic billionaire class knock us apart!
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