We have just celebrated another Fourth of July, the annual celebration of the beginnings of this nation. We celebrate the end of colonization. We celebrate breaking away from control by an authoritarian ruler and his supportive economic aristocracy. We celebrate the choice of self-rule and the beginning of the great experiment of modern democracy. Granted, it was not perfect and has sometimes moved too slowly toward that ideal, but it was, and still is, the abiding ideal that provides the heritage of America. The New Deal under FDR was a major move in that direction as were the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement and Marriage Equality.
However, over the years since the death of FDR we have faced a growing and concerted effort by an American economic aristocracy to assert their control over this nation. They have used many means to accomplish that goal. They used the Cold War to build a huge, and profitable military-industrial complex. We saw a new economic philosophy created to justify this transfer of wealth called “neoliberal economics” which was anything but liberal. We watched the use of the threat of terrorism to develop an entire structure to consolidate power and limit access, using secrecy and such terms as “national security” and in the process creating an entire dark level of governance.
With incredibly subtle flimflam and manipulation this neoliberal economic philosophy changed the very nature of American life and allowed a strange kind of economic Darwinism to replace concern for each other. It has become the “survival of the richest”.
It is hard to see much of any shreds of democracy in this change, a change that modified the very DNA of America.
This is the time for the ordinary citizens, rededicated to American ideals, to recreate a grassroots democracy and to take back America.
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Bob Passi
Baxter
