Occupy and the Sleeping Giant

Bill O'Reilly has declared the Occupy movement dead. Of course Bill has always had trouble distinguishing reality from wishful thinking. He has suffered from magical thinking at times - thinking he can create reality just from his pronouncements alone. The day after his declaration 1,000 Occupy protestors marched in New York. As of November 26 the meet-up page "Occupy Together" listed 2,668 Occupy communities worldwide.

I don't know how long the occupy movement in its present form will continue but here's what I do know:

400 individuals in the US now possess the same amount of wealth as 150 million Americans combined. Their effective federal income tax rate fell from about 30 percent in 1995 to 18 percent in 2008, the most recent data available. The top 1% of the richest Americans have enjoyed a 300% increase in income in the last thirty years of trickle-down economics. Middle class America, in that same time, has had zero growth. Something is trickling down - but it’s not wealth or even opportunity. 

Thirty top corporations paid no tax last year. The Supreme Court has declared that corporations are individuals and money is free speech. Our republican leadership, with a straight face; demand extension of tax breaks for the most wealthy, and huge subsidies to oil companies despite them having recently reported quarterly profits of approximately 8.5 billion dollars each - each - all the while demanding cuts in social spending as a means to 'fiscal responsibility'. 

We have suffered ten years of undeclared war at a cost of over 1.2 trillion dollars - money that goes not just to bombs and bullets but into the pockets of those that make them, war profiteers all. If you counted one dollar every second, 24 hours a day, it would take you 40 years to just count that much money. In the meantime our bridges and roads and rail are crumbling. Our schools in decline. The gulf between the haves and have-nots widening. Hunger and poverty increasing - 43 million of your fellow Americans now live in poverty, 15 million in severe poverty. 

8-10 million American families stand to lose their homes as a result of the sub-prime-mortgage/derivative/world recession fiasco. Despite this - nothing has changed, the crooks responsible completely free to do it all again.

Occupy protesting? Mild compared to what could happen when the people finally wake up to the colossal rip off put in place by 30 years of trickle-down economics, cronie capitalism, government corruption-dysfunction and corporate control.  Millions have suffered. There is a sleeping giant out there. Continue the unbelievable greed and corruption and it will wake. Continue to fix the game in attempts to channel all the wealth to the few and it will wake. For some in wall street, big banks, and government I’d be listening very carefully for the footsteps - even if Bill O'Reilly pronounces they are not really there.

Geneva in Vain

Charles Krauthammer's column published 10/29/11 in The Oregonian expresses justification for the manner of Gaddafi's death at the hands of the rebels. Apparently because he’s a bad guy that gives justification to the NATO backed rebel forces in sodomizing, torturing, and then murdering him. He had his chance to leave. “Call it the Gadhafi Rule: Give it up and go, or one day find death by "Libyan crossfire” – a temple to temple bullet shot point blank across the skull. “Followed by a Libyan state funeral. That's when you lie on public view for four days, half-naked in a meat locker” Krauthammer gleefully writes, blood curling down from his lower lip.

How are we to distinguish between the rebels and Gaddafi if they are willing to do this to an unarmed man - without due process - and then display his body publicly for days against sacred Muslim law? We support these people - this reflects on us as well. As does the manner of death of Osama Bin Laden and others. Is this really how we want it to go?  

To people like Krauthammer apparently so. I would very much want to ask Mr. Krauthammer and all the other blood thirsty people like him - where is your honor? Where is your humanity? There are rules of conduct in war - they are hard earned coming out of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Apparently, Mr. Krauthammer has no use for them – and for that he and those like him should be deeply ashamed.

2019: Charles Krauthammer is dead now and cannot defend himself. The above was written while he was alive. I leave it here now for despite his death, his words live on. His words will forever leave a stain on his legacy, and on his decedents, for which there is no defense, and no forgetting.  An eye for an eye will never be a pathway to peace, or to our collective humanness. It may feel good at the moment, but Charles’s words harmed and diminished us all.