Are we truly free?

Are We Truly Free?

On this evening that we celebrate American “independence,” I must ask:

Are we truly free?

When our ancestors threw crates of tea into the Boston harbor, they were fighting against a corporate monopoly that was controlling the prices of basic commodities, making them unaffordable to the masses.  Does this sound familiar?  It should.  We are there again, except this time there are many monopolies and a government controlled by corporate puppets that is used to control us.

Yes we fought the British government, but they were the enforcers for the corporation which shared profits with the crown to get that protection.  Now we have allowed a disguised conservative movement to create a pay-to-play system in Washington that allows big corporations and billionaires to do whatever they want and shift the vast majority of wealth to a handful of greedy people.  We now have a completely immoral billionaire at the helm removing every protection that was put in place for the benefit of the people over the last 50+ years!

We have mini monopolies controlling our media access because they paid our government to divide up territories between them rather than creating a competitive system.  We have a small number of communication options in an industry that conspires to keep prices where they want them.  We have a government that agreed to pay for drugs without negotiating prices and now investment firms are buying big pharma companies and raising prices as much as 5,000%!  The problem is that we are the taxpayers paying the taxes that go towards paying those unfair prices.

If I am not mistaken, we are supposed to have a government for the people by the people.  What we really have is a government for the corporations by the corporate lobbyists.  Are we really supposed to agree that the economy is good when the rich keep getting richer, and after 40 years of wage stagnation, we see a 3% wage increase occasionally?  Before 1980 wages grew for all sectors of society equally.  Education was free to anyone who worked hard in school.  An entrepreneur could start a business without giving away majority stake to a rich person because “savings and loan” banks actually gave out affordable small business loans.  Now we are supposed to feel good about small wage increases, carrying huge debts if we get a college degree and a system where if we are successful at building a new business, we will see a big business take it from us and be lucky to walk away with anything!

When the country was founded, there were not states that had massively more population than others so 2 senators for each state may have made sense.  Now the Republicans have succeeded in getting voters in a bunch of small states to vote against their own interests through fear mongering and lies.   This has allowed them to control the senate with the backing of only 14% of the population!!!  That is not majority rule; far from it!  Mitch McConnell now gloats about stopping the majority from seating supreme court justices and passing legislation that actually helps the people.  They make voting as hard as they can because they know that they will lose every time the majority comes out to vote.  A huge portion of voters don’t even bother to vote because their lives are now so involved that they don’t feel that they have time for politics.  THIS IS BY DESIGN.  Low voter turnout allows minority rule.  We have lost our country, and we have allowed it to happen by accepting lives too full of distractions to give a shit about what the ruling class is doing to us.

We now live in a world where money equals freedom and a handful of ruling class billionaires have more money than the bottom half of the population!  3 people having more than 150 million is not a system of equality, justice and freedom for all.  The rich routinely get privileges throughout their lives from being first in line at everything from restaurants to theme parks to concerts. They buy justice, and even when they go to prison, they get time in “country clubs” not time in the general prison population.  They enjoy an obscene level of freedom to do whatever they want while most of us slave away day in and day out, and have to feel blessed when we get a few days at the beach or actually get the healthcare we need.  This is not freedom for all.  It is wage slavery.

What history teaches us is that we can take freedom back when we work together.  This is why Fox news trains its viewers that liberals are the enemy.  By creating a fictional enemy, their viewers cannot see the real enemy.  If we cannot rationally talk about issues and find common ground, we end up fighting in a divided nation that is easily controlled.  It has gone on so long that we cannot get most right wing voters to help us, but we can talk to independents and work with them and teach young people the error of our ways going forward.  We can train a new generation of activists to take to the streets and help us to restore freedom and a government for the people by the people.

This won’t happen on its own.  It is time for us to take responsibility for our world before those who profit from destroying it succeed in doing so.  Please find ways to teach and take every opportunity to take to the streets and make this freedom movement to big and obvious to ignore or fail! 

We are not truly free, but we can be!

by David Stein 7/4/2019