Article: Thomas Jefferson Was Right!

   What are we to do when we find ourselves plunging into a third world society, where there are the few, very rich and the many, very poor? We are the richest country in the world. Our grandparents and great-grandparents came here for freedom and opportunity. What happened to that?
   The media treat the popular movement to resist control by less than 1% of the populace, as just one more item of interest, if they treat it at all. Yet, besides global warming, it should be the only item of interest to Americans, and it will increasingly become so, until the economic inequities are corrected, and not before.
   Jefferson was right!
   Those who can recall their American history texts may remember that there was an intense rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over banks. Hamilton was the Wall Street sharpie of his day, advocating for the monied elites. What they wanted then was a national bank they could control, and Hamilton was their choice as Secretary of the national treasury.
   Jefferson was still smarting because the word 'democracy' never made it into the US Constitution, thanks to Hamilton and the backers of the bank. (Nor did it give any legal protection to the natural world or the tribespeople.) Jefferson knew the dagger the monied elite held to the heart of democracy was a bank.
   "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country," Jefferson wrote. Then he said that there was "so general a sickening at the effect of the banks that I hope the country is ripe for suppressing
them by degrees, but entirely in the end."
   Well, we ain't there yet, Tom! The banks (i.e. the mega-rich) control our economy and are now vying as to who among them will administer our national government for the next four years. Your old office, Tom.
   How did the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence know what would happen? Many are bewildered today, when he warned us two hundred years ago.
   The banks presently rule! They have all the money, their biggest haul being what is called a 'bailout'. Jesse James should have been so lucky! He only stole the banks' money, but they stole our children's future.
   As long as we continue with our present way of thinking, we will suffer from the avarice of the mega-rich, who pull the political, financial and media levers, leaving citizens confused, alienated and feeling helpless.
   The older generation of which I belong can remember a time when all this wasn't so. We can recall the proud generation that fought WWII. After overcoming the fascist regimes of Europe, they would not have put up with what is happening today. This is what the banks and big corporations did in Germany and Italy that caused the war in the first place!
   We can recall the war was fought for high-minded ideals, which Eisenhower called 'a crusade in Europe'. It was to bring democracy to the war-ravaged countries that needed a good dose of ol' American freedom. Those WWII vets would hardly have stood for the shredding of our democratic rights here at home.
   This is a spiritual struggle we are in, against forces driving us to death and destruction. The earth and sky are doing what they can to wake us up. But we're so distracted by our man-made, technological world that we're like Sleeping Beauty, or those in Plato's cave. We need some outside force to wake us up.
   Humans for the most part have deeply inherent religious instincts.
Unfortunately, these instincts are preyed upon by hucksters and others, seeking wealth and power. Many recoil from their hypocrisy, intuitively knowing that spirituality is not about wealth or power.
It's about love. Organized religion has been deficient in teaching that the natural world is the primary revelation.
   "When religion lost the cosmos, humanity became neurotic," Otto Rank said. We live in a psychopathic world, and the only way out is in the spiritual direction. That means to awaken a metaphysical understanding of the world, to be open to the universal, to allow the spirit dimension to reveal itself as part of reality. When the movement against the current status quo gains such a dimension, it will quickly take off.