Article: As the Rain Tumbles Down

Free Trade is a sham; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is a sham. The war on terror is nothing but an attempt by a failing empire to control resources and to try and wall off the rising Russian economy. You see, given the choice between backing Moscow or Beijing your rulers chose to support Beijing. At the end of the cold war promises were made to Moscow not to expand NATO, but those promises were quickly broken. Russia has gold, diamonds, timber, natural gas and lots and lots of oil. Russia has vast potential areas of oil and natural gas deposits that have been barely scratched. Beijing has cheap labor, lots and lots of real cheap labor.

Why would they choose Beijing? Russia is a European nation with deep Christian traditions. We have far more in common with Russia than with China and for decades we fought a cold war against Soviet Communism. At the very moment when the Russians renounce Communism and embrace Capitalism, the very thing that we've been supposedly waiting for, we turn instead to China. For the simple reason that we would rather trade with a Communist dictatorship that allows us to exploit its people than a democracy that doesn't.

Your government has been fighting a phony, concocted war for seven years and now promises you that maybe it will take another fifteen years more. "Subsequent occupation of Iraq, required major shifts in national resources to the military."

America has exported forty percent of its industrial base to the third world, to where it can turn the clock back on industrial and environmental regulations a hundred years. Where again if a worker is badly burned they can be sent home to live or die and the company has no interest in it either way. Where millions upon millions of hard-working Americans lose their jobs to a free trade program that benefits a very few wealthy and pollutes and corrupts an entire economic system and your government tells you again and again that it can't be helped. But they are liars and thieves, liars and thieves who lie to you and steal from you and from your children.

My grandfather grew old and retired on his union pension and Social Security. His exploits outside the family were largely forgotten until his death, when his union stepped forward to provide a bronze casket worthy of the President of the United States. To the union he was no less a hero than the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. His strained relations with his own children ended at the grave while tens of thousands of children who had never heard his name led better lives because of him and thousands of others like him.

He wasn't a wild-eyed revolutionary; he didn't even have a high school education. He was a man who said, "I'll give you a day's work but I won't give you my dignity."

"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare." Mark Twain

He was a soldier on the front line of the eternal battle between wealth and the individual, and he did his bit in the rain. Today we have millions that say, "I would but"," or "It's not that bad yet," but they are merely conscientious objectors to the rain.

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