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Give and They Shall Receive

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Newsflash: The Former United States of America has been under a dictatorship for quite a long time.   

Thom Hartmann’s book “Screwed” tells us that the American middle class in sinking in the quick sand of poverty.  This brings me back to the donations requested by the organizations mentioned above.  

How much sense does it make for those who are losing even what we consider a middle class existence to give to some, most or all of these organizations?  Many of the organizations actually promise to do all that they can to even out the playing field while draining those who have been “screwed” out of whatever resources they may have left. 

I listen to Thom Hartmann daily and find his approach the most mature, educational and balanced approach in talk radio.  But even Hartmann misses the point. 

One of the ways in which Hartmann misses the point is through one of the tag lines that’s repeated on his show.  The line is “where despair is not an option”. 

The other is Hartmann’s sign off – “Tag, you’re it!” We’re what?  We’re people who’ve been protesting and marching and calling and writing since 2000, no, check that, since 1960, no check that, since before 1960?  The truth is not much has changed. 

We give ourselves credit for ending the Vietnam war.  Yet, in the years between Vietnam and Iraq, we invaded Grenada and Panama, bombed Libya, Afghanistan, Serbia, Sudan, killing civilians. 

We brokered a trade between two organizations that promoted and still promote terrorism – Iran and the Contras. 

We armed Osama bin Laden and now we demonize him. 

We armed Saddam Hussein and then attacked Iraq in the early nineties.  Look at what we’re doing there now. 

Most of us thought that investigations into Bill Clinton’s life were bogus, yet they still proceeded, utilizing millions of dollars of taxpayer money.  I bet the phones and emails of members of Congress were all a-buzz at that time, yet the sordid investigation continued. 

Whereas that particular investigation of Clinton was, indeed, bogus, no one investigated his taking jobs away from Americans and sending them to slave labor nations.  NAFTA was passed by wealthy politicians who stood, and still stand to benefit from the loss of decent middle class jobs in America and the perpetuation of squalor within the nations to which those jobs were sent. 

How many phone calls have been made to our members of Congress?  How many emails have been sent?  How many snail mail messages have been sent? 

Has war stopped?  Has the FUSA stopped propping up tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia and China?  Did African Americans, working through peaceful disobedience with Martin Luther King, really win anything in the sixties? 

Did they win the right to vote?  Witness Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. 

Did they win the right to live life as Caucasians have been living life in the FUSA?  Witness profiling.   

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Michael Bonanno is an associate editor for OpEdNews.

He is also a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's (more...)
 

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