Written by Greg Whitaker   

The American people stand today in befuddlement and despair. They are working two and three jobs, paying 12-15% increases in their health insurance premiums every year AND paying vastly higher co-pays and out-of-pocket payments, paying over twice as much for fuel and watching their grocery bill go up as the last tattered shreds of the American Dream die around them, getting the foreclosure notice from the sheriff as a reward for trying to work through the federal program to achieve an affordable payment and on and on. The economic assault upon the despised worthless useless lazy contemptible bottom 90% HAS been a majestic Shock and Awe campaign unlike anything seen in our history. Class warfare HAS raged in this nation for three decades, and the triumphant economic royalists have swept the field, leaving us shattered, reeling and broken.

But we're not dead yet. Not yet. They managed to sneak up on us, to convince us in our foolish childish patriotism to vote again and again against our own self-interest. But we yet live, and we outnumber the top 1% by 99 to 1. As the famous Japanese analysis that led to the Pearl Harbor attack viewed us, we ARE sluggardly, docile and slow to anger, great lovers of our peace and comfort. That led the Imperial Japanese High Command to think that they could bloody us with impunity, knock us out with one blow and eliminate us as a potential threat. All of those things are true ... and yet, Tojo's reservation about the report that attacking us may awaken a "sleeping dragon" could and must again hold true.

We ARE the cogs in the wheel of the machine, the draft animals in the corporate harness ... but we are more than that as well. We are the doughboys who volunteered to go to France and climb up out of the trenches into the lethal fire of No Man's Land and sweep the Huns from the battlefield. We are the descendants of the Marines who fought and died by the tens of thousands across the jungle, fighting yard by yard and cave by cave and lofted the flag on Iwo Jima. We are Americans, slow to anger but incomparably fierce when attacked - and we have been attacked as never before. The masses turned out and swamped the enlistment offices in both world wars because they came to see both conflicts as assaults upon the American way of life.

In a sense, they were ... but not NEARLY so much as we see today. This is an assault directly upon the American family, promising to END the American dream in this generation, to condemn our children and grandchildren to a future that is far poorer and far less certain and with far more dire consequences for economic or health failure than we had ourselves. We may not fight if only for ourselves; we may find a way to tighten our belts and accept the dimming of our own hopes and dreams. But we will fight like BANSHEES for our children, for our families. Royalists ALWAYS overreach, always go just one step too far. That is why the arc of history is toward freedom, toward oppressed people taking on all odds to throw off tyrants. WE taught the world this lesson, and we can tell that story again, updated for the 21st century.

IF we stand together, IF we recognize that the strength of America, the ONLY strength of America, is each other ... we cannot lose. IF we lift the boot heel from the neck of our neighbor, if we recognize that our son's teacher is a ally in our effort to live a better life instead of a threat to our lives ... if we shake off the fever dream imposed by the tsunami of propaganda and take a single clear-eyed LOOK at the reality of our situation and grasp WHO has profited and will profit from our destruction ... IF we take the battle to those who have managed to make US their proxy army of occupation for each other, then we cannot lose. We have overwhelming numbers and we have everything to lose. We hold the fate of generations to come in our hands. We can do this.


We can. We must. We will.