A comment I placed on a Mother Jones article

I was reading a great piece by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones online, about the long and dreary rise of the plutocracy (and the decline of the labor movement) in America. It draws from another piece ("It's the Inequality, Stupid") about the growing and almost ludicrous disparity between the ever-smaller few people controlling the ever-larger share of wealth in America.

So I was prompted to write the following comment, which I feel bears repeating on its own:
Old doc 15 minutes ago


The funny thing is how the conservatives use a false fear of "government" to influence people to allow them to have their way with us. But hey... Government is us. Didn't they teach us that in grammar school?

People in this country have the numbers. The AARP showed how a group with a huge footprint can exert huge influence, whether you always agree with their positions or not. We need something similar for working Americans. The AFL-CIO affilaited group (workingamerica.org) that's set out to do that doesn't seem to have gained any steam, possibly because it's so tarnished by its connection with organized labor. But we need to give people hope that the system is NOT rigged for evermore against them.

Sure. The hippie movement didn't play well with organized labor, and that's too bad in hindsight, but now those people are grown up and the old union folks are retired. Let's pool our wisdom, figure out our goals, and start to build some unshakeable alliances that can stand up to lies and pessimism. We're smart people, and our kids and grandkids expect and deserve better from us than sitting passively while the wealth stagnates like bad blood, the power is left to the people with personality disorders, and we watch "Survivor."

We need to reform the way we elect our politicians at all levels, and to stop accepting the excuse that we can't change anything, because it's politics as usual and they're all the same. We had a false populism with the Tea Party; how about a real populism? A decent fair shake for working people would be a very attainable goal. We must get people to feel a sense of self-efficacy again, and we can do that, if we can start to let the wealthy know that we will hold them to their side of the social contract of a civilized society. And we need to mean it, and we need to make it clear that won't be intimidated, lied to, pacified with big screen TV's and Angry Birds, or turned against each other. Esepcially not turned against each other.