The Senator & The Reporter: Fear and Hope
The excerpts below come from a piece by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
As we survey our country at the end of 2013, I don’t have to tell you about the crises we face. Many of you are experiencing them every day.
The middle class continues to decline, with median family income some $5,000 less than in 1999.
More Americans, 46.5 million, are now living in poverty than at any time in our nation’s history. Child poverty, at
22 percent, is the highest of any major country.
Real unemployment is not 7 percent. If one includes those who have given up looking for work and those who want full-time work but are employed part-time, real unemployment is over 13 percent – and youth unemployment is much higher than that.
Most of the new jobs that are being created are part-time and low wage, but the minimum wage remains at the starvation level of $7.25 per hour.
Millions of college students are leaving school deeply in debt, while many others have given up on their dream of a higher education because of the cost.
Meanwhile, as tens of millions of Americans struggle to survive economically, the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well and corporate profits are at an all-time high. In fact, wealth and income inequality today is greater than at any time since just before the Great Depression. One family, the Walton family with its Wal-Mart fortune, now owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In recent years, 95 percent of all new income has gone to the top 1 percent.
The scientific community has been very clear: Global warming is real, it is already causing massive problems and, if we don’t significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet we leave to our kids and grandchildren will be less and less habitable.
Clearly, if we are going to save the middle class and protect our planet, we need to change the political dynamics of the nation. We can no longer allow the billionaires and their think tanks or the corporate media to set the agenda. We need to educate, organize and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights. We need to make government work for all the people, not just the 1 percent.
When Congress reconvenes for the 2014 session, here are a few of the issues that I will focus on. (By the way, I’d love to hear from you as to what your priorities are).
WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY: A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little. It is simply not acceptable that the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while the bottom 60 percent owns all of 2.3 percent. We need to establish a progressive tax system which asks the wealthy to start paying their fair share of taxes, and which ends the outrageous loopholes that enable one out of four corporations to pay nothing in federal taxes.
JOBS: We need to make significant investments in our crumbling infrastructure, in energy efficiency and sustainable energy, in early childhood education and in affordable housing. When we do that, we not only improve the quality of life in our country and combat global warming, we also create millions of decent-paying new jobs.
WAGES: We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. We should pass the legislation, which will soon be on the Senate floor, to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour, but we must raise that minimum wage even higher in the coming years. We also need to expand our efforts at worker-ownership. Employees will not be sending their jobs to China or Vietnam when they own the places in which they work.
RETIREMENT SECURITY: At a time when only one in five workers in the private sector have a defined benefit pension plan; half of Americans have less than $10,000 in savings; and two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, we must expand and protect Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity.
WALL STREET: During the financial crisis, huge Wall Street banks received more than $700 billion in financial aid from the Treasury Department and more than $16 trillion from the Federal Reserve because they were “too big to fail.” Yet today, the largest banks in this country are much bigger than they were before taxpayers bailed them out. It’s time to break up these behemoths so that they cannot cause another recession that could wreck the global economy.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM: We are not living in a real democracy when large corporations and a handful of billionaire families can spend unlimited sums of money to elect or defeat candidates. We must expand our efforts to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move this country to public funding of elections.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: While we have made progress in recent years in expanding the rights of minorities, women and gays, these advances are under constant attack from the right-wing. If the United States is to become the non-discriminatory society we want it to be, we must fight to protect the rights of all Americans.
CIVIL LIBERTIES: Frankly, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies are out of control. We cannot talk about America as a “free country” when the government is collecting information on virtually every phone call we make, when it is intercepting our emails and monitoring the websites we visit. Clearly, we need to protect this country from terrorism, but we must do it in a way that does not undermine the Constitution.
WAR AND PEACE: With a large deficit and enormous unmet needs, it is absurd that the United States continues to spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. The U.S. must be a leader in the world in nuclear disarmament and efforts toward peace, not in the sale of weapons of destruction.
This is a tough and historical moment in American history. Despair is not an option. We must stand together as brothers and sisters and fight for the America our people deserve.
Radical Transparency
In an address to the Hamburg Hackers conference, reporter Glenn Greenwald mentioned a number of international heroes or revolutionaries, who have resisted the surveillance state despite threats and actual imprisonment: Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, WikiLeaks, Sarah Harrison, Laura Poitras, Aaron Schwartz, and others.
Greenwald himself, rarely leaves Brazil, due to threats from US and UK security agencies and addressed the conference by means of Internet video, noted the abusers of civil liberties in US and UK by men like Security Administrator James Clapper, NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander, and President Barack Obama as well as women like Sen. Diane Feinstein.
But these villains have also sown seeds of dissent and activism. Greenwald suggested that the US and UK can’t allow Snowden to live a free life because the virus might spread to the hoi polloi, who might get ideas about privacy and freedom. Despite benefitting from Snowden revelations, governments worldwide have same reaction. Due to motives concerning economic forces, political control, and power for its own sake, the surveillance state needs to know everything about everybody and and almost all governments cooperate against their own citizens.
Still Greenwald notes that you can’t stop the resistance. He expects hackers and revolutionaries to rise up and contest the status quo for control of the Internet. “They” (NSA) have built a wall of secrecy around public officials and agencies that should have transparency while destroying the privacy of private individuals.
Even as today’s surveillance state reverses hundreds of years of slow progress toward constitutional and human rights, we today are seeing the precipitous decline of civil rule and social justice under the Bush and Obama administrations. The democrats apparently have passed the republicans in the race to the bottom.
About twenty-five hundred years ago Socrates died for an idea, the logos, the principle that one must speak up for truth, for the moral imagination, and the freedom to debate and persuade in the agora or marketplace of ideas. These ideas included defending human conscience and consciousness against force, superstition, and the conventional ideas of the powerful: might makes right. Today’s atavistic leaders seek justification in the example of the prehistoric Titans, who were overthrown by Zeus or the ancient Yahweh, whose notions of “an eye for eye” died with Jesus on the cross at Calvary. Out of Ancient Athens and Jerusalem the principles of the American Experiment were founded but that testament—the U.S. Constitution— has been lost in an old lumber room behind the files in the Library of Congress.
While the US and UK criminalize dissent, the elites and their conformist supporters are repeating lessons learned from Greek tyrants and Roman Emperors. Even as Obama and the rest oppose the principles of democracy and free speech, they seek to control the citizens’ private life and consciousness, while surrendering their own to the slavish fiats of the system they have created.
Bush and Cheney can no longer travel abroad for fear of arrest under international law i.e. the Nuremberg principles. Bush’s successor, a decider of state-sponsored assassinations and fellow traveler of fraudsters and torturers, has devolved into the caricature of a bad politician. Neither donkeys nor elephants have a monopoly on callous stupidity. They’ve got the Internet and we’ve got them.