I submit for your consideration that the Tea Party uprising and the Occupy Wall Street movements are one and the same. I'm sure there are many members of the Tea Party as well as Occupiers who would vehemently protest this idea. But I insist that, in order to truly take the bull by the horns, we must recognize the same underlying American Spring that manifests itself in these apparently distinct movements.
I hold that the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Protesters are both reacting to the same discontent springing from deep within the American people - a sudden and acute awareness of our shameful state of economic injustice, against the backdrop of our recent global recession. While the Tea Party, which was temporarily co-opted by the Republican ideology (but can never be permanently clouded, for its grass-roots purity will never thus allow) might focus on the injustice of the bank bailouts; the Occupiers will seize upon the travesty of wealth inequality. And while the Tea Party might be reluctant to identify the problem as wealth inequality due to their temporary (for the people's grass-roots hearts can never be permanently deceived) and stubborn belief in upward mobility still fed to them by the Republican philosophy; the Occupiers might likewise be tempted to settle their claims through some great government handout as Democrats tend to do. Hence will the status quo of the Republican and Democratic parties (our two-faced boss) attempt to appease an unstoppable American Spring that is ultimately purer than partisanship! But then the Tea Party will wise up to the fact that upward mobility is now a dead promise; as will the Occupiers, if they are likewise temporarily appeased, realize that such a "quick fix" that leaves the underlying wound of economic injustice will never truly suffice. Then will the peoples' hearts again stir, and the grass-roots uprising will have been purified.
This therefore is my prediction, which amounts to a warning to the Republican and Democratic parties: The people will no longer be deceived! For as George Washington advances: "The power of the Constitution will always be in the people. It is entrusted for certain defined purposes, and for a certain limited period, to representatives of their own choosing; and whenever it is executed contrary to their interests, or not agreeable to their wishes, their servants can, and undoubtedly will, be recalled." Our political leaders must cease their attempts to pull the wool over our great American people's eyes. They must stop being infiltrated by the corporate and moneyed interests that continue to squeeze our American citizenry. They must end their reliance on the American people's innocent trust that their parties sincerely represent the peoples' interests, while foolishly underestimating the power of the 99 percent.
For on that bright day when the Tea Party recognizes the Occupiers as brothers and sisters 99 - on that day will there be hell to pay!
As a Midwest Occupier, I have already stepped up in launching a wholesome Community Soap Box event in Davenport on October 22. This was a community gathering that was specifically nonpartisan, and it saw a great and positive showing of very diverse peoples of all political ideologies. We openly discussed the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in our country, we shared our respective stories and ideas, and we have subsequently begun constructing a New American Spring economic-justice advocacy organization aimed at returning the power of democracy to the people. One of our paramount objectives is to educate the people to exercise their interests in effective ways, for as Thomas Jefferson wrote: "I know of no safe depositor of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
In the October 21 edition of The Nation, Bill Moyers presents a pivotal article titled "How Wall Street Occupied America." Writing that the "future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell" led a "class war waged from the top down," and about how this resulted in a "40-year 'veritable crusade' against our institutions, laws, and regulations - against the ideas, norms, and beliefs that helped to create America's iconic middle class;" Moyers says that the result was that "the United States is looking more and more like 'the capitalist oligarchies, like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia,' where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by." And while Mr. Moyers consequently understands why "so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence that historian Lawrence Goodwyn described as 'the mass resignation' of people who believe in the 'dogma of democracy' on a superficial public level but whose hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal;" he nonetheless obstinately asks: "Who, in these cynical times, with democracy on the ropes and America's body politic pounded again and again by the blows of organized money - who would dream such a radical thing [as a New Deal-style democratic revival]?" I submit to you that New American Spring is just such a revival!
Roger Farinha
NewAmericanSpring.org
