CHAPTER NINETY SIX. MOTOR CITY MADHOUSE

Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Jun 27, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

This chapter is dedicated to Henry Ford, the Detroit industrialist who had the good sense to listen to his wife when she explained to him that he was cutting his own business by paying his workers wages insufficient to allow them to buy the cars they manufactured. He agreed, whether through common sense or the threat of her withholding her affections. This led to the development of a thriving industry and contributed to the rise of a thriving middle class after WWII.

In Ford’s day, people were beginning to understood the value to the economy of a strong middle class, where one worker could earn enough money to raise a family comfortably, own a home, educate the family’s children and pay for access to health care. This was the exception to the rule in this time of the rise of the trusts who threatened to take over the US government at the turn of the century. Fortunately, an assassin’s bullet miraculously catapulted to the Presidency the one man prepared and willing to fight back against the corporate coup.

Theodore Roosevelt enforced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 for the first time since it had been introduced. It seems to have been passed to placate the angry masses who were beginning to organize the worldwide labor movement. In an attempt to take the wind out of the sails of the growing labor movement, the US Congress had passed this bill with no intent of enforcing its provisions It requiring the government to investigate and pursue evidence of illegal collusion between corporations engaged in monopolistic practices.

Roosevelt knew that the government has the responsibility to secure for American workers the right to a fair share of the wealth that they created by the sweat of their brows. His Imperialist aims notwithstanding, he was the greatest American President since Lincoln and rightly deserving of his place of honor on Mount Rushmore. He led the Progressive effort to unseat Taft when Taft proved unworthy of Roosevelt’s support by compromising with a Republican leadership intent on undoing the progress of the Square Deal. He survived a would-be assassin’s bullet to deliver a speech in New York, thereby earning for himself the title of leaders of the Bull Moose Party.

America does need the man from Illinois to be another Lincoln and end the Uncivil War, but as importantly President Obama must also channel the spirits of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt to take on the international corporate Puppetmasters who now control the Senate. Democracy itself is at stake not only in the United States but worldwide, should we fail in our mission to abolish corporate personhood.

The US Social Forum is a gathering of social justice advocates from around the world. Whether their passions are health care, preventing environmental devastation, feeding, housing and clothing the poor; establishing safe foods grown locally in a localized economy, giving green power to the people, opting out of the globalized economy or ending war, they were all Soldiers For Peace from all over the world. It was fitting that the 2010 Forum was held in Detroit, the birthplace of the middle class that now struggles for its very existence in a world of capitalism gone mad. The corporate grip on the mainstream media continues to brainwash enough Americans that challenging the Puppets in the Senate remains a formidable task. I was heartened by the degree of awareness shown by these activists, who are increasingly aware that the abolition of corporate personhood is the key to advancing the entire progressive agenda that America and the world desperately need.

Workers in the auto industry were the leader in fighting for fair wages and benefits when unions had real influence in the US. The rest of the American middle class benefited from its success and enjoyed a rising standard of living from WWII until the rise of crony capitalism under Reagan. This icon of the Right ran up a huge deficit trying to economically outlast Russia, which he failed to realize was a dying empire already due to its inherent economic weaknesses and maldistribution of wealth. Brought to power by acts of treason which Colonel Ollie North and Admiral Poindexter proudly proclaimed to the world on TV broadcast from the halls of Congress, Reagan blithely slept through cabinet meetings where the fate of the free world was decided. Perhaps he was dreaming of that shining city on the hill that he led us directly away from. I guess it was Bedtime for Bozo.

Detroit has come a long way from the riots of the late 60s. At that time, violence erupted when an enraged Black population said “No mas!” to segregation, exploitation and a vicious double standard that had kept them subjugated since the advent of Jim Crow. The modern Detroit has thrived under the institution of community programs that have brought the people of Detroit together in a Rainbow coalition symbolized by the Heidelberg Project. This is an internationally famous project that is the result of the vision of one man who saw that the people could rise together to create a better world for ourselves and our progeny.

Tyree Guyton, with the help of his grandfather, created this art garden of symbols of peace, hope, racial unity and love of all of Mankind. Neighbors at first did not understand and got the city to destroy the artwork, which he patiently replaced. The “garden” now runs more than a city block and the neighbors are part of the project, allowing their houses, yards and street to become a part of the mural depicting a more hopeful New World Order of peace, justice, love and hope.

I was honored to take part in an action of Code Pink at the Heidelberg Project on the closing day of the Forum, in which we memorialized a fallen Hummer they had half-buried and painted pink as a symbol of the impending death of a war-based economy run be the selfish. These are the oil barons, the international financiers and other war profiteers will never be content with too much. These are the counter-Revolutionaries who have been working to subvert the Revolution since Lincoln was assassinated under very suspicious circumstances. The fledgling Republican Party was taken over by corporatists who tore up his Reconstruction plans and subjugated the people of the vanquished South until they too rose up and cried “No mas!”

Democrats in the South fought the rise of the Republican Party and its promises to limit slavery. They remained loyal to the Party of Jim Crow until Lyndon Johnson, one of their own, fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In retaliation for this challenge of the right of states to persecute members of their own citizenry they converted en masse to the newly ascendent Republican Party, which cynically used the rascism of Southerners at the time to benefit from the Southern strategy that welcomed these unrepentant racists with open arms. In the end, the result was the rise of a Republican Party bent on stripping the economic rights of the poor, who were and are to be found disproportionately in the South.

Thus do politicians utilize the politics of division to further the ambitions of the already wealthy and powerful Puppetmasters of the Senate and the fascists who they represent. In protesting the freeing of the slaves and the enforcement of the Fourteenth amendment, in their blind anger they gave the racist party the power to place fellow fascists on the Supreme Court who abused the amendment designed to free the slaves to make economic slaves of us all. Those toiling in Southern automobile factories are enjoying the fruits of their fellow Southerner's labor, substandard wages and benefits for those lucky to get a job from the foreign automakers who have invaded the South.

Viva la Revoluccion!

In the words of Paul Stanley:

I feel uptight on a Saturday night.

Nine o'clock, the radio's the only light.

I hear my song and it pulls me through

Comes on strong, tells me what I got to do, I got to.

Get up, everybody's gonna move their feet.

Get down, everybody's gonna leave their seat.

You gotta lose your mind in Detroit rock city.

Get up, everybody's gonna move their feet.

Get down, everybody's gonna leave their seat.

Getting late,

I just can't wait.

Ten o'clock and I know I gotta hit the road.

First I drink, then I smoke.

Start up the car, and I try to make the midnight show.

Get up, everybody's gonna move their feet.

Get down, everybody's gonna leave their seat.

Movin' fast, doin' 95.

Hit top speed but I'm still movin' much too slow.

I feel so good, I'm so alive.

I hear my song playin' on the radio, it goes.

Get up, everybody's gonna move their feet.

Get down, everybody's gonna leave their seat.

Twelve o'clock, I gotta rock.

There's a truck ahead, lights starin' at my eyes.

Oh my God, no time to turn.

I got to laugh 'cause I know I'm gonna die, why.

Get up, everybody's gonna move their feet.

Get up, everybody's gonna leave their seat.

Rick Staggenborg, MD

From Detroit, Michigan, Host City of the 2010 US Social Forum

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX. CONNECTING THE DOTS

Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Sep 15, 2010 7:38 AM PDT.

This essay is dedicated to my wife Karen, who has more or less patiently endured my absence during most of the time that I have been writing this book, working around the country to promote a single payer health care system and now to run for the office of US senator. I am so sorry that she was hurt because I felt a moral imperative to respond to the clear threat to human civilization that we are facing. I have had to put aside personal concerns to throw my every effort into the cause of providing our children with a world worth inheriting.

I promise her that things will be different come November, when we will take a well-earned vacation together in Hawai’i and reconnect with each other before I travel to meet friends in Turkey who are supporters of the work of Soldiers For Peace International. I hope that by then I will have news that I will be going to Washington in January, but that is a bridge we will cross together if it appears.

If I have at times seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of intellectual giants I have met along the way, both famous and unknown. To them I owe everything that has helped me along the way to create the vision of a world worth passing along to our children who will be responsible to see that it is preserved for future generations.

What follows is a summary of the themes of this book, which are elaborated on at more length in the commentaries that I have made in this text. I invite interested readers to add their comments online and to become listeners and callers of the web-based talk show SPFI Radio, the voice of Soldiers For Peace International on the worldwide web.

I began writing Stop the Madness on the suggestion of Dr. Ken Rossi, a veteran and an open minded conservative who implored me to put my ideas down for posterity. It took me awhile to get started, but once I did I found it a welcome relief from my job stress as a VA psychiatrist and the rigors of my political work. Because my political work was initially focused on single payer health care advocacy, I began by explaining how recognizing the systematic manipulation of the political process of this “reform” effort was a good way to understand the relentless assault on democracy that has taken place over the last several decades. It was my goal to awaken others to what I had belatedly discovered: the United States has been under fascist rule for decades, since its people turned over the reins of government to corporations.

This counter-Revolution has been led by the Puppetmasters of Congress and the White House, the international corporate terrorists who believe themselves to be Masters of the Universe. These elitists have no respect for the average individual and therefore no respect for democracy. Democracy being necessary for a nation to act responsibly, I have always known that the end of civilization would be near if we did not heed the messages of all the prophets who have warned us when we are one human family whose survival depend on the recognition of our interdependence.

The time has come to abandon self-imposed distinctions and petty differences to restore the natural order of things that we used to take for granted. Together, we can control our individual and collective destinies by working together for peace, justice and freedom for all the Peoples of the world. The success of the mission of Soldiers For Peace International will depend on establishing democracy in America, which will begin when we get corporate money out of elections. This is the only way a People can take down the corporatocracy that aims to  enslave the planet by undermining the gains of the American Revolution.

Democracy depends on equality, yet children of privilege have successfully inculcated the idea in the collective American consciousness that it is natural that some will rule over others as if by divine providence. They believe that Ayn Rand was right when she wrote that humans are by nature competitive and that those who prevail in the vicious struggle for supremacy are worthy of exaltation. This process of unnatural selection has perverted the law of the land into the Law of the Jungle. In their blind faith in the power of the Invisible Hand, they accepted the foolish notion that practicing selfishness would magically produce Paradise on Earth instead of the worldwide fascist threat that we now face.

We can no longer accept the idea that greed and selfishness are noble and good. It is perplexing how religious fundamentalists in the United States have been led like lambs to the slaughter by the promise that they will be rewarded for blind obedience to an ideology at direct odds with the teachings of the man they assume will save them from the consequences of their willful ignorance.

Theirs is the faith that no effort on their part, Jesus will save them from the certain destruction they assume the rest of us alone will face. They feel no responsibility to do as he  said and unite as one to ensure that Armageddon does not occur. I do not believe that they can remain blinded by the hope of the Rapture to save them. As they too fall victim to their own willful ignorance, they will come to understand the hubris of believing that they alone understand God’s will. Like many who have faith but reject religion, I believe in the universal presence of God in dwells in each of us and in the world at large. I have  faith that this will impel us to recognize that each of us is an aspect of God and therefore responsible to love and care for one another.

We cannot be saved by faith alone. Only by our works can we hope to restore the Garden and bring Heaven to Earth as men and women have prayed for since before the Lord’s Prayer was first written. Prophets have come in different times and places to reveal to us the nature of God and reality in terms that the People of those times and places could understand. It is our duty as Deists, atheists or doubters to come together to decide collectively what that message is, for it alone can unlock the secrets that science cannot reveal. The universe operates under probabilistic principles and only by considering this can we divine the truth of life’s mysteries unseen. Those things unseen may be revealed in the patterns of the Universe to those who attend to them.

It is the product of the individual probabilities of events occurring throughout space-time that convinces the rational scientist that God exists. History is a series of improbable events, each leading us toward the destiny that is now before us. Those who do not know how to estimate probabilities are going to be blind to the patterns of world history that have enabled futurists to predict events millennia before they occur. The irrational common man tends to skew his estimates of the probabilities of rare events, ascribing seeming miracles to coincidence. If they were to continue to  have such utter faith in either nihilism or salvation by faith alone they would not contribute to the salvation of Mankind by joining others in the effort. To divorce themselves from the rest of humanity when human civilization itself is threatened with self-destruction would be a betrayal not easily forgiven.

It baffles me still that some atheists continue to fight a lonely battle against injustice when they not only deny the existence of a loving God but have no faith in the essential  goodness of Man.  They have the same belief in the essentially evil nature of man as the fundamentalists they so bitterly oppose. Some, having blinded themselves to the possibility that God is all of us, have abandoned the fight altogether. We cannot stop the imposition of worldwide fascism until we have a working relationship with each other that will bring us ever closer to each other and to the God that is within, beyond and between all of us.

In the immortal words of George Harrison:

We were talking-about the space between us all.
And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth-then it's far too late-when they pass away.

We were talking-about the love we all could share-
When we find it
To try our best to hold it there-with our love
With our love-we could save the world-if they only knew.

Try to realize it's all within yourself
No-one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small,
And life flows ON within you and without you.

We were talking-about the love that's gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul-
They don't know-they can't see-are you one of them?
When you've seen beyond yourself-then you may find,
peace of mind is waiting there.

And the time will come when you see
we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

 

 

Rick Staggenborg, MD

Sawyer Rapids, Oregon.