Trifecta which says it all

All parts of me, mind body and soul, are still reeling from reading Marisacat's latest on Liberal Street Fighter.

I've been calling 11-2 Black Tuesday partially in jest but I realize I've been in major major denial.

I'm pointing out three things to read, all quite long and absolutely vital, articles I'm sharing while in mourning.

Start with Marisacat, who directs us to Larry Kramer's last incendiary speech, while directed to gays, is applicable to all of us who don't agree with the ideological frame presented for the sheeple.

Kramer quotes Bill Moyer's speech October 20th 2004 at the Palace Hotel. Key paragraphs below:

For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right -- this is documented from 1971 on -- the religious, political, and religious right have been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else.

For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life.

Finally, and this is the worst of it, Powell's doctrine, which I have not heard of before. Okay, color me naive, blind, what have you.

It's funny how little I knew, even as I thought I knew more than the average citizen. And now that I know how much I don't know, I see more clearly how so many of us live blithely unaware how we are manipulated to believe, to think, to live a certain way. Policy made at top somewhere affects our daily lives yet many of us don't know what they are and where it all comes from.

Since I've been following education policy, at least the little bit that is allowed to be public, it took awhile but I now realize there is a huge hidden agenda behind the superficial layers. When I go to meetings and get confronted by comments directed towards me because I don't like NCLB, sometimes I don't know where to start. I want to do a brain dump and say, here is what I know. Take it and understand it. Then you'll know where I come from. But there is so much info, so little time and so much opposition to challenging the paradigm defined by the oligarchs.

All that Moyers and Kramer says apply specifically to what is going on in public education today as well as for all social welfare institutions.

I'll end with more Moyers:

The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocate, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world and the greatest economic inequality in America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions, except rewarding the rich and waging war.

..snip..

By the end of the '70s, Corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy, and when we look back, it seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored it at the time.

As their cover, they formed and alliance with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who launched a cultural war to mask the fact that the very foot soldiers in that war were having their pockets picked by the very elites who had asked them to fight the cultural war.

Just as the war in Iraq is a class war being fought by young men and women whose only route to college is through war, so the cultural war is a great smoke screen for the continuing class war against the masses of American life.

Never has there been a need to recover the prophetic religious tradition, the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and the great prophetic mission of Jesus who in the 21st Chapter of Matthew lost his temper and threw the money changers out of the temple.

I am asking you, The Interfaith Alliance, that no matter what happens on the 2nd of November, this must not be just the end of a campaign, but the beginning of a movement to take America back, put America back on the track, and no matter who wins because there will be differences, but you are fooling yourself if you think a corporate Democrat is going to really crack this nut of inequality.

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience fought for by men like Judas Spoke [ph], Thomas Helwys, and so many others.

Good luck and God bless you.

I wish Moyers had more to offer on exactly how to take it back. Kramer provides us with the first steps to doing so:

You cannot move forward without accepting your past. I am going to say that again. We cannot move forward without accepting and understanding our past.

Acceptance of our past. Understanding our past. And I'll add taking responsibility for this as well.