SMOKE and MIRROR DEMOCRACY

My fellow citizens. I come to you to speak not about the most you deserve, but what Franklin D. Roosevelt and others have thought was the least you deserve. I come not to ask what you should be doing for your country, but what is the minimum your country should be doing for you and still honestly call itself a democracy. I come to you not to make you feel greedy because you expect something you deserve from your government. I come to you to show you what you have a right to expect from government, any government calling itself a democracy. There is no reason to feel guilty about asking what your country should be doing for you. That is the reason and the only valid reason for the existence of government, to answer to your needs. It certainly isn't there for the sole purpose of supporting corrupt politicians and their cronies, the reason it seems to be there now. Government is there to serve you. It is not there to give politicians fat jobs. It is not there to be sold to the highest bidder who gives the biggest campaign contributions. It is not there for corporations to maximize profits at the expense of the quality of our lives. It is not there to be what it is today, an ineffectual rubber stamp for corporations to make the rich even richer. It is not there to be a sop or a dole to the powerless or a magic show of smoke and mirrors to convince the impoverished they are getting their fair share of the pie. Government is none of these things, as our present opinion leaders would have you believe. Government is only there for one reason. And that is to equally and fairly serve all its citizens. This present government is a disaster because it only serves the purposes of the rich and powerful.

I do not come to you today to tell you how to get the most you can from government with the least effort. I come to talk to you about what is your inalienable, your God given, your natural and your most basic right under any government that dares call itself a democracy. That most important, most abused, most ignored of all democratic rights is the right to economic justice. What is economic justice? The powers to be, "the princes of greed" to quote FDR, would have us believe there are no rights to economic justice in America. I would tell you that they are not only wrong, but a pack of liars, corrupt tyrants and greedy thieves that have stolen your democratic heritage by buying your representatives and your government and using their wealth and power to promote their own selfish ends.

Economic justice is no more a commodity to be bought and sold than is air. Economic justice is in the words of America's greatest president, F.D.R., the right to a remunerative job that will provide adequate food, clothing, recreation, education, housing, medical care, retirement, protection from the vicissitudes of life and protection from predatory wealth. Yes, F.D.R. believed every American has a right to equality in the pursuit of happiness and that there should be an economic Bill of Rights to ensure that no American should be cheated out of his or her democratic birthright. This great economic program, necessary according to Roosevelt to achieve a lasting high quality democracy, has never been enacted. And we consequently, instead of living in a land of economic democracy and equality for all are living in an economic tyranny that with every passing day becomes more unjust and unequal.

America has become instead of a high quality democracy, a first class pseudo democracy. Instead of economic security for all, we have drastic insecurity. Instead of small businessmen and individuals being protected from predation by both domestic and foreign corporations, a form of monopoly called appropriately chains and multinational corporations run the world with a virtual free hand. And they are turning the whole world into a wage slave hell in the process. Instead of each and everyone of us having a profitable job that will allow us to successfully pursue happiness, our jobs are under constant assault and threat by corporations that only have regard for one thing, maximizing profits. This my fellow Americans is the reason why the American dream is turning into the American nightmare. The American dream is being stolen by the paymasters of your so called representatives who recognize quite correctly that representative government under our laws is not necessarily democracy. Your most basic right in life next to life itself is the right to a remunerative job, the key word being remunerative. When Roosevelt used this word, he knew it meant profitable; the opposite of subsistence slave wages. It is the only right you have that will ensure your just and secure pursuit of happiness. That is why it is the only right that has been totally denied you. There is only one way to make government serve people instead of special interests and that is to add a right to a remunerative job to the bill of rights.

If this is so you may ask, what good is our present Constitution and Bill of Rights that guarantee us a lot of political rights such as the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to our choice of worship and the rest? The answer to that one is they give you the right to be a sucker, because without having the right, in FDR's words, to a remunerative job, the rest of these rights are a hypocritical almost worthless farce. And that is what we have. A hypocritical farce of a government that has overseen the destruction of the American family and allowed the American dream to turn into the American nightmare. Except for the ingenuity of the individual American worker to create his own job, helped by the productivity of the personal computer, there would be massive unemployment in America. The traitorous policies of corporate America, which continue in spite of much criticism, is deindustrializing America by exporting our manufacturing jobs, capital and technology anyplace where it is cheaper to operate. The bottom line for the American worker is not the height of the stock market, but the tens of thousands of high paying jobs being outsourced every month. Don't be fooled by phony employment statistics. Low paying service jobs will never replace high paying professional or manufacturing jobs.

Dear friends, Americans, voters, the one thing they will never give you is the guarantee of a job, because that is the one thing that will upset the corporatism milk pail. Guaranteeing you a remunerative job would blow away the smoke and mirror scam that you live in a democracy. All the non-issues that now pass for a national debate in this country would now go up in a cloud of smoke, because there is only one real issue. Your right to a remunerative job. There would no longer be a reason for an abortion debate, because when Americans know they have a right to a remunerative job, babies would be welcome and in demand. And when Americans know their government stands for love instead of corruption, there will no longer be a necessity to bring in millions of immigrants to do jobs American born and educated sons and daughters should be doing.

Without economic justice based on immutable laws, there will never be real democracy. Economic justice can only come about when laws are permanent and uncompromiseable. Economic justice can only be permanent when it is not placed on an economic shopping list for corrupt politicians to sell at their whim to the highest bidder. Only a constitutional amendment that makes the government directly responsible to see that every American has a remunerative job will change this system of tyrannical economic insecurity that passes for democracy in America, but is really pseudo democracy. A good secure job for all Americans who want one is the way to control corporate greed, which is picking the world clean for the rich. Instead of corporate socialism for the rich, let us have responsible free enterprise that provides the good life for all.