Where is America's Breaking Point?

"Unemployment is high. Average income is low and declining,
making it impossible for a man to marry and support a family. Anger with
rampant corruption in government is palpable and longstanding. One percent of
the population lives in the lap of luxury that ordinary people can only dream
of. The richest one percent is totally ignorant of the real problems of
ordinary citizens. GDP is roughly 5% but the majority of the people have seen
no benefit from that. When the president
travels in his limousine the roads are cleared in front of him, so he has no
notion of how bad the traffic problems are. Elections
here are fixed and essentially a joke, as opposition parties cannot run in any
effective sense. The people have been
accused of lethargy and apathy, and a willingness to tolerate a loss of civil
liberties. But everybody has a breaking
point. The people are fed up. They have had enough."

That was Ben Wedeman, CNN's longtime Mid-East reporter
speaking from Egypt
last night. But that could have been Amy Goodman reporting from a march on Washington. As Hillary
Clinton urged tolerance for protesters from the Egyptian government I wondered
what she would say to the world if 200 million Americans took to the streets to
protest government corruption, rigged elections, an absurd wealth distribution,
and declining wages in America.

Where is America's
breaking point? In a country where both
parties in a two-party system are equally beholden to corporate money, where
are the opposition leaders? When do Americans
demand real elections - elections where there is no money involved and all
potential candidates are funded by taxpayer dollars?

Americans are now placed in the absurd position of needing
to organize a constitutional convention in order to overturn a politicized ruling by a corrupt supreme court;
of needing to prove in every state that a corporation is not a human being. The
apathy of Americans is equally palpable - as Congress and the courts behave as
though they are enslaved by corporations and ignore the will of the American
people most of the time. As Hank Paulsen was in the process of blackmailing
Congress into a trillion dollar bailout for his banker cronies, every American
adult with a pulse called his representative and screamed "NO". Congressmen
reported on the floor of the House that calls and emails were 99% against a
bailout. Congressional Democrats buckled to their banker masters and ignored us. And how did
Americans protest being ignored? They turned control of the House of
Representatives over to the Republicans - whose initial volley was to outlaw
public funding for presidential elections. Next on their agenda: outlawing
abortion and ending Social Security and Medicare.

Our progressive opposition groups are fragmented and
issue-based, as could be expected in a nation so huge and diverse. What is
needed is a mechanism for binding progressive groups together to fight -
literally - for a new regime: For publicly-funded elections and an end to
gerrymandering that would give us some hope of a representative government. What
is needed is genuine progressive leadership.