Storming the Gates

I read with interest Richard Mann's fantasy piece about the "Birth
of the National Progressive Party", and while I can't help but applaud
such an eventuality, I lament that, barring some courageous acts by
many courageous people, Mr. Mann's fantasy will remain just that.Just
as the Tea Party movement now offers a direct challenge to the
entrenched powers in the Republican Party, so will those who call
themselves progressives and liberals have to rise up in equal numbers
or greater to challenge the corporate lethargy in the Democratic
Party. We are owned by Wall Street and we are fed as directed by the
owned corporate media. And now that corporations have been given
voting rights, they own your vote as well. You have no real say in how
the government is run, or how they spend the money you give to them
each year in taxes. They'll spend our money on wars instead of
education and jobs, clean and alternative forms of energy, health in
infrastructure, however they damn well please, just as long as we
allow them to do it, just as the unfunny and for once sober comedian
George Carlin once said. The system has been gamed, and as of this
writing, you and I are still not among the winners.To take back or
assume (depending on how you interpret US history) control of
ownership in our own better interests is going to require noble effort
on all of our parts at some point. It will mean disrupting and
dismantling the financial /corporate chain of command. It will mean
tearing things down so we can put them back together the way we want
them to be, to the point that we are truly "one nation under god..."
etc.I will be very interested to see how the Tea Party develops, to
see how effective they are in stealing fire from Republicans, and the
stratagems they use in doing so.Our fiscal sanity can no longer be
restored by voting in a different Republican or a Democrat. With very
few exceptions (Grayson and Kucinich being the only ones I can bring
to mind), those we elect are already players in the game from which
you and I are already excluded. Someone already has bought the rights
as to how they will vote, and it's not you.We can march nonstop around
the Lincoln Memorial, but unless and until we are able to strike real
fear on Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve, we will
remain, in the immortal words of our former Idiot-in-Chief, a "focus
group".Only one question remains. At what point will we arrive at the
tipping point, the threshold of personal pain, where we rise up to
wrest our own money from those currently abusing it? Is the Tea Party
a part of this? Are they the spark?I think we are not too far away
from the flash point, if we are not already there.