Editor: This is the text of a speech at a rally in solidarity with the Wisconsin workers at Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa, March 15:
“Brothers and Sisters, welcome to Tahrir Square, California! This is our Egypt moment. You have braved the weather to take your place in history, the place where we as a people stand up for our rights and our identity, and mark the turning point at which we say: the tyranny of our Mubaraks and their bought and paid for puppets stops here!
“Moses stood up to the Pharoah, just as the Egyptian people stood up to Mubarak. We are here in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin, who are standing up to the corporate overlords and their political mouthpieces.
“Our Mubaraks are veiled: we usually only see their puppets in public. The Koch Brothers are Wisconsin’s Mubaraks: Scott Walker is their puppet. We need to pull back the curtain on the Mubaraks in our midst. We see them represented by their corporate masks: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, General Electric… They are willing to pay nothing of their vast fortunes to sustain the common good, yet demand that we sacrifice our children’s future to their unholy lust for wealth without limits.
“Our strength in this historic struggle is our solidarity. This sense of shared destiny and common purpose is the antidote to the toxic culture of empire, which is cynical and alienated by design. We are the cure. We are the ones that we have been waiting for.”
Ben Boyce
Sonoma
I was in Santa Rosa that rainy afternoon standing on the curb with my own picket sign and not under the gazebo listening to the same old worn out preaching to the choir….I have been a union man all of my life and remain staunchly so. Much of what Ben Boyce says is right but at the rate this country is becoming an economic and cultural Three Mile Island, it would soon be far more accurate to compare America to a three thousand mile Gaza strip than an Egypt.
What so-called “progressives” like Boyce, Ken Brown and Will Shonbrun persist in refusing to recognize and apparently remaining oblivious of is that demonstrable fact that the single worst enemy —by far—-of the working people of America is and always has been the hoax that calls itself the “federal reserve bank” and its armed collection agency most of you will be surrendering your hard earned money to at gunpoint a week from today: the i.r.s.
Ben was a point man for the so called “living wage ordinance” which I figured for a joke from page one—-there will NEVER be anything remotely akin to a “living wage” in this country as long as the public allows itself to be ruthlessly sodomized bow-legged by a totally marxist income tax structure calculated in cold blood to do harm and injury to the most productive and creative segment of American society: the working class and particularly the middle class—-for all intents and purposes rendered extinct at this point.