Independence

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

July 4, 1776, Independence Day celebrates our fight to cast off colonial rule by a wealthy elite who were keeping the benefits of our labors for themselves. We fought this system and we won our independence. In the years since We, the People have built up solid public structures like our system of laws and courts, schools and universities, roads and transit systems, police and fire departments, food and drug regulations, worker protections, minimum wages and maximum hours -- all of which have enabled us to prosper together.

In 1776 democracy and government by the people were literally revolutionary concepts but even now they continue to face constant attack from the interests of concentrated wealth. Today we face a new form of this attack on our shared prosperity. Where we have fought and built protections and rule by the people, companies evade our rules by moving factories and jobs to places that have not, and remain exploited. They hold us hostage, saying "give in or we'll just move your job, too." They create conditions where we are forced to fight each other for lower and lower wages just to keep a roof over our heads. They corrupt our democracy with floods of cash, and our politicians with promises of jobs as highly-paid lobbyists. They buy our news sources and pollute our information. Their propaganda poisons our people against their own leaders. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to cast off the chains of corporate rule and great concentration of wealth and power, we must do so. We can fight this now, just as we fought it in 1776, and fought it again and again in our history. We built this country and its government and democracy, and we ought to keep it.

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