Runaway Toyotas are lethally crashing into concrete abutments.
An exploding coal mine and a burning oil rig both inflicted horrible mayhem, with the latter also unleashing a mammoth environmental disaster.
Our jobs are going out the window, leaving homes we can no longer afford to own, and the entire Greek working class is being shafted as a precursor for ordinary folks in all nations, just to save a few bankers’ greedy hides.
US streets are full of potholes, libraries are closing or reducing hours, schools are crumbling, and police and fire protection slides from bad to worse because of local governmental insolvency.
The obscenely rich don’t pay their proper share of taxes, not to mention fair wages for the workaday producers of all societal wealth.
What money we should be spending for human needs is instead squandered on endless wars and the roughly eight hundred military bases or active sites we operate around the planet, which justifiably generate increasing global hatred toward our country.
We’re faced with staggering inequity and injustice, but we’re asked to blame impoverished immigrants without documentation, who possess a hunger in their empty bellies that the rest of us have yet to experience, but surely will, if seamless working-class unity isn’t achieved.
Do straws in the wind have to become the size of hurricane-tossed tree branches before we can see what’s happening? Must the dots we should be connecting be iridescent orange and larger than medicine balls?
Or are we hopelessly hypnotized by diversionary GOP and Tea Party demagoguery?
Capitalism has run amok. It’s destroying everyone’s livelihoods and lives.
The system we were indoctrinated to blindly venerate in grammar school has proven to be a relentlessly pillaging, profiteering assault on public welfare, the common good, and Mother Earth, itself.
Our only salvation is to curb monopolies, bust trusts, enact worker and consumer protections with razor-sharp teeth, plus foster a prevailing mentality that environmental defense is absolutely key to universal survival.
If that can’t be achieved within a continuing capitalist context — which becomes more unlikely with each passing day — then aren’t we obligated to move toward a truly liberating super democracy that would give the overwhelming majority of adult Americans and their foreign peers — wage-earning workers everywhere — the decisive say over their own existence?
No longer would Jesus-offending, mammon-worshipping Fat Cats run things and grow rich at our painful expense.
No longer would Main Street jobs, homes, and pensions be cruelly sacrificed at Dow Jones’ ungodly altar.
We need to speak with one, reverberatingly loud voice that can’t possibly be ignored.
Either make the system serve this nation’s and the world’s laboring backbone, or face the eventual prospect of a complete takeover by the people themselves, of their mines, mills, and factories, consistent with revolutionary rights mandated by dire need.
Grim reality provides stark evidence of how intolerable the status quo has become. The sinister truth is literally lapping our ankles as we stroll Gulf Coast beaches.
It’s crunch time for capitalism.
Can it change its destructive character today, or must workers seize control tomorrow and show everyone what finally has to be done?