Ed Asner 's Speech during the Umbrella Movement Meeting on Sunday, November 21st : Miami IMC

Before I begin, I think a psalm is in order, now that the religious right holds sway in our land:

Let us pray:

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
Thou maketh me to lie down on park benches.
Thou leadeth me beside the still factories.
Thou leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
Thou leadeth me onto the paths of unemployment for thine cronies' sake.
Yea, though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Thou makest me continue to fear Evil.
Thou tax cuts for the rich and thy deficit spending discomfort me.
Thou anointest me with never-ending debt: my health insurance runneth out Thou restoreth my fears.
Verily my days of savings and assets are kaput.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me all the days of thy administration, And …..
My jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.
Amen

When I’m asked to show up and give my two-cents, I don’t usually have a single theme to share with the audience, but today I do, and that theme, simply put is:

The American Dream Is a Nightmare

In the early days of this nation, Thomas Paine could write pamphlets, hand them out on Boston street corners and mobilize the public to action. In one of those pamphlets, he wrote, “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” Today we can see, it's also the duty of the patriot to protect his country from destructive influences upon that government.

Ever since George Bush debased what could have been an honorable national response to 9-11 - the word patriot as in Patriot Act, means something very different.

Does my government have a right to know what books I buy or check out of the library? Thurgood Marshall once said, “If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”

Does our government have the right to arrest peaceful anti-war demonstrators under the guise of the Patriot Act? Will we sit back and watch our country overtaken by a minority with an extreme religious ‘agenda,’ or as George Bush calls it: mandate? When there is a lack of honor in government, the principles of the whole people are poisoned.

The atrocities following the Patriot Act are too innumerable to list here so be sure to pick up a copy at the information table on your way out and read it.

But Thomas Paine’s spirit lives on and we can still access and share information on the internet and by using email. And we must create awareness, sound sirens, mobilize… before the gates close behind us. Next week or perhaps tomorrow, we may be called disloyal for attending a meeting such as this. Norman Sommer lives here in your neighborhood and is willing and brave enough to help you access information through his Umbrella Group - they are here to point the way for anyone interested in activism with guidance.

Now for those of you here today that are not terribly concerned with the slashing of your basic civil rights - what about your basic right to keep Uncle Sam’s hand out of your pocket? I’m talking about corporate pickpockets.

Do you know that the CEO paycheck vs. the worker paycheck is approaching 301 to 1!!! Twenty some years ago the ratio was more like 42-1. What this means is the ‘average Joe’ out there --- took home last year around $517 a week, while your not so average CEO socked away more than $150,000 a week! According to Business Week, if the minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, today it would be $15.71 per hour instead of $5.15 an hour.

According to ‘Citizens for Tax Justice‘: Between 2001 and 2006, Florida taxpayers will receive $69 billion in tax cuts - sounds pretty good - but you will also face $216 billion dollars in added Federal debt. Even my own dismal attempt at bookkeeping translates that to forking over $147 billion to Washington for $69 billion dollars in tax cuts. Could this have anything to do with the fact that corporations paid 40% of the federal tax bill in 1940, but by 2002 they have reduced that number to 7.1%?

Please tell me!…am I delusional? Do you suddenly find a taste of snake oil in your mouth? That oily residue represents almost nine thousand dollars a year in taxes for each and every Florida resident - within a certain income bracket - of course.

The American Dream Is a Nightmare

Not long ago President Bush and the U.S. Congress could have provided $85 billion in aid to the states during our nationwide fiscal crisis, which would have eliminated every state’s deficit and prevented states from taking actions that drag down the national economy. Instead, President Bush and the U.S. Congress chose to pass a tax bill that provides only $20 billion in aid to states (12% of what was needed) and gave away $330 billion in tax breaks, primarily to the wealthiest Americans.

The federal government provides money to states and localities for such programs as Medicaid, special education, childhood nutrition programs, transportation and housing development among other programs. So when the federal government (now bought and sold to Corporate interests) gives away massive tax breaks to themselves, of course less funding is available for domestic priorities - that would be the rest of us.

If states choose not to raise revenue, they must cut spending. Since the overwhelming majority of a state’s budget goes to education, health care and human services, these areas often take a big hit. At the local level, these cuts translate into layoffs for policeman, firemen, teachers, human service workers, larger classroom sizes, fewer people with healthcare, and the elderly not able to afford prescription drugs, closed libraries and increased fees for college.

So the people getting the tax breaks are the ones who need it the least, and the people not getting the tax breaks are the ones who feel the impact of the local budget cuts the most – the ones who can’t afford the increased fees and property taxes and who depend most on public education and other public services. Remember, if the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have.

The American Dream is a Nightmare.

And it gets worse:
According to the Population Health Forum the U.S. spends more hours at work than any other country Almost 40 percent of Americans are now working more than 50 hours a week. In fact, we're working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country. Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks. Many of us (including 37% of women earning less than $40,000 per year) get no paid vacation at all.

Generally we are working almost 3 months more than European workers AND…. we are doing the impossible without even knowing it: working longer than the legendary Japanese worker! We haven’t worked this hard and long since the 1920’s and as a result we are experiencing stress, burnout and personal sacrifice that undermines the fabric of our society.

According to the website: poclad.org – giant corporations govern, even though they are mentioned nowhere in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. So when corporations govern, democracy is nowhere to be found. When people live in a culture defined by corporate values, common sense evaporates. We stop trusting our own eyes, ears, and feelings. Our minds become colonized and we wake up one morning greeted by George Bush’s CEO government (which now officially owns our representatives and runs this land), calling the shots and shifting the tax burden off investments and onto wages - and America’s low and middle income citizens twitch about - vaguely sensing a thieving hand ever deeper inside their drawers - pockets picked!

Our press, and our media are now largely in the hands of a few huge conglomerates. This world is very different from the time when I portrayed Lou Grant, a crusading, fighting editor. Where are those editors today? Hard to find, hard to identify. They are mostly captives of Murdoch and company and other industrial giants. That makes America no longer the teacher of democracy, but the shill, the advertiser of consumer society.

We are not entirely without power in this stealth takeover. To effect change we must strike at corporate rule of our media and government or we are all dead ducks. We can start by boycotting the brands that corporations either finance or profit from. There’s plenty of information on the Internet, just use a search engine such as Google and you’ll find more than you may have imagined.

Can someone tell me why the good and decent people of this land are breaking their backs for a militaristic juggernaut that dares to rob us - as we embrace one last time, our beautiful, ignorant, idealistic kids. We wish them well with a sense of doom knowing our ‘best and brightest’ have been yet again suckered to march off to war!

Warmongers have always greedily smacked their lips with satisfaction while counting their profits; indifferent to the burden of our loss, the magnitude of our suffering and the spiritual poverty bequeathed to us. ‘War’ is tossed by those scum, those war profiteers, over our fences and onto our porches - to be dragged into our living rooms and re-opened; again, poisoning all that we cherish and even take for granted.

And when we slouch away from our democratic responsibilities we begin the counting of coffins - boxes draped in the American flag - as if that makes burying our sons and daughters more heroic. This president won’t let images of those long boxes be televised because he knows they are filled with what’s left of our hope…the “earned capital” Bush declares he now intends to continue spending - God help us all.

And don’t you believe those craven cronies who reside in the Pentagon haven’t got something else up their sleeves. Do any of you happen to feel a ‘draft’ headed your way? Our sons and daughters in Iraq are seriously unprotected on many levels including military force because there just aren’t enough kids willing to volunteer to fight in a country that doesn’t even have a military. And as far as I can tell so far, no one has figured out how to do battle successfully when there are no rules to fight by or a unified group to target.

When will we wake up from this nightmare?

Well now, my two cents are pretty well used up as I’ve attempted to share some important information today. May you take some of it away with you and find the courage to not let your actions be influenced by your fears or by the ‘dread’ George Bush promulgates. We cannot let ‘enforced ignorance’ be the rule of the land. Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win - because people who have kept on trying - when there seemed to be no hope at all - have accomplished most of the important things in the world. Like it or not Mr. Bush, a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government because government is the agent of the people, not the master.

Remember, if you can't beat them….. arrange to have them beaten. How? Well we can join and support organizations such as the Umbrella Movement to Counteract the Right, who have invited you here today. It's a time to stand together, to be strong, determined and vocal. Samuel Adams believed that “it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.” More than ever before, it’s time to light those fires, it’s time to raise our voices and know, as did Sam Adams, that:
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace.
We seek not your counsel,
nor your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Thank you!