Fifteen Reasons for a Second American Revolution

From: http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/5782-fifteen-reasons-for-a-second-american-revolution.html

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now
maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young
men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare
coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world’s police. Wonder whose
assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world –much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and
Venezuela - combined.

The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people
through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts,
access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer
views of sites, and travel.

The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3
million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the
world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big
businesses.

Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite
majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or
women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil
libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic
justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in
New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the
Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. “We as
a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a
“thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit
motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of
racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
It is time.

Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola
University New Orleans. Quigley77@gmail.com
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