by David B. Brooks   

Our education system fails Americans as most seem to know nothing of the citizens right to redress their grievances in public, but today lobbyist for corporations and business are over protected. Within my lifetime authoritarian dictatorships were married to business and corporations and enforced dominion over the people with militarized police forces. It is happening again, not in Europe which has learned the hard way; but here in America.

The occupy 99% have become slaves to a government bribed by business and corporate desire to maintain and expand an empire of influence in the world at the expense of the American people.

Today there is no public representation. The American citizens do not own or control the public services they depend on. Americans are at the mercy of privately owned and controlled public services. Whether it is the banks, the communications , the distribution of energy or the transportation of people and goods, Americans are at the mercy of private owners who have a lot of greed but no mercy.

When the real estate bubble was created and burst the perpetrators, the villains among the elite were rewarded because some in government believed they were too big and important to fail. The people were made to pay the price of recession and unemployment so the elite could continue to receive their unearned profits. So why did the banks and financial gambling machines not fail? Why are the banks still in private hands? Well Americans have been taught that publicly owned public services is "socialism/communism". But if all of the public services were owned by the public, and not the government, then they would be cooperatives, and that is not socialism

America should own itself and not be divided by a false duality. The Libertarians are correct about government being too big and too powerful, but their demi-god Ayn Rand was wrong. What is in the people's interest, all of the public utilities, should be in a third division of power and interest. It should be separate and under the independent rule and ownership of the public that requires and uses public utilities. Only then will there be a free and independent citizenry. The people should own and control the banks, the energy industry, communications and transportation, health-care, that is independent of both government and private businesses.

A country with its public sector owned and operated independently by cooperatives is not new, it is and has been done before and it works well. It is not socialism nor is it capitalism, it is people-ism. People working and living together as partners in a full and true community of common interest.