Monday, March 20, 2017

How Democrats Lost Union Workers

via Portside

I have a lot of sympathy for this argument, as it makes more sense than the Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein "give up on white workers, universal benefits, Sanders, inequality, no raises for 40 years, etc, etc....until they deal with their 'white identity'".

At the same time, how does Sanders, or Sanders-like politics really turn the American austerity regime around? The truth is, I suspect, is that we really don't know. We mainly KNOW that the alternatives, the Republican fascist threat, and/or liberalism with no wage increases and increasingly dysfunctional and failing institutions, are NOT working. And the failures are killing us.

African American and Latino voters did not express their frustrations in the same ways electorally. When everyone is scrambling for crumbs, the race, nationality, religion, and other "identities" play out in numerous divisive and splitting narratives

The power shifts necessary -- in class terms -- to have a modern social-democratic (call it socialist, if you wish) regime that rolls back the half century of austerity are frankly mind-bending. Comparisons to the abolition of slavery, or the rise of the New Deal, or the American revolution itself, come immediately to mind.

Plus, having put together a sufficiently strong coalition, progressives have to bring to the table a lot more than manufacturing--where technology is pointing to more intensive robotics -- to sustain a credible return of a "middle class". Do we really want a return to the middle class, where the "lower" class remains mired in poverty? If we focused on abolishing any "lower class", the middle might continue to disappear, but no one would notice or suffer.

Chuck Jones
March 17, 2017
Huffington Post
 
A map of Indiana can show you what went wrong for the Democratic Party and what's going wrong for the country.
 
 
"The big picture is that American jobs are leaving this country to exploit cheap labor," he said. "When you start taking away the middle class, what do you have left?"...He'd been a loyal union man for years, been raised on the notion Democrats were the party of the workers and made calls for Democrats from union phone banks. But after the trade agreements signed by Democratic presidents, and after Trump spoke to the plight of workers at places such as Carrier, Feltner broke ranks. With the layoff fresh on his mind, he cast a vote in November for Trump. He says most of his rank-and-file union members did the same.
 
"I'm scared to death:" The last bitter days of Rexnord, Indianapolis Star, Feb. 24, 2017
 
A few weeks back, I spoke to the Democratic National Committee Forum in Detroit about how the party lost a lot of Midwest blue collar voters – and with them, the presidency. My union – United Steelworkers Local 1999 ― represents the Indianapolis Carrier plant that loomed large in the presidential showdown. Our role grew even more prominent after Trump attacked me on Twitter for having called him out for lying about the Carrier jobs.
 
But it wasn't just Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Carrier that got the Democratic Party in a ditch. A lot went on over a long time to get us here. I dealt them some tough medicine in Detroit. I don't know if it took.
 
A map of Indiana can show you what went wrong for the Democratic Party and what's going wrong for the country. Not just the Carrier plant, that's shipping 550 jobs to Mexico, but another one of our local's plants, Rexnord Bearings, has 300 jobs headed to the same city, Monterrey. In Huntington, near Fort Wayne, 700 jobs from the same corporation as Carrier – UTC – are headed there as well. Indiana's 2nd Congressional District, which includes South Bend, has two Elkhart plants, Harman International and auto-parts maker CTS Corp., shipping more than 350 jobs overseas. The 2nd District used to be a lock for Democrats, and was at least competitive the past 30 years. Now it's elected a Tea Party Republican to her third term.
 
The DNC wanted to know why traditional Democratic areas in the industrial Midwest have gotten away from them. It's because too many manufacturing plants have been getting away from us – and too many Democratic leaders have been AWOL. When it comes to how they and their families are going to survive, too many workers can't tell one party from the other. Yes, we've stood up for the safety net and social justice – we're not one-issue Democrats. But Indiana, along with much of the industrial Midwest, has been getting hammered by rigged trade deals that have left thousands of Hoosier families stranded. It's upended our world.
 
We're not against trade. But the trade deals we've been given by Republicans – and too many Democrats ― have betrayed people who work for a living. Don't lose sight of the fact – because too many politicians already have – that for these family breadwinners, it's over. Often middle aged or older, they now look forward to a fraction of their pension, if that, and any dreams they had for their kids getting a leg up into the middle class are gone. For too many it's been a life of despair leading to alcoholism, bankruptcy, broken families, even suicide. I've seen it.
 
The sad truth is that Trump made a liar out of Republicans and Democrats with what he pulled off at Carrier (even if it wasn't all he tried to sell it as). The standard response has always been – "there's nothing we can do; the company has made up its mind." Well, it might have been a little smoke and mirrors mixed with alternative facts when he rolled it out ― but the real fact is 700 of the jobs are staying in Indianapolis (for how long is a question for another day). And going forward, anytime any job looks like it's staying in the States or coming back, "alternative fact" or not, Trump will own it.
 
Don't let him. Instead of throwing up their hands, Democrats need to roll up their sleeves. Confront the corporations, donors be damned. Working people will take notice.
 
My message to the Democratic Party is that we need leaders with the guts to stand up to Wall Street and defend working people.
 
That means trade deals that respect worker rights – here and abroad – starting with renegotiating NAFTA.
 
We need job creation policies that don't put the public on the hook while guaranteeing a windfall for the corporations. They've had their bailouts – it's time working families get theirs. The Blueprint to Rebuild America's Infrastructure would create 15 million jobs. Trump talks about infrastructure projects where the public picks up the tab through corporate tax giveaways and gutted regulations. The Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act pays for it by closing corporate tax loopholes.
 
And that goes for fighting the outsourcing of jobs. When a hugely profitable company, like Carrier, with plenty of government contracts, again, like Carrier, announces it is taking jobs abroad, the response is to open the government wallet and get a list of regulations (meant to protect the public) for shredding. How can you expect workers to respect a politician that doesn't stand up to extortion? The Outsourcing Prevention Act would halt federal contracts, tax breaks, grants and loans to companies taking jobs off-shore. It's insane to reward companies that destroy communities.
 
And when we say jobs, we mean jobs with rights, safety and a living wage. There's not enough of that now. A jobs/infrastructure deal that undermines what little we do have is poison. We need real jobs that pay a living wage, not the minimum wage. Workers should not have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. A good start to fixing some of these problems is Sen. Sherrod Brown's "Working Too Hard for Too Little – A Plan for Restoring the Value of Work in America." It improves rights and benefits for lower paid workers and penalizes companies that pay so little their employees need welfare to get by.
 
When workers organize, Democrats need to march with them into the boss's office and demand their rights be respected.
 
For the Democratic Party to even begin to turn this around, we need to see leaders standing with us when we bargain with corporations. When workers organize, they need to march with them into the boss's office and demand their rights be respected. A great example of that was recently in Mississippi where Sen. Bernie Sanders marched with Nissan auto workers fighting for a union. That's how you'll win back workers, not just the ones you lost last November, but the ones you've been losing for decades. And we'll get the 50 percent on the sidelines to start thinking voting might matter, and that putting heat on politicians can get results.
 
In Detroit I just stated what I saw on the ground. And what I saw in the Indiana primary was workers, and not just in manufacturing, getting excited about Bernie Sanders like no other candidate ever. His straight talk, consistent positions, and refusal to kowtow to conventional wisdom, made him damn near a hero. But the unvarnished truth about last year is this: after Bernie was eliminated, a lot of workers started drinking the Trump Kool-Aid or just plain took a pass on the election. Many had been Obama voters. Those who did throw in with HRC – men, women, black and white ― did it without the kind of enthusiasm you need to bring others along.
 
But it was a situation decades in the making. The Republicans created Trump, he's theirs; but too many Democrats built the vacuum that Trump filled.
 
In Detroit I reminded them that the Democratic Party needs to continue to be the home of working families. Trump's a fraud, and the Republicans don't have our back. But if the party wants these voters to come home, it needs to stand up for them.
 
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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Sunday, March 19, 2017

Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:The Poetry Show -- March 20, 2017 -- Cindy Hunter Morgan

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: The Poetry Show -- March 20, 2017 -- Cindy Hunter Morgan
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/03/the-poetry-show-march-20-2017-cindy.html

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698 Counties Affected by Trump’s Plan to Eliminate Three Agencies [feedly]

698 Counties Affected by Trump's Plan to Eliminate Three Agencies
http://ritholtz.com/2017/03/698-counties-affected-trumps-plan-eliminate-three-agencies/

698 Counties Affected by Trump's Plan to Eliminate Three Agencies

From Wonkblog:

"In rural Appalachia, people are so poor that there is a federal program dedicated to lifting them out of poverty. Through the Appalachian Regional Commission, the government pitches in on projects that these rural communities badly need but can't quite afford — everything from fixing roads, to building computer labs, to training workers, to opening health clinics.

These efforts have become so widely admired that in recent years Congress launched, with bipartisan backing, sister agencies to help other rural regions stuck in generational cycles of poverty. Together the programs spend about $175 million each year bringing jobs and opportunities to places that long have felt left behind.

President Trump, who won rousing victories in these same parts of rural America, would eliminate that funding."

Its quite surprising that Trump's budget plans, Trumpcare, tax policies disproportionately fall on his supporters. Its quite a thing . . .

 

Amazing:


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Out of Time in North Korea [feedly]

Out of Time in North Korea
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/north-korea-strategic-options-by-richard-n--haass-2017-03

NEW YORK – There is a growing consensus that the first genuine crisis of Donald Trump's presidency could involve North Korea and, more specifically, its ability to place a nuclear warhead on one or more ballistic missiles possessing sufficient range and accuracy to reach the continental United States. A crisis could stem from other factors as well: a large increase in the number of nuclear warheads that North Korea produces, evidence that it is selling nuclear materials to terrorist groups, or some use of its conventional military forces against South Korea or US forces stationed there.

There is no time to lose: any of these developments could occur in a matter of months or at most years. Strategic patience, the approach toward North Korea that has characterized successive US administrations since the early 1990s, has run its course.

The Year Ahead 2017 Cover Image

One option would be simply to accept as inevitable continued increases in the quantity and quality of North Korea's nuclear and missile inventories. The US, South Korea, and Japan would fall back on a combination of missile defense and deterrence.

The problem is that missile defense is imperfect, and deterrence is uncertain. The only certainty is that the failure of either would result in unimaginable costs. In these circumstances, Japan and South Korea might reconsider whether they, too, require nuclear weapons, raising the risk of a new and potentially destabilizing arms race in the region.

A second set of options would employ military force, either against a gathering North Korean threat or one judged to be imminent. One problem with this approach is uncertainty as to whether military strikes could destroy all of the North's missiles and warheads. But even if they could, North Korea would probably retaliate with conventional military forces against South Korea. Given that Seoul and US troops stationed in South Korea are well within range of thousands of artillery pieces, the toll in lives and physical damage would be immense. The new South Korean government (which will take office in two months) is sure to resist any action that could trigger such a scenario.

Some therefore opt for regime change, hoping that a different North Korean leadership might prove to be more reasonable. It probably would; but, given how closed North Korea is, bringing about such an outcome remains more wish than serious policy.

This brings us to diplomacy. The US could offer (following close consultations with the governments in South Korea and Japan, and ideally against the backdrop of additional United Nations resolutions and economic sanctions) direct negotiations with North Korea. Once talks commenced, the US side could advance a deal: North Korea would have to agree to freeze its nuclear and missile capabilities, which would require cessation of all testing of both warheads and missiles, along with access to international inspectors to verify compliance. The North would also have to commit not to sell any nuclear materials to any other country or organization.

In exchange, the US and its partners would offer, besides direct talks, the easing of sanctions. The US and others could also agree to sign – more than 60 years after the end of the Korean War – a peace agreement with the North.

North Korea (in some ways like Iran) could keep its nuclear option but be barred from translating it into a reality. Concerns over North Korea's many human-rights violations would not be pressed at this time, although the country's leaders would understand that there could be no normalization of relations (or end of sanctions) so long as repression remained the norm. Full normalization of ties would also require North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons program.

At the same time, the US should limit how far it is willing to go. There can be no end to regular US-South Korean military exercises, which are a necessary component of deterrence and potential defense, given the military threat posed by the North. For the same reason, any limits on US forces in the country or region would be unacceptable. And any negotiation must take place within a fixed time period, lest North Korea use that time to create new military facts.

Could such an approach succeed? The short answer is "maybe." China's stance would likely prove critical. Chinese leaders have no love for Kim Jong-un's regime or its nuclear weapons, but it dislikes even more the prospect of North Korea's collapse and the unification of the Korean Peninsula with Seoul as the capital.

The question is whether China (the conduit by which goods enter and leave North Korea) could be persuaded to use its considerable influence with its neighbor. The US should offer some reassurances that it would not exploit Korea's reunification for strategic advantage, while warning China of the dangers North Korea's current path poses to its own interests. Continued conversations with China about how best to respond to possible scenarios on the peninsula clearly make sense.

Again, there is no guarantee that diplomacy would succeed. But it might. And even if it failed, demonstrating that a good-faith effort had been made would make it less difficult to contemplate, carry out, and subsequently explain to domestic and international audiences why an alternative policy, one that included the use of military force, was embraced.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Weekend Reading: Bill Moyers: What a Real President Is Like [feedly]

Weekend Reading: Bill Moyers: What a Real President Is Like
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/03/weekend-reading-bill-moyers-what-a-real-president-is-like.html

Weekend Reading: Bill Moyers[What a Real President Is Like][]: "WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the bitter paradox of both...

...I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and feared. We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs:

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you...

[What a Real President Is Like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/

Some years later when Johnson was president, there was a press conference in the East Room. A reporter unexpectedly asked the president how he could explain his sudden passion for civil rights when he had never shown much enthusiasm for the cause. The question hung in the air. I could almost hear his silent cursing of a press secretary who had not anticipated this one.

But then he relaxed, and from an instinct no assistant could brief -- one seasoned in the double life from which he was delivered and hoped to deliver others -- he said in effect: Most of us don't have a second chance to correct the mistakes of our youth. I do and I am. That evening, sitting in the White House, discussing the question with friends and staff, he gestured broadly and said, "Eisenhower used to tell me that this place was a prison. I never felt freer."

For weeks in 1964, the president carried in his pocket the summary of a Census Bureau report showing that the lifetime earnings of an average black college graduate were lower than that of a white man with an eighth-grade education. And when The New York Times in November 1964 reported racial segregation to be increasing instead of disappearing, he took his felt-tip pen and scribbled across it "shame, shame, shame," and sent it to Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate.

I have a hard time explaining to our two sons and daughter -- now in their twenties -- that when they were little, America was still deeply segregated. The White House press corps, housed in Austin when the president was on vacation in Texas, would often go to the faculty club at the University of Texas, which was still off-limits to blacks in 1964. I remember the night it changed.

There was a New Year's party for one of the president's favorite assistants, Horace Busby. About halfway into the evening, there was a stir and everyone looked up. The president of the United States was entering with one of his secretaries on his arm -- a beautiful black woman. The next day, a law professor called the club to say he intended to bring some black associates to a meeting there. "No problem at all," said the woman on the phone. "Are we really integrated?" the professor asked. "Yes, sir," she answered, "the president of the United States integrated us last night."

In those days, our faith was in integration. The separatist cries would come later, as white flight and black power ended the illusion that an atmosphere of genuine acceptance and respect across color lines would overcome in our time the pernicious effects of a racism so deeply imbedded in American life. But Lyndon Johnson championed that faith. He thought the opposite of integration was not just segregation but disintegration -- a nation unraveling.

But he also knew not an inch would be won cheaply. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is to many of us a watershed in American history. With it, blacks gained access to public accommodations across the country. When he signed the act, he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the early edition of The Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come," he said.

Critics attacked his notion of consensus, but the president kept insisting to some of us that in politics, you cast your stakes wide and haul up a big tent with room for everybody who wants in. The only time I can remember any kind of discussion with him about his political philosophy, he said he was "a little bit left, a little bit right and a lot of center."

When he signed into law the anti-poverty program, he said, "You tell Sargent Shriver no doles, we don't want any doles." But he thought the government should be adventuresome. He turned around the direction of one meeting on the defense budget by saying:

You know, you can't take a tank from the blueprint to the battlefield -- you test it over and over. That's true of the social programs as well. You can't take a poor kid and turn him around just by getting Congress to pass a bill and the president to sign it and one of those agencies in Washington to run it. You have to experiment and keep at it until you find what it takes."

Moreover, LBJ believed, income was not the only measure of well-being. What about status, self-respect, opportunities for upward mobility and political power? Could these be left only to those who could afford them? "Not on your life," he said. I'm pretty sure LBJ never read John Stuart Mill, but in his bones, planted there from the experience of childhood and youth, he believed that in the absence of its natural defenders, the interests of the excluded are always in danger of being overlooked.

"It isn't enough just to round out the New Deal," LBJ said one day to a congressman. "There has to be a better deal." He talked of "the Great Society," but the slogan was no more precise than others in currency in those days. Sometimes LBJ despised the term: It just didn't fit his way of talking. In simplest terms he was trying to raise our sights beyond sheer size and the grandeur of wealth. A full stomach yes, but a fuller life too.

What worked? Well, in 1967, 75 percent of all Americans over 65 had no medical insurance and a third of the elderly lived in poverty. More than 90 percent of all black adults in the South were not registered to vote, and across the nation there were only about 200 elected public officials who were black. There was no Head Start for kids.

Today, Medicare, food stamps and more generous Social Security benefits have helped reduce the poverty rate for the elderly by half, and they are no poorer than Americans as a whole. Nearly 6,000 blacks hold elected office. A majority of small children attend preschool programs. The bedrock of the Great Society -- Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, the right of blacks to citizenship -- are permanent features of the American system. So much so that in the first debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, Reagan presented himself as the man who saved the nation's safety net.

What went wrong? Some things that went wrong were unjustly blamed on the Great Society. As my former colleague Ben Wattenberg has pointed out, there was no "soft-on-crime act" of 1966. There was no "permissive curriculum act" of 1967. But plenty of things went wrong. We had jumped too fast, spread out too far and too thinly over too vast a terrain, and then went to war on a distant front -- against an enemy that would not bargain, compromise or reason together.

A slogan is a dangerous thing. Those who create it can lose control of its meaning. Others read into it what was not there. Friends put their own spin on it. It can mean everything or nothing. But slogans aside, at the root the Great Society was only an idea -- and not a new one. It was the idea that free men and women can work with their government to make things better.

The problem of big government is real. Finding ways to make this complex system work, of making it responsive and responsible with a due regard for the integrity of the individual and well-being of the country, was the challenge we set out to wrestle 20 years ago. It will be so far into the future.

"The Great Society," said Lyndon Johnson, "is a challenge constantly renewed."


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Bernstein: Health care spending and health care costs: they’re not the same thing! [feedly]

Health care spending and health care costs: they're not the same thing!
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/hthcare_spending_costs/

Health economist David Cutler offers sage thoughts on the R's health care plan. I like where he starts. When Paul Ryan said that what his plan brings to the table is the "freedom" for healthy people not to have to subsidize the sick, many progressives pointed out that…um…that's kinda how insurance works, Paul.

But as Cutler points out:

Critics were probably too quick to dismiss Ryan's remarks as ignorant. What he said reflects a long-standing vision of many on the right about who should pay for the chronically ill. Spreading the costs so that healthy people pay more than their own care likely will warrant in a given year is one option. But that's not the solution Republicans have traditionally favored. Their answer for health care, as for old-age support, is to put a greater burden on individuals to pay for the costs they incur. In that mode of thinking, the unraveling of risk pools is a virtue, not a vice.

In other words, in their YOYO world ("you're on your own"), risk pooling is a socialist, not an actuarial, tool. As Cutler suggests, this helps explain their antithesis to any version of social insurance.

What he doesn't get into is that this is really just a stop on the path to the ultimate goal of turning the resources that support social insurance over to the wealthy in tax cuts, a very obvious play in the ACHA. (Heads-up: Ben S and I feature the author of that link, CC Huang, along with health expert Shelby Gonzales, in our next episode of the On the Economypodcast, out Tuesday.)

However, Cutler goes on to explain that:

Even under this philosophy, though, Ryan's American Health Care Act is fatally flawed: It does nothing to address the high and rising cost of chronic illness.

Along with a must-read tutorial on the cost structure of chronic illness, Cutler's key point, also relevant to the next piece I'll discuss, is that in this debate, you don't want to conflate spending with costs. It's easy to cut spending. It's hard to cut costs. With their emphasis on high deductibles and less comprehensive insurance, R's cut spending by shifting costs onto people who are now getting more government assistance. But they do nothing to reduce costs, leading to a very dangerous collision between those with low and moderate incomes and their health needs.

I thought NYT columnist Ross Douthat fell into this trap in an interesting piece about the advantages of Singapore's health care system, where they spend 5% (!#$&?@#) of GDP on health care (we spend 17%). My bold:

Republican politicians may offer pandering promises of lower deductibles and co-pays, but the coherent conservative position is that cheaper plans with higher deductibles are a very good thing, because they're much closer to what insurance ought to be — and the more they proliferate, the cheaper health care will ultimately be for everyone.

No, no, no! Read Cutler. The cheaper health coverage will be, not health care.

Of course, all of this begs the question: how can we reduce health care costs?

Cutler mentions a key factor emphasized by Dean Baker: the extent to which the patent system adds literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year to the cost of American pharmaceuticals (see Chapter 5 here).

Revealingly, in his praise for aspects of Singapore's single-payer system that keeps the private sector in the mix, Douthat fails to mention the main way they control costs: government cost controls (see Chapter 4 from this useful review by William Haseltine). The government sets prices in the dominant public sector, and the private sector must follow suit.

Haseltine:

One study comparing healthcare systems among the developed Asian nations described the Singapore government as "micro-managing provision," ensuring that public hospital charges are kept at acceptable levels, and in turn relieving pressure on Medisave accounts [mandatory health savings accounts]. It went on to say that the government "uses funding (and hospital ownership) in a calculated manner to control service costs and subsidize care, in turn limiting expenditure from insurance accounts and providing incentives for private providers to keep costs down."

Medicare helps shape the private market to a lesser extent here, and there's some compelling evidence that states that took the Medicaid expansion had lower premium costs charged by private insurers in the exchanges, along with reduced costs of uncompensated care.

It's never hard to reduce spending in government programs. Reagan did it in the 1980s by throwing poor people off of the welfare rolls, and his present day disciples do so in the ACHA by cutting Medicaid spending by 25% by 2026.

But spending isn't costs, which people either have to somehow pay or suffer the consequences of their illnesses. As this debate lumbers on, it is essential to recognize that many of the factors most associated with reduced health-care costs (vs. spending)–single payer, government cost controls, patent reform, incentives for quality care over quantity–involve a level of government intervention with which I'm totally comfortable but many others, like Douthat, are surely not.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Fwd: I Am An American Patriot



Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Stewart Acuff <acuff.stewart@gmail.com>
Date: March 18, 2017 at 7:56:50 PM EDT
To: Stewart <acuff.stewart@gmail.com>
Subject: I Am An American Patriot

I am an American

I am an American patriot

I have learned democracy

And I know my country is tainted by a blot

That blocks right now what we see

A blot that sears our collective soul, makes blood run hot

I love our people and to be

There for each other and not

Pretend not to see

I love our land, the still wild and the tamed a lot

But I love more too

I love the people like us

Wherever they live, we should find ways to do

More all together, we must

Find ways to join our voices, connect our strengths, make new

Our longing for what is just

What is right for us all and true

To a vision of our unity

You see I love all our people

And I love how we can be
-together
-at peace
-loving for loving's sake
-living love in what we do

We can love our America, our country

And not hate others

Because it's too late for we

To erect barriers
Sent from my iPhone