Revolution Now: Common Sense Asks Why Not? - a podcast by Laura Flanders

July 4th, Independence Day, is coming up and I’ve been thinking about Thomas Paine.

“These are times that try men's souls,” wrote the American revolutionary in 1776. But you’ve got to wonder. The rule of mad King George and the Royal East India Company was bad. But is the rule of the mad Big Banks and the Corporate Congress better?

Paine’s Common Sense is widely credited with giving the war of independence its rhetorical juice and vision: if Americans wanted to enjoy unity, equality and independence, he said, they’d have to throw off kings, and unaccountable colonial corporations.

In the England of his youth Paine witnessed what happened when the rich fenced off and privatized what had been common land. A few landed families grew ever richer, while the poor lost every decent means of self-support.

Aboard a merchant ship, Paine met sailors who had been “impressed” or forced into service. He worked with others who had been enslaved.

His first writings from Philadelphia were against colonialism and slavery. Britain has, he stated, done little but “rip up the bowels of whole countries for what she could get.”

Skip forward to today and our wars are ripping up their share of bowels. Have any doubt? Just look at Iraq.

Our congress of the very rich has so shrunk the options for the poor that 46 million Americans live with poverty and another 7 million of us are locked up. Americans may not be forced to serve in their military or their jails, but when there's no other route to schooling or a decent wage, it may not be impressment, but it’s close.

Of the gap between rich and poor in his day, Paine wrote: “The great mass of the poor in all countries are become an hereditary race and it is next to impossible for them to get out of that state of themselves…. This situation, he wrote, “is absolutely the opposite of what it should be and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it.”

The great mass of today’s poor are in a similar fix. Those that have wealth invest, while the rest can only work. Invested wealth compounds; wages do nothing much. Corporate cartels rig prices, favor monopolies and turn every aspect of our social lives into commodities for trade: from our homes to our thoughts and our “friends” and our “likes”.

Tottering on the brink of commotion and disturbance “the mind of the multitude is left at random.” Wrote Paine.

In our times, police and drones and detention camps keep a cap on commotion - and our most powerful media -- brought to us by the makers of those drones -- tell the mind of the multitude we live in a democracy.

We live in times that try our souls for sure. Are we in revolutionary times? The only question is why not. Happy Independence Day!

For more commentaries from me, and interviews with the Thomas Paines of today, go to GRITtv.org and sign up there, to join us. This week, LGBTQ activists Kate Clinton and Urvashi Vaid on what makes revolutions and revolutionaries irresistible.

I’m Laura Flanders.

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