9/11 Truth Symposium
Bob Bowman PhD., Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.) June 2006
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"Most Americans don't understand what's been done to them. We have a great country. The United States is number one in the industrialized world.
Number One in our use of the world's resources.
Number One in the production of pollution.
Number One in the gap between the rich and the poor.
Number One in deaths by gun fire.
Number One in teen pregnancy.
Number One in poverty among the elderly.
Number One in citizens without health coverage.
Number One in child poverty.
Number One in homeless veterans.
Number One by far in citizens behind bars.
We've got a larger percentage of our black population in jail than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. We're the world's #1 debtor nation, #1 in the creation of new billionaires, #1 in school drop outs, #1 in poverty, homelessness, hunger, divorce, suicide, and oh yes, number one in military force, nuclear weapons and military spending as much as all the other nations on earth combined. This also makes us the #1 object of fear and hatred in the world and therefore along with our friends in Israel, the #1 target of terrorists.
We are not the target of terrorists because they envy us, or they don't like our democracy, or our freedoms or our human rights. [ ] They hate us because we deny freedom, democracy and human rights to people in the third world.
We also lead the world in the number of hours worked per family. Because real hourly wages in this country are now a third, in real terms, a third of what they were in the 1950's. Now a lot of people may be shocked by that, they say, "But our economy is great. And we've got low unemployment, and they're creating all these new jobs. Of course one of my sons has three of them."
You can't support a family with one job anymore like we did in the 50's. It takes two wage earners and three jobs. Is that because we're so much less productive than we were then? Baloney! Productivity has doubled over and over and over again. Our workers are the most productive in the world. Yet they take home the smallest percentage of the wealth they create.
If worker pay in this country had kept up with executive pay, the average worker would now be making over a million dollars a year and the minimum wage would be $171.00 an hour.
If we in this country still got the same share of the wealth we create with our work, as we did in the 1950's, no more - just the same share, every worker in this country including the garbage collectors, the people who mow lawns, the people who flip hamburgers, the people who watch our kids, every worker in this country could support their family with one job, working two days a week!
That's what productivity has done. But we don't have it. Because all that wealth we create doesn't get to us. They call it trickle down economics. They pump all the wealth to the top and it's supposed to trickle down, but it never does. It never does."
"What went wrong? Why are our workers paid such a tiny percentage of their true worth? Why are we the only nation without a national health program? Why are our high school graduates two years behind their counterparts in other countries? Why are we hated by so many around the world? Why
do we have hundreds of thousands of troops patroling foreign lands and supporting foreign dictators?
What's going on?
The answer is, we have lost our republic.
Legislators no longer represent the people who elect them, but the corporations who finance them. They answer not to their constituents but to the K Street lobbyists who line their pockets and fill their campaign coffers. In return these government officials have undone decades of hard fought victories against the robber barrons of the 19th century. "
