People should rise against plutocracy in US: Analyst

Analysts have warned that the US is experiencing a state of degeneration, citing economic and cultural issues, with unsatisfactory performance on the part of the US administrations over several decades.

The Great Satan US has the largest prison population and the highest rate of crimes in the world.

School shootings are far more frequent in the US than in other countries and access to guns is a significant factor in the shooting incidents.

This comes as some 12 people were killed and 59 others injured early Friday in a shooting rampage during the screening of a movie in the city of Aurora near Denver, Colorado.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Dr. Randy Short, with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, from Washington, to further discuss the issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Dr. Randy Short, Sherwood Ross’ question, there’s got to be an end to it, perhaps should be, given the fact that he said this is a cultural thing, should be perhaps addressed to the Hollywood studios. After all, aren’t they depicting violence to, in a sense, glorify it as our guest Sherwood Ross there said? So, are they at fault, glorying violence and making what occurred which movie goers thought was part of the movie when this tragic incident happened?

Short: Well, if you’re going to say something about Hollywood, remember that laws and policies can govern what they turn out if in fact the desire existed for movie theaters to not make so much violence. Everyone knows that violent images through television and through movies influence behavior.

I want to differ with the first speaker who said that the founding fathers will be shaking their heads. This is a country established on racial violence and terrorism of people who look like me. I’m also part native American.

Those guns were there to kill Indians, to take their land, and to force black people and later Latinos to work without being paid. That Second Amendment was in there specifically because 25 percent of the American population was black and enslaved.

There’s a relationship to a group of people from Europe, white folks, taking something that wasn’t theirs, and the guns back up them grabbing what used to belong to “Redskin” people, and taking labor from black and brown skin and mixed-race persons like myself.

It’s very much American for the gun to be the law. You can’t make people pick your cotton and your tobacco and work your fields and work your mines and do everything, and not pay them unless you’re going to use coercive violence.

What’s really happening in the society is what has always been applicable to people that look like me, now this is beginning to hit other people, and I’m not happy about it; but in reality, you have another thing going on.

When you have racial hatred as a norm in this society, gender hatred, you have a lot of these things that fit within this sociopathic white male, Anglo-Saxon way of life in this country — that also you have a violence among black men — that comes from the brutality of how this society’s structured.

I don’t have a short answer for when it would change because this is who we are, not the professed lofty America, not the Norman Rockwell America but just what happened in Aurora, Colorado, or the other white supremacist that shot the Congresswoman in Arizona.

I want to remind everyone that two days from now will be the one year anniversary of that white supremacist in Norway killing 69 people and injuring 110 others. There is a whole culture if you start looking at who’s doing the killing and why.

That includes Columbine which has been covered up that one of the people killed in that high school was a black boy; and before they shot him, the comment was ‘what do monkey brains look like?’ before they blew his brains out.

Racism and hatred and classism are driving a high level of stress and anxiety in the society. We need to have jobs. We need the society to change.

Press TV: In order to make up some revenue, there is a debate now that they’re going to introduce… gambling to be legalized in states across the United States of which liquor sales and the times that it’s sold is going to be extended as well as bar hours.

Tell me the consequences of something like this is going to happen in the neighborhoods where gambling potentially is going to occur and, of course, if there’s going to bring any notion of violence within that surrounding?

Short: Alcohol is the leading cause of murder at least for African-Americans in the United States. Where you have gambling, you have prostitution and drugs and, of course, that means you’re going to have AIDS which about 50 percent of that is going to be in my community. We don’t need gambling.

We need to tax the rich people in this country about 80, 90 percent like they did in the 50s. We need to take some of that cash back and invest in people. That’s what we need.

We need to shut down the Pentagon and we need to have an agency for world peace, be another division of the government. We don’t need that.

There’s plenty of money in this country; it’s in too few people’s hands and it needs to be spread around.

All I will say is you’ve left out the city of Chicago which has a 30- or 40-percent increase in murders this year, and it’s being ignored because of that idiot, President Obama’s friend, Rahm Emanuel, the son of the terrorist that was murdering people over in Israel. He’s the mayor.

So, through politics, you have a black president who’s a Kenyan-American not an African-American like me, and this son of a terrorist who’s mayor of Chicago ignoring the poor people there as frightful numbers of people die.

What needs to happen in this country is the people need to rise up against the plutocracy here. They need to demand that there be a progressive tax on the rich, and we’re talking about 90 percent.

They’ve had 40 years of really not paying anything and look at what’s happened to the country. The less they tax these people, the more they give away, the more the country goes down.