What will the revolution look like?

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world . . .

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

—John Lennon, “Imagine”

My writing has been dedicated to overthrowing the oligarchs and plutocrats who have made a USA-Inc.-hell of the nation, replete with an empire based on the greed of ruling scum. These bastards are the lowest form of life and if they all died today the world would be a better place.

The ruling forces of greed have abandoned millions to survival status, without jobs, without health care, without hope. Those in the middle get crumbs off the table and grovel in a subservient state lest they fall through the cracks.

In my view, all billionaires are psychopaths. Amassing such fortunes, are they unaware of the millions starving to death, living without clean water and dying of preventable illnesses in their wake? They claim to be intelligent, so they must be aware.

Corporate media bury us in stories about the good works of billionaires to make us think they are somehow special people. Bill Gates, they tell us, has the Gates Foundation, so isn’t he a grand fellow? But Gates has spent his life amassing billions, and that is what this is all about. The Gates Foundation is a tax write off, so that Bill doesn’t have to pay taxes. Bill even sold out his own workers by bringing in Indian programmers to take their jobs and provide Gates with more profit. His billionaire pal Warren Buffett bought into the scam and now enjoys massive tax write offs as well.

If Gates were sincere about wanting to make a better world he would do the one thing that would bring immense change and form a public interest mass media network, waking up the citizens of the planet that they are being betrayed, so that democracy had a decent chance to break out. It is the corrupt mainstream media which maintains the status quo.

In my dreams I have seen the revolution begin, and it is magnificent. We developed an elaborate plan to overthrow the US government and the corporate empire for which it stands.

When the morning came for the onset of the revolution I could hardly feel the chill of the early spring day. We knew we had to start in early spring because we wanted a long spell before running up against the cold of winter, so difficult for revolutionaries to endure when such planning may easily get one past it. We would worry about the winter if we made it that far with our lives.

Volunteers came over the Internet, thousands of people who had participated in the Occupy Movement. Nobody knew who the leaders were, supposedly, but I did, as I’d known them for a long time. I kept it to myself, the plan to which I had proudly contributed. Individuals would meet at pre-arranged places in and around the city of Washington, according to their assigned brigades.

Some arrived at positions in the Maryland suburbs, others Virginia suburbs, and yet others in strategic places within the District itself, such as Malcolm X Park and Rock Creek Park. Each brigade had commanders in communication with Alpha. In case anything happened to Alpha, such as an arrest, there were several backup Alphas who would, one at a time, step in to coordinate actions.

At 6 a.m. the First Brigade moved into the Washington Mall and occupied it.

In the planning stages some people asked, “But they won’t let us occupy the Mall, they’ll kill us won’t they?” Of course everyone knew the police would allow the occupation for a time, but there was always an establishment limit to these things, when those in power wanted a crackdown to teach a lesson to rebels who would challenge the power structure.

During Occupy, police used pepper spray, beatings, tear gas, jailings and other brutality to end protests. The part of the Constitution which reads that the people have a right to peaceably assemble is really just a joke, as anyone who’s gone up against the system can tell you.

So we modeled our protest on the Tiananmen Square protest, with people carrying paper mache statues of liberty, and calling it “The Democracy Movement.” Once we got a bit of publicity and the public knew it as the Democracy Movement, it would become more difficult for the police to crack down. Would they shoot democracy protesters? We were going to find out.

Of course, we knew that people would likely be rounded up and herded away, but there were a thousand people in the First Brigade, which took a lot of police, a lot of paddy wagons, and before all of the protesters could be hauled away, based on what Alpha could see happening, he (or she?) phoned the Fifth Brigade commander to march in from the northwest. The mall was filled again with protesters of The Democracy Movement, as the police, mostly now at the other end of the mall, were occupied with protesters from the First Brigade, who they were hauling away.

Alpha had options to bring in a brigade from many different directions, whichever had the easiest route through police barricades, and it appeared the Fifth Brigade was in a good position.

Police were caught by surprise and for a time they backed off. Protesters put up tents and made camp. Surrounding the mall were dozens of Democracy Movement people with cameras to capture video of any police raid, taking shifts throughout the day and night, because police were known to make night raids. The videos would be online in minutes so that the world could see any police brutality, and we made sure the police were aware they were being filmed.

We’d established web sites where information could get out around the corporate media to inform citizens, who were starting to learn about the Democracy Movement. After two weeks of occupying the mall police attempted another crackdown, but by then we had an informer in the D.C. police force who told us it was going to happen, and we were ready.

As the last of the first occupation people were herded away, the Third Brigade marched in from the South, having shut down the 14th Street Bridge to motorized traffic, as it had become a pedestrian pathway. But as the Third Brigade approached the mall, an army of US Park Police set up a barricade and began to arrest people by the hundreds, having seen us use this tactic before.

Sports stadiums became temporary prisons, as those on the mall and those coming over the 14th Street Bridge were arrested and carried away.

Then the Second Brigade marched in from the north, down 6th Street, flooding the mall and completely occupying it. Originally the brigades were about a thousand strong each, but now they were nearer two thousand, so the occupation actually grew as the police were tied up arresting the first protesters. We were back in control of the mall.

By now millions of citizens had joined the Democracy Movement, including a few celebrities who could get attention for the cause. The government tried to shut down our web sites, but we had magnificent volunteer hackers creating mirror sites that kicked in as others were shut down. If you tried to get to one of our more popular web sites and it was shut down, you would automatically be routed to a mirror image site, as though nothing had happened. Government computer experts were joining us, secretly, and letting us know about plans of the various intelligence agencies. Before the start of the revolution we had planned that we would be infiltrated, so we knew we had spies among us.

We’d come to understand that the revolution was seen by average citizens as necessary, and our numbers were increasing daily. Many wanted us to attempt to rewrite the Constitution so that the government actually became a republic, that is, a government that represented the people, unlike the plutocratic oligarchy which existed. But that would be impossible with corporate puppets occupying the government’s elected seats.

Then came the announcement from Alpha that we were ready for stage two. In stage two a political party called the Progressive People’s Party, commonly referred to as the Triple P, was created as a wing of the Democracy Movement. It was a presidential election year, and followers were charged with getting the Triple P on the ballot in their states, counties and cities, for all offices.

The Triple P would represent all of the people, not just the wealthy and corporations, as do the Democrats and Republicans. We combined most of the third parties into the Triple P, Greens, Socialists, whomever.

We would get rid of the Empire, shut down all the wars, bring all the troops home, close the thousand overseas military bases, and use the savings to create health care, jobs programs and other needs of the people.

Since these things are very popular with the masses, even with a hostile corporate media, we won enough seats to claim nearly all of the state legislatures, Congress (but only a third of the Senate) and the presidency. Our web sites were drawing millions of people daily.

A new Constitution was written, and the government completely changed as we won a majority of the Senate after two more years.

Donating to political campaigns was outlawed under bribery statutes, so that elections could no longer be purchased by the billionaires of the planet.

The minimum wage was initially set at $25 an hour, with everyone who wanted one, guaranteed a job by the government. Crime plunged to an all time low.

Large corporations were broken up into small ones, with corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy increasing tenfold. Corporations were no longer people, and the people who ran them were subject to the laws of the land, no more simple fines for the corporation, but prison time for the CEO if they poisoned our environment or knowingly caused illness or death.

The nation withdrew from all of the “free trade” agreements which hurt workers and the environment so much as they enriched the wealthy. People in various countries began to make much of their own goods close to home, which was beneficial to the environment, easing global warming.

Everyone was guaranteed good, comprehensive health care, including dental and psychiatric care. Mentally ill people were taken out of the streets, where they lived eating out of garbage cans, and were provided with homes where they could be cared for and get medical help.

Although the world’s largest prison system was shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former self, many of the oligarchs and plutocrats were tried in our new courts, and found guilty of serious crimes for which they had previously gone unpunished.

Such as, knowing that workplaces were unsafe, they had allowed workers to die rather than spend minimal amounts on safety. Knowing that pills were dangerous, allowing thousands to die from taking deadly pharmaceuticals in order to continue high profits. Knowing that products were unsafe, allowing people to die, and so many other horrors of capitalism that went unnamed when corporate media ruled the airways together with government controlled by corrupt politicians financed by the scum of the earth.

I wish I could say at this point that everyone lived happily ever after, but there were billionaires plotting for a return to the old Empire, willing as always, to kill us all for a dime in profit. It is on that sobering thought that I wake from the dream, but I know it can be done if the people have the will to be free.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of An Attack on the National Security State, about peace activists in prison.