Obama Breaks Promise To Veto Bill Allowing Indefinite Detention of Americans

[Xicano]

108. Let us not deceive ourselves.....

Here's an altered version of Patrick Henry's speech.

Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this legislative array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has the government any enemy in this quarter of the world after a decade of crushing country after country who the government believed in all their profiteering wisdom constituted some phantom threat to now all of the sudden call for all this accumulation of laws, militarized police and now armies?

No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us after these latest public assemblies to petition the government with a list of grievances: they can be meant for no other. In this eve before ever greater wealth disparity between the 1% vs the 99% they are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the 1% have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last fifty years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm of feudalism which is now coming on at an ever increasing rate. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne called Washington/Wall Street, and have implored any of its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of those who have corrupted it and used it to commit acts of fraud, theft and tyranny too numerous to list. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and the reconciliation of real change we can believe in. There is no longer any room for hope.

If we wish to be free -- if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending -- if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious and just object of our contest shall be obtained -- we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to all the 99% to simply sit down in solidarity and withhold all of our labor from today's feudal lords, the 1%, and withdraw all our wealth from their institutions and invest it in new ones created by and for the 99% is all that is left us!