Only Pawns in the Game
Only Pawns in the Game by Stephen Fleischman
You can demonize Bush and Cheney (rightfully) until hell freezes over--but it's not going to change anything. Keith Olbermann does it almost every night on his MSNBC television show, but it doesn't change anything. Trashing Bush and Cheney or Hillary or Obama might make a lot of people feel good, but it doesn't change anything. They're only pawns in the game.
The real power resides in the corporate oligarchy that runs this country. It has a strangle hold on America. The only point of an election in our two party-one party system is to determine which one carries out the agenda. If we do something about that, we might be able to change something.
David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World", points out that "the basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands..." Today's American corporations evolved from that.
The Great Depression of the 1930s must have taught us something. When people lose everything they tend to wake up. They look around and see what's been done to them and what they've done to themselves by not paying attention. From their Hoovervilles, the people, hit by the depression, saw Hoover and his rotten administration for what it was, and threw the bums out. They elected new, progressive leaders (FDR Democrats), who saved capitalism with safety nets and a "New Deal".
Can we do something like that again; hopefully before the coming economic collapse? We'd better start trying now, and maybe ease the pain. Here are some things that need to be done.
Here are some suggestions of what we can do to get our country back. Do we agree with this assessment and how do our candidates measure up?
Reverse Reaganomics. Reinstitute regulation of industry. Make the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, do their jobs, so that we don't have US corporations off-shoring their manufacturing to another country, like China, for example, and then importing their product, like toys, for example, painted with lead, for our children to play with.
Soak the Rich a phrase coined by FDR when he spoke about the "Economic Royalists" who brought this country to its knees. Instead of cutting taxes for the rich, as Bush has been doing, raise taxes for the rich and their corporate enterprises, as they did during the great depression when FDR laid a tax rate on them of over 90% in the upper brackets.
Marshal Plan on Energy -- Go cold turkey on our addiction to oil. Massive investment in the new technologies of alternative energy sources, wind, solar, geothermal. Halt the return to nuclear, and head off the development of biofuels that will put our food into your gas tanks. We can create new high-tech industries and high-paying jobs with a new energy world.
Single Payer Universal Health Care - end the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance companies, once and for all. And make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Any candidate for office will get elected on that platform.
Stop the Hemorrhaging in Afghanistan and Iraq - Four thousand dead American soldiers is four thousand too many. Two trillion dollars to destroy two countries is two trillion dollara that could have been used to rebuild the infrastructure of our country and have enough left to enhance the lives of our young and our old.
David Korten says, "Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital--by money and those who have it--in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit."
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Health care is my big issue
I've given up on even the glimmer of hope that any of them really possess any deep democratic principles but at least one of them could throw us a bone and get the insurance companies, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies off our backs.
Common sense would dictate that a healthy worker is one who earns money and pays taxes longer. If our 'representatives' were looking beyond the terms they hope to fill they'd realize that.
My daughter and my son are both uninsured. If either of them have a catastrophic illness they will have to just file bankruptcy. They can't pay it. Can't convince me that's good for any of the parties involved. I don't care how stupid they are, they've got to know that.
This is microscopic but...
...I get a product online for $28.
At local pharmacies it costs $62 (NOT generic but the EXACT same thing).
They charge what they can get away with.
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I'm not sure why some folks think that is critical to our economic wellbeing. One need ONLY look at each profession and see at what point folks would continue in their labor for the LOWEST possible price. (Otherwise it actually damages our economy by withdrawaling capital from those who would be most productive with it).
Conservative men do this ALL THE FRIGGIN TIME for the bottom 90% but NEVER do it for the top 10%. They do not want to look like they are badmouthing the upper crust so they take a title ---"Rugged Individualist"--- over a raise.
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The counter argument would be that folks can just order online. Along with this comes the insults designed to keep incomes for the vast majority LOOOOOOOOW: too lazy to order online, don't be a bum just do some research, etc.
The problem is that the above is only one of a million examples and folks ARE too busy doing other frivioulus things like:
-Working.
-Raising kids for 18 years who will be sacrificed for our Nation.
-Actively maintaining the health of their family. Which is needed to provid additional laborers.
-etc.
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I'm not sure when folks are just going to wise up and demand a raise.
I do know that something like the above needs to be spelled out all over America if this argument is to advance. It will not come from simply offering an item on a list. The knee jerk reaction to that is simply: "dats Socialism".
NO...that's Americanism: BALANCE.
Health Care as Proposed
Strong determined leadership
Strong determined leadership in congress and in the WH can bring these changes to fruit, if we pick the right candidates for that leadership and support them.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross." ~ Sinclair Lewis
"I'm just pissed off that not enough other people are pissed off."~Bill Maher
Corporatism vs Capitalism
In 1886 the Supreme Court turned this country into a corporate controlled nation by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. This ruling gave the corporations the right to use their wealth to influence the government in their own interests and dominate the public thought and discourse.
The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can “donate” millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Having the same rights as private citizens allows Corporations to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of “free speech.”
As long as corporations are considered persons under our constitution they basically have all the advantage and Corporations rule.
Where it all began, and what
Where it all began, and what we can do about it…
”The need to be freed from legislative and judicial constraints, combined with the use of the word "person" in the U.S. Constitution and the concept of the "artificial person," led to the argument that these "artificial persons" were "persons" with an inconsequential "artificial" adjective appended. If it could be made so, if the courts would accept that corporations were among the "persons" talked about by the U.S. Constitution, then the corporations would gain considerably more leverage against legal restraint.
These arguments were made by corporate lawyers at the State level, in court after court, and many judges, being former corporate attorneys and usually at least moderately wealthy themselves, were sympathetic to any argument that would strengthen corporations. There was a national campaign to get the legal establishment to accept that corporations were persons. This cumulated in the Santa Clara decision of 1886, which has been used as the precedent for all rulings about corporate personhood since then.
Though it is not yet clear who hatched this plan or where the campaign began, the early cases mainly concerned railroads. In the late 1800's railroads were the most powerful corporations in the country. Most of the nation's farmers were dependent on them to haul their produce; even the manufacturing corporations were at their mercy when they needed coal, iron ore, finished iron, or any other materials transported. That the lawyers for the railway corporations had planned a national campaign to make corporations full, unqualified legal persons is demonstrated by the Supreme Court making several decisions in which this was an issue in 1877. In four cases that reached the Supreme Court [94 U.S. 155, 94 U.S. 164, 94 U.S. 179, 94 U.S. 180 (1877)] it was argued by the railroads that they were protected by the 14th Amendment from states regulating the maximum rates they could charge. In each case the Court did not render an opinion as to whether corporations were persons covered by the 14th Amendment. Bypassing that issue, they said that the 14th Amendment was not meant to prevent states from regulating commerce.” [Emphasis added]
See this website for more information than you bargained for:
http://firstuucolumbus.org/corppers/cponlart.htm
The Twenty-Eighth Amendment
(Draft)
"No legal entity shall be considered a natural person."