WINNING THE CLASS WAR FOR THE 99%

There have been a slew of constitutional amendments introduced in Congress recently, each claiming to “reverse Citizens United.” This is the result of pressure from activists passing resolutions around the country calling for an amendment that would actually do this, which none of the amendments introduced to date would do.

Each of these amendments is limited to giving states and the federal government the right but not the obligation to control the flow of corporate money in elections. It is preposterous to expect that a Congress dominated by corporate money would even consider using such a power if by some miracle the thing were passed. Do not be fooled by these generally well-meaning efforts by members of Congress trapped in the mentality that they must work on only what is possible now. The fact that they are working with colleagues who have accepted the self-fulfilling prophecy that they have no choice but to sell their loyalty to the highest corporate bidder is no excuse. While some willingly sell their loyalty, others feel this is the only way that they can make a difference in Congress because they have to be re-elected to do the public any good.  

The 99% cannot give up on the electoral process if they want to effect real change. They need to recognize that we do have real representation in Congress, but they will only take risks when they know we are backing them. Some members of Congress have been elected and re-elected without being tainted by corporate money. Senator Bernie Sanders comes immediately to mind as an example. We have to ask the question why is he afraid to do what must be done: introduce a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate personhood outright? He knows as well as anyone that only by ending the power of corporations to buy members of Congress can we hope to elect those who will put the interests of We the People over those of They the Corporations. The answer may seem clear but it is not as simple as many people think.

Although Bernie doesn’t rely on corporate money to run, he has to realize that planting a dagger in the heart of the corporatocracy would invite retaliation, making himself the target of right-wing campaign PACs like Karl Roves’ Crossroads. In addition, he would be setting the corporate Democratic leadership up by making support for the amendment a campaign issue. We all saw what happened to Dennis Kucinich and Anthony Weiner when they dared challenge Democratic leadership to put the interests of American citizens over those of their corporate Puppetmasters: Kucinich was marginalized even by real liberals in Congress like Peter DeFazio of Oregon, while Weiner was left twisting in the wind when he got caught in a scandal that had nothing to do with the performance of his duties as a Representative.

As long as Democrats and independents in Congress are cowed into following the Democratic leadership in lockstep toward the Right, voters will continue to abandon the party in disgust. Many are concluding that a party willing to be led by the nose by the same corporate entities that have wholly bought the Republican Party is not worth their support. The perception is that the difference between the two is not important enough to fight for. The Democratic Party has not so much been abandoned by their supporters so much as they have been abandoned by it.  

Democrats supporting the amendments presently in Congress fall into two categories. There are those like Max Baucus who have long ago sold themselves out to corporate interests, and those who believe that incremental change is their only choice. Baucus took in over $6 million dollars in the election cycle preceding the Democratic effort to bail out a failing medical insurance industry that was cynically labeled “reform.” The resulting gift to the corporations that comprise the medical-industrial complex was obvious. What was less obvious to many is that this was the intent of Democratic leadership when they decided to take on the issue. There are lessons here we must heed if we are going to get a constitutional amendment introduced and passed that will accomplish what the members of Congress proposing the current bills claim.



Prior to the public debate about the public option and its far worse alternatives, Rahm Emanuel put Democratic leaders on notice that single payer was off the table. Inside sources say that Howard Dean was told that he would not be a player in the debate if he could not get Democracy for America to support the public option bait-and-switch. DFA responded by claiming that their million-plus members supported the public option strategy when a simple poll would have proven otherwise. In getting other progressive leaders and members of Congress to fall in line, they managed to sell to the Democratic rank and file the self-fulfilling prophecy that single payer was “not politically possible.” 



This Machiavellian plan to satisfy corporate interests in the name of “reform” was reminiscent of the Bush Administration’s marketing of the Medicare Modernization Act that appears to have been designed to kill Medicare by establishing an unfunded prescription benefit plan whose costs were deliberately and grossly misrepresented. Among other gifts to the medical-industrial complex, pharmaceutical manufacturers were given the power to set their own prices by a ban on the government negotiating drug prices. In what came as a shock to those who are unfamiliar with how some Democrats receive underserved credit for being “liberal,” Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden crossed party lines to cast the deciding vote for this bill that is putting the viability of the Medicare program at risk.



Not surprisingly if you follow the money, Wyden introduced the only serious competitor to the public option plan, the Healthy Americans Act. It was so bad that it received bipartisan support. While quickly shelved, key elements of this mandate plan were quietly put into the Orwellian-titled “Affordable” Care Act, including massive cost shifting to the consumer that was not taken into account in the CBO analysis. As a result, health care costs continue to rise even while the Democrats proclaim victory in producing health care ”reform.” 



The bait-and-switch going on in Congress now is even more insidious and dangerous. If we do not call on these members of Congress to abandon their effort to placate the public while doing essentially nothing about the problem, the movement to abolish corporate personhood will be split and a historic opportunity lost just when the economy, the environment and the families of those serving in wars for corporate personhood cannot stand the delay. 



This is a call to action for those who understand the difference between abolishing corporate personhood and enshrining it in the constitution through an amendment that would validate the doctrine by recognizing that Congress should have the power to regulate it. If corporate personhood is abolished then there is no need to regulate corporate money going to campaigns because it will be illegal.



Those of us engaged most deeply in this modern abolition know just what is at stake. In our educational efforts we need to let the public know the danger of supporting this pig with lipstick. We can pass an amendment abolishing corporate personhood outright and win the war being waged against the 99% if we focus our efforts on making support for a proper amendment a campaign issue in 2012 and beyond.

HOW’S FASCISM TREATING YOU?

As I write this, I am en route to Madison for the Democracy Convention, of which Alliance for Democracy is a part. As a member of the national council of this partner in the Move to Amend coalition, my hope is to convince as  many  organizers and attendees as possible that we are at the point where we can quit playing defense and launch an all-out coordinated assault on the corporatocracy. By working together each in our own way as individuals and members of such groups we can get a constitutional amendment introduced in Congress in time to affect the outcome of the 2012 elections.

I have been working to convince people since 2009 that the economic catastrophe brought on by the greed of an unregulated banking/finance industry was only the first of many consequences of turning control of the government to corporations that would give us the hook to help Americans get over their learned helplessness and get involved in the revolution that must take place in order to ever realize the dream of democracy in the United States.
 

The international corporate terrorists that control the US government have no loyalty to the United States, its people or the Peoples of any other nation. Like a series of timed dynamite explosions, we have seen the predictable consequences of unregulated capitalism unfold, one outrage after another. Only the corporate media and the corporate Puppets in Congress and the White House are preventing open revolt by creating the illusion that these crises are all unrelated.

First the Massey disaster revealed the ineffectiveness of token regulation of energy interests, then the BP spill revealed the power of an international corporation over our government and military. Next, the Fukishima disaster failed to slow plans to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up an economically and environmentally indefensible private industry. Together, these events proved to anyone who didn’t know it that big Energy and the banksters control the levers of power in government.

 

Amid all this, the medical-industrial complex flexed its muscle by controlling the process of the “health care reform” debate that was a thinly veiled bailout of a medical insurance industry. On the verge of collapse as its inefficiencies and lack of cost controls were making it increasingly inaccessible to millions of Americans, private insurance would have become unaffordable to the vast majority of Americans in just a few years without the massive infusion of taxpayer money provided by the “Affordable” Care Act. 

Adding to the 45 million without access to medical insurance before the debate began were the swelling numbers of unemployed and underemployed victims of the housing crisis.  The myth of the free market promoted by the corporate media and corporate politicians was enough to head off any efforts to find the only real solution, a single payer Medicare-for-All universal health plan. Instead of advocates being invited to the table, they were arrested for speaking at the Finance Committee hearings without being recognized by chairman Max Baucus.

The promised savings of PPACA will be proven an illusion as surely as Part D was found to cost several times what the Congressional Budget Office forecast on the basis of the unrealistic assumptions they were forced to work with. It defies common sense to conclude that adding millions of less healthy citizens who have not had access to health care to the pool of those covered by taxpayer-funded health programs is going to save money when the act eliminates the use of pre-existing conditions and other methods of denying insurance to those who need it. This has to drive up costs to private insurers, which will lead to further numbers of uninsured who will then qualify for taxpayer-funded assistance. Even if it were true that the taxpayer will save a bit initially, the difference will be more than made up for by the already skyrocketing premiums we have seen for those who do pay for their own, increasingly shoddy insurance.

The banksters of Goldmann Sachs who financed Obama’s campaign were rewarded with control of the Fed, Treasury and several regulatory agencies. The Democratic banking “reform” bill was as much of a sick joke as the medical insurance “reform” corporate-dependent Democratic leaders were able to eke out. The Wall Street casino that crashed the world economy was financed by the savings of investors used by banks gone wild after the removal of the barrier between investment and commercial banks erected to prevent just such an economic collapse. This eerily paralleled the stock market crash in 1929 that led to the previous Depression.

In the 1930s, people had been brought up to take care of themselves and their families. In the Roaring 20s work was plentiful and successive Republican Presidents promised that everyone could get rich if they trusted the invisible hand of Big Business to assure that the economy would be self-correcting without any messy government interference. We saw how that worked out, but a combination of the decline of the American educational system, the rise of a media that is completely devoted to advancing the corporate agenda and a jaded citizenry that has lost interest in politics produced the conditions that have until now prevented the rise of a grassroots revolution that would unite the Left and Right in the cause of ending fascism in America.

Complicating all this of course is the intensification of the use of the politics of division to keep Americans fighting each other instead of fighting together against the real threat: corporate personhood. Since 1968 the Republican Party has honed the technique to a fine art. They have systematically used the corporate media as a means of misinforming voters and keeping them angry and fearful at the prospect of creeping socialism in a society that has been sliding into fascism the entire time. In 1968, Nixon’s southern strategy used racism to split the Democratic majority of Americans in response to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

1968 was also the year of the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, when peaceful protestors were assaulted by Mayor Richard Daley’s goon squad while many union leaders looked on in approval. Traditionally conservative police, fire and construction unions abandoned McCarthy, who had been a loyal union supporter, in favor of the candidate of the Party representing corporate power. With union leaders like this, who needs union? 

Union membership has been declining ever since for a variety of reasons aside from their systematic demonization and scapegoating by the corporate media and corporate politicians. The most important reason for loss of union membership is the manner in which national union leaders have remained cozily in bed with corporate Democrats even as these cynical corporate Puppets were increasingly abandoning the worker in pursuit of corporate campaign cash.
 

In Wisconsin, even at the state level many unions have failed the workers in this time of crisis. While very good at organizing large rallies, union leaders resisted using the strike, the very instrument by which unions came to power. It is true a strike should only be called in response to an outrage, but what could be more outrageous than an assault on the right to collective bargaining? With virtual unanimity of purpose of all Wisconsin unions in fighting this attack on democracy and the rights of workers, the time has never been better for a general strike. Had this happened months ago, Democrats would likely have now been in control of the Wisconsin Senate. 

The absence of national Democratic leaders in Wisconsin during the united stand of Wisconsinites against the fascist takeover of their state government was instructive. It once more illustrates graphically the price of remaining loyal to a party whose leadership depends on the patronage of the same international corporate terrorists who are waging war on America’s middle class.

Republican leadership is waging total war against the social safety net constructed in response to the horrifying suffering of the first Great Depression and the only thing preventing an equal amount of suffering today after they and corporate Democrats sold out the country by turning it over to fascist corporate interests for a few pieces of silver. The only solution is to do what we did in 1775 and again in the years 1890 to the 30s as union power slowly built up: We must put aside our differences and fight in common cause to move the country in the direction of democracy. The alternative is to allow our children to be trapped in the nightmare of a permanent fascist New World Order in which Americans will be as repressed as citizens of the nations now under military siege by the Armies fighting for corporate Empire.