This will be my first post on a political topic, because of its importance. Like many other citizens – Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents – I believe that the political system is rigged, and is no longer “of, by and for the people.” Two weeks ago my wife Maria and I attended the second annual Unrig Summit, in Nashville. Last year we attended the first Unrig Summit, in New Orleans. The movement seems to be gaining momentum, and there have been legislative victories in several states since the first summit. The movement’s primary goals are to get Big Money and the corruption it enables out of politics, and to hold elections that are free and fair. (One presenter said that the country suffers from “electile dysfunction.”) Regardless of political affiliation, the attendees were united in their conviction that allegiance to country supersedes allegiance to political party. All of us who believe in democracy need to unite, to unrig the System.
In successive rulings, the Supreme Court has decided that (1) corporations should have the basic rights granted to actual persons under the Constitution, that (2) money, in the form of political contributions, is a kind of free speech, and that (3) there should be no limit to the amount of “free speech” rich donors could contribute to political campaigns. The latter ruling is known as Citizens United, and can only be overturned by a constitutional amendment.
To me, the reasons for Citizens United are absurd, because it makes “free speech” quantifiable – a concept that had never occurred to me before. By law, rich people now have more free speech than the rest of us. This isn’t what our Founding Fathers intended in establishing the right of free speech. There are several national organizations dedicated to overturning Citizens United, including Stamp Stampede. I stamp all of my paper money with the message “Corporations aren’t people. Amend the Constitution.” Each bill I stamp will likely pass through dozens of hands, promoting the message that corporate personhood is a legal fiction that should be abolished. Corporations can’t serve time in jails and prisons, let alone be executed, if they break the law. Why should they have all of the constitutional rights that citizens enjoy? Why do giant corporations need to be protected from the rest of us? It makes no sense.
Another continuing threat to our democracy is gerrymandering – as well as other voter manipulation/suppression schemes. Both Democrats and Republicans have used gerrymandering to allow politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It’s necessary to re-apportion voting districts every ten years, after the census, as populations change in many districts. The question is, who decides how districts are re-apportioned? Does the dominant party in each state get to re-draw the lines, in ways that benefit their candidates? Or do the people in each state get to decide, via bi-partisan citizen re-districting commissions?
True democracy depends on free and fair elections, and anyone who seeks to skew elections to benefit their party either doesn’t understand or doesn’t trust the democratic process. My fears that we’re already an oligarchy (ruled by an elite, as in Russia), rather than a true democracy, were stoked by the passage of Citizens United. We haven’t been a true democracy for very long. Women weren’t enfranchised nationally until 1920, and Jim Crow laws disenfranchised millions of African Americans until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plutocracy is a form of oligarchy, and I believe that we’re already being ruled by the rich, and not by the electorate. The rich have an army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington that far outnumbers our elected representatives.
Re-claiming (or establishing) true democracy in America isn’t a partisan issue. A solid core of citizens on both the Left and Right advocate unrigging a rigged System. So, how do we go about undoing decades of political corruption, financed by the rich? First, we have to overturn Citizens United, and to establish that corporations don’t have all the rights of actual people. Then we need to close the revolving door between serving as a legislator, and then becoming a high-paid lobbyist for special interest groups. These days, too many people enter politics with the goal of enriching themselves. Private gain is antithetical to public service, and our national legislators need to stop depending on special interests and powerful individual donors to finance their re-elections, if our democracy is to survive.
All it takes for oligarchies to thrive is ignorance and/or indifference on the part of the electorate. Since the rich control the popular media, the average citizen is influenced by “invisible” propaganda/PR campaigns that exist to promulgate ignorance on a mass scale. Orchestrated ignorance leads to public indifference, or to antipathy toward the targets of the propaganda campaigns. Back in 1920, Walter Lippman coined the term “manufactured consent” to describe how the electorate can be manipulated into political impotence.
We the people can establish/re-claim true democracy if we have the information and the will. We’re facing a daunting opposition from the plutocrats who are currently calling the shots, but I believe that it’s not too late to unrig the System. Check out the Unrig Summit website if you want to find out more about the movement. (Jennifer Lawrence moderates one of the panels.) You can watch all of the plenary sessions in their entirety, get inspired, and get an idea of what you can do to help restore democracy in the United States. I especially recommend the Saturday morning plenary session, which starts with a stirring oration, and introduces some of the movers and shakers in the movement, who are getting things done in their home states.
jeffkooblog 