I have consistently written to and called Senator Warner. He is a venture capitalist, and he approves of corporate control of Washington. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can control Washington. Our entire senate has placed the interests of corporations that sell health insurance above the American people against poll numbers and in response to ignorant and frightened fringe groups manipulated and funded by corporations.
In Virginia, our wise citizenry, fearful of themselves and afraid they would lose “business,” mobilized people in churches and other Republican strongholds — God, guns, and TEA Party — to re-file as Independents and vote in the Democratic primary. I know this from phone-banking after the primary for local candidates using the list of people who voted in the primary and listening to people tell me they were Republicans. I know it also from being at the polls for the primary handing out sample ballots to people I know are strong Republicans.
Our primary resulted in an overwhelming vote for Creigh Deeds, who agrees with the Republicans more than with the Democrats, and who actually lost a race to Bob McDonnell in the previous election. Creigh is a fine man, but a weak candidate. We might have won the day if Republicans had not stolen the primary and we had been able to run Terry McAulliffe.
We elected Bob McDonnell with a lot of Democrats staying home. The youth vote would have come out for Terry as it did not for Creigh.
One of the first things that Bob McDonnell did was send a letter to President Obama asking him to reconsider changing over the management of student loans to government. Direct government management is the best thing that could happen to people who owe student loans. But banks do not want to give up lending government money — our tax money — and collecting the interest for themselves. Who co-signed his letter? Our two Virginia Democratic senators, Warner and Webb.
When banks control legislators, interest is taxation without representation. Can we say this?
The second largest shareholder in Fox News is a Saudi prince. Can’t we point this out? Frequently and loudly?
MoveOn needs a new strategy. I can send you every dime of my Social Security and every other person can do likewise, and we can’t match the money flowing from our own corporations, much less from China and Saudi Arabia. And they give a lot of it directly to the legislators, while we try to pretend that the process still works and pay for a van to take a few activists who are out of work to Washington to talk to Rick Boucher who won’t listen and does not care. Legislators are exempt from insider trading prohibitions, so corporations can give “wink wink” tips to our legislators in exchange for votes, and we won’t even know that a corporation gave them anything. How else does the stock market go up when everyone we know is going down? And the corporations will hire Rick Boucher, Mark Warner, and possibly even Jim Webb when they leave Washington.
Forget convincing our legislators. Those who see it see it, and those who don’t have looked away and will not turn again. They have shown that they are not on our side. They have bought the “free market” lie and actually believe money will trickle down. They haven’t read anything Adam Smith said about free markets, they have just signed on to the current ideology that claims to come from Adam Smith. It doesn’t. I invite them to read Adam Smith. We live in a world very different from his, and you can’t “light out for the territories” any more, or get on a boat for the new world. You can’t get ahead by your own hard work any more. Corporate control of wealth is the modern equivalent of primogeniture, and people will all be poor if we accept it.
Our legislators who have bought the lie will not turn back to us. They cannot. They are owned, and we will not be able to buy them back.
If we win in 2010 or in 2012 we will have to win over the ignorance vote — the God, Guns, and TEA Party crowd. We have to show people that they are being sold down the river to corporate interests, that corporate control of government is bad, and that corporations — including banks — tax them more today than the federal government ever has.
We have to go to the people, the young and the old.
The young can’t find jobs because the old can’t retire. Reduce the Medicare age to 55 and watch the jobs open up. Can we poll that and predict a number and put the information out there?
The manipulators drive a wedge between the young and the old by citing the load that the baby boomers will have on Social Security. Can we point out that the baby boomers are the two-income generation? Most of the working women that I know pay in to Social Security for many years and still use the spouse’s benefit because it is greater than their own benefit from work would be. I have paid into Social Security from full-time employment since the 1980’s. When I retired, I took my own benefit, which was just a few dollars above the spouse’s benefit. We are the two-income generation. We pay in twice, draw out once. The money went away when George W. Bush took the funds out of the Clinton lock box and let our legislators fund wars with it. Can we say that?
We have to tell women that where governments control a woman’s reproductive choice they can say “no abortions” today and “only one child” tomorrow. Didn’t China do this?
What we have in the United States today is not a democracy because we have only a few statesmen in government. Al Franken is a statesman. A year ago I would have said Jim Webb is a statesman. We have a few, but most of our legislators serve corporations and do not know history at all. The middle class is the source of wealth, and it has thrived under liberal economic policy. Our elected representatives are sitting there in their seats with President Obama and a mandate, and they won’t vote against their large funding sources, which will always be corporations. I imagine that if one of them actually read the Constitution either they skipped the Preamble or they don’t know what “the general welfare” means.
Life in the Third Layer 