move on EliPariser

I really don't think big money can be stopped. You and I have well educated friends who share that opinion. Fascism is a fact of life here in these present United States. If I were as young as Eli Pariser, I'd move to some country in Northern Europe. In retrospect, one wonders why the Jews didn't get out of Germany when they could. The fascists simply shut off my radio microphone. Ten years from now they'll be secure enough to shoot similar sinners and say they're doing it to protect the people.

The good thing about the recent Supreme Court decision is that now corporate dollars will buy legislators from both parties. Because everyone will be on the same side it will save hours of quibbling on the floor of Congress and expedite legislation. With all votes a foregone conclusion, legislators will no longer need to assemble but will simply push a button from wherever they happen to be vacationing.

The humble Farmer

The following By ELI PARISER who I understand was one of my wife's students in Lincolnville, Maine.

Here's the lesson of 2009: Washington's problems go deeper than George W. Bush.

That's not to say that Mr. Bush was anything but a terrible president. He launched us into a disastrous and unnecessary war, ran up the federal deficit and nearly imperiled Social Security by investing it in the stock market. He prioritized politics over policy and ideology over reality. And with Dick Cheney's help, he cultivated a national atmosphere of paranoia not seen since McCarthy.

All of that made it easy to pin our nation's problems on our president. For eight years, "Stop Bush" was a simple and morally compelling rallying cry. It united the progressive and Democratic tribes with a simple praxis: To solve the problem of a bad president, a) block his proposals in Congress and b) replace him.

One year into the Obama administration, it's clear that changing presidents isn't enough. Pundits who argue over how progressive Mr. Obama really is or how well he played his cards miss the larger point. Our problem isn't just leadership, it's also the system we ask our leaders to maneuver. Corporate interests and their lobbyists have hamstrung our politics, making it difficult or impossible to make the change our country needs. Unless we confront this oversized influence directly, it will stymie our best chance in a generation for progress and reform.


The Democratic energy bill is larded with giveaways to the oil and coal industries. Health-insurance companies have declared "we won" on key pieces of health-care reform. And perhaps most infuriating, after nearly wrecking the global economy, the financial industry is poised to kill any hope of fundamental financial reform. Most economic experts believe we're no better equipped now to deal with financial crises without spending billions of tax dollars and creating massive moral hazard than we were before the crash of '08.


Yes, this is business as usual. But it has consequences for real people. More American families are suffering through a winter of unemployment. Kids in too many families won't get adequate health care. We are failing to confront the climate crisis that threatens our national and economic security.

The corporate influence in politics isn't good for people, it's not good for democracy, and it's not even good for capitalism. The housing bubble's growth, securitization, and collapse hurt everyone—businesses, communities, and individuals alike. Rather than opening up new markets, lobbying typically helps incumbent industries prevail over start-ups. Huge subsidies for oil companies mean that American solar and wind companies are less competitive than those in other nations. In this context, a genuinely free market, without lobbyist-induced favoritism, would be a step in the right direction.

These giveaways are as offensive to many people on the right as the left. And libertarians, Tea Partiers and MoveOn members can find common cause in reforming this corrupted system.

Mr. Obama, to his credit, has done more than any sitting president in a generation to counter the influence of lobbyists. But it's not enough. And of course it's not just his problem—Congress is more beholden to corporate interests than the executive branch.

We urgently need to restore our ability to govern for the common interest. That's the overarching task of 2010 (and beyond) for progressives. Here are three places we can start:

• Public financing of congressional elections. The Supreme Court is busy dismantling the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act, which makes it all the more urgent that candidates who don't have a powerful industry backing them can get heard. Public financing for all federal elections would cost less than $1 billion a year, compared to the hundreds of billions that oil companies alone make as a result of sweetheart tax breaks.

• Eliminate our current corporate subsidies, and start with a clean slate. No more subsidies for oil drilling. No more subsidies for pharmaceutical companies. In theory, progressives and conservatives ought to be able to align on this one. And if we do it, the payoff is enormous—billions that we can return to taxpayers and invest in real economic growth.

• Apply to Congress the new lobbying restrictions that the president has established for the executive branch and the stimulus. Too many elected officials cash in on their time in office by becoming lobbyists for the industries they used to regulate.

Fix the System
Enacting these changes won't be easy. But there's one big thing working in favor of real reform: It's clear to just about all of us that the current system doesn't work. We live in the shadow of a decade of lobby-rigged markets and see the results every day in the unemployment numbers and food-stamp counts.

And we're angry about it. If we put that anger into action, we might just see the era of reform and change President Obama promised. As he said on election night, "This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were."

— Mr. Pariser is president of MoveOn.org and blogs at elipariser.com.

The wisdom and foresight of Abraham Lincoln

This passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. .. . It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching hat unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

The passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.

For a reliable pedigree, cite p. 40 of The Lincoln Encyclopedia, by Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY). That traces the quote's lineage to p. 954 of Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait, (Vol. 2) by Emanuel Hertz (Horace Liveright Inc, 1931, NY).

A final Lincoln tidbit, although it pertains to one very specific case:

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."

speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837.
See Vol. 1, p. 24 of Lincoln's Complete Works,
ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 1905)

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I want to thank Harvey for calling this quote to my attention.

Your Neighbor humble

Radio friend Mike sent me this. It turns up on another blog.

The primary indication and responsibility of citizenship is the right to vote. While a citizen may choose NOT to exercise that right, corporations don’t even HAVE a right to vote, at least not in the legal way of a citizen. In a sense, they DO vote. In the Middle East this form of voting is called “baksheesh” or bribery, and though it’s widely practiced, even there it’s illegal. In the US, it’s called “corporate campaign contributions,” but unlike the Middle East, it’s legal, mainly because these contributions have bought laws that make them legal. This is the same as Alice’s Red Queen saying that a word means what she wants it to mean. However, to mix a metaphor, A rose by any other name is still bribery.

Money is NOT free speech. Money is legal tender and it says so right on the bills. Legal tender, of course, means the money legally can be offered (tendered) as a medium of exchange. When corporations tender money to a political candidate, what is it that the political candidate can offer in exchange? The only thing any politician does is create legislation, therefore, ipso facto, the corporation tenders money in exchange for legislation. Of course, this would be legislation favorable to the corporation. In other words, this is bribery. And here, too, the bribees have seen to it that the word no longer means what it means.

I’d like to start a campaign of rebranding our political heritage in view of this miserable situation into which the Supreme Court has just put us. This falls in line with the strategy the far right has used so effectively in the past: “Obama is a Muslim;” “The single payer plan is Socialism;” “Global warming is a liberal plot.” A grassroots movement that would be the liberal internets’ equivalent of the tea-baggers but with a less deviant symbolism.

So, I suggest everybody start calling our country “The United Corporations of America.” The term “Citizen” should become “Minion;” we should incessantly insist that in light of this new ruling, we no longer can call our form of government a Democracy, but a Corporatocracy; let’s worry that the Bill of Rights will be reworked and then renamed the “Bill of Indenture;” let’s reveal that the House of CEOs and the Board Chairmen’s Senate plan to rewrite the Preamble to the Constitution to read, “Government of Corporations, by Corporations and for Corporations.”

In addition, we should claim that a manifesto will soon be published that eliminates a citizen’s guarantees of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and in its place will be the corporations’ guarantees of Bonuses, Freedom from Regulations and the Pursuit of Unlimited Profit.