To begin to answer these questions, I refer you to the main points made by Bill Moyers

at the Boston University Howard Zinn Lecture Series:

For Howard Zinn, democracy was one big public fight that everyone should plunge into. That's the only way, he said, for everyday folks to get justice -- by fighting for it, continuously.

Here are some of the things that prompted Zinn to say that:

Between 2001 and 2008, about 40,000 US manufacturing plants closed. Six million manufacturing jobs -- one out of every three -- disappeared over the past dozen years. Without any good-paying jobs in the United States, how are people going to pay for their health care, and put their children through school?

Consider the new BMW plant that recently opened in Alabama and advertised that the company would hire a thousand workers. Among the applicants: "a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm. Some held college degrees and resumes in other fields where they made more money." And now these professionals will be paid a measly $15 an hour -- about half of what BMW workers earn in Germany.

Among our political and financial classes, this is known as "the free market at work." A better name is "wage repression," and it's been happening in our country since around 1980. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 1950 through 1980, because the nation's economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too -- from $17,719 to $30,941. That's a 75% increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

But then the increase stopped. The economy continued to grow handsomely after 1980, but the financial rewards started going only to people at the top. On the chart plotting income growth, the income "growth" line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans after 1980. For them, average income went up, barely, from that $30,941 achieved in 1980 to only $31,244 in 2008, almost 30 years later. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years and the vast majority of that increase went to the top 10%.

There's no better description for this than continued wage repression for the sake of maximally expanding profits and the now stratospheric incomes for the top 1%.

Specific example in the New York Times of how this tremendous transfer of wealth and income occurred: "Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts: Despite falling motorcycle sales, Harley-Davidson profits are soaring, with a second quarter profit of $71 million -- more than triple what it earned the previous year. How can Harley keep increasing its profits as motorcycle sales fall? Simple. It's going to cut 1500 more jobs by the end of next year -- on top of the 2000 jobs cut last year."

This is one reason the mood on Wall Street is buoyant while staying pretty glum in so many households, where unemployment problems show no signs of letting up.

Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be a third-consecutive quarter of sharp earning increases. But instead of spending on the usual things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the extra profits. And what are their plans for this money? The Washington Post explains:

Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year... But the rise in buybacks signals that many companies are still hesitant to spend their cash on the job-generating activities that could produce economic growth.

That's how financial capitalism works these days: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices, thus making their stock more attractive to Wall Street. Because of falling wages and unprecedented numbers of layoffs, too few workers any longer have the money to buy the remaining products that are being made, so why should companies invest in producing more product?

Hear the chief economist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Ethan Harris, who truthfully told the Times: "There's no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy. Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits."

Or the chief economist for Credit Suisse in New York, Neal Soss: As companies have wrung more savings out of their work forces, causing wages and salaries barely to budge from recession lows, "profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40% between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010." (The rich are getting richer off of wage repression.)

Just recently the New York Times reported that the private equity business is roaring back: "While it remains difficult to get a mortgage to buy a home or to get a loan to fund a small business, yield-starved investors are creating a robust market for corporate bonds and loans."

If this were a functioning democracy, our financial institutions would be helping everyday Americans and businesses get the mortgages and loans -- the capital -- they need to keep going; but they're not doing that, even as the financiers are reaping robust rewards. Even more importantly, our government would be helping workers get the increased wages and higher paid jobs they need in order to buy the products that companies might then produce. That's what the German government did for their workers, and by that means the German economy largely escaped the worldwide recession.

(http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/german-economy-stimulated-by-market-oriented-fiscal-policies/)

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But he's run off with all the toys

Another story from the Wall Street Journal: Above an op-ed piece by Robert Frank the headline asked: "Do the Rich Still Need the Rest of America?" The author wasn't ambivalent about the answer. He wrote that as stocks have boomed, "the wealthy bounced back. While the Main Street economy was wracked by high unemployment and the real-estate crash, the wealthy -- whose financial fates were much more tied to capital markets than to jobs and houses -- picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and started buying luxury goods again." How nice. For them.

Citing the work of Michael Lind at the Economic Growth Program of the New American Foundation, the article went on to describe how the super-rich earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America, "while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country."

Another story from the Wall Street Journal, three years ago: The private equity firm Blackstone Group swooped down on a travel reservation company in Colorado, bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months, one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal. Blackstone made a killing while those workers were left to sift through the debris. They sold their homes, took part-time jobs making sandwiches and coffee, and lost their health insurance.

That fall, Blackstone's chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, reportedly worth over $5 billion, rented a luxurious resort in Jamaica to celebrate the marriage of his son. According to the Guardian News, renting the Montego Bay facility for the wedding cost $50,000, plus thousands more to sleep 130 guests. Earlier in the year Schwarzman had rented out the Park Avenue Armory in New York (near his 35-room apartment) to celebrate his 60th birthday at a cost of $3 million.

Adding insult to injury, the stratospheric income of people like Schwarzman is for the most part taxed at the 15% rate -- considerably less than the 25-30% rate paid, say, by a middle class family. And when Congress considered raising the rate on their Midas-like compensation, the financial titans flooded Washington with armed mercenaries -- armed, that is, with hard, cold cash -- and brought the "debate" to an end faster than it had taken Schwartzman to fire 841 workers. The financial class had won another round in the exploitation of working people who, if they are lucky enough to have jobs, are paying a much higher tax rate than the super-rich.

So the answer to the question, "Do the Rich Still Need Most of the Rest of Us?" is as stark as it is ominous: Increasingly they don't any longer need most of us. As they form their own worldwide, international financial culture, ever more separated from the fate of everyone else in the U.S., it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people.

You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization, as shown by anthropologist Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Here the Pulitzer Prize-winning author tells how governing elites throughout history have isolated and deluded themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment is one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula suffered as their forest disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare further exhausted dwindling resources. And although Mayan kings could clearly see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society, which they bled right to the very end. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, the last leaders to continue this folly became casualties of their own privilege and pillage. Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns . . if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions, separated from the common life of the country -- which is exactly what is happening today in America.

Yet the isolation of our super-rich continues -- and is even celebrated! Consider this document published in the spring of 2005 by the Wall Street giant, Citigroup, setting forth an "Equity Strategy" under the title and I'm not making this up! -- "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer (pdf)."

Now most people know what plutocracy is: the rule of the rich, with political power controlled by the wealthy. Plutocracy is not an American word and wasn't meant to become an American phenomenon -- some of our founders deplored what they called "the veneration of wealth." But plutocracy is here, now, and a pumped up Citigroup even boasted of coining a variation on the word -- "plutonomy," which describes an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich continue to get richer and that government helps them do it! Five years ago Citigroup decided the time had come to "bang the drum for plutonomy." And bang they did.

Some excerpts from the document "Revisiting Plutonomy"

"Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years." (Whoopdie do.)

"The top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the United States -- the plutonomists in our parlance -- have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US and from globalization and the productivity boom -- at the expense of labor." (Hallelujah.)

"And they are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years, because the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact." (Glory be.)

That bears repitition: "The dynamics of plutonomy are still intact." That was the case before the Great Collapse of 2008, and it's the case today, two years after the catastrophe. But the plutonomists are doing just fine, thank you very much. Better than ever in some cases, thanks to our very generous bailout of their big banks.

As for the rest of the country, listen to this summary in The Economist -- no Marxist journal that -- of a study by Pew Research:

More than half of all workers today have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have canceled or cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with their parents. Fewer than half of all adults expect their children to have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower. For many Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since The Second World War, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself.

Let that sink in. For millions of garden-variety Americans the audacity of hope has been replaced by the paucity of hope.

The legendary correspondent Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here's mine: Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Socrates said that to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what's happening to our political system is corruption -- a deep, systemic corruption. For more on this, I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper's Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our alleged representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still "matter" of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the real power behind political influence -- money.

The article is excerpted from Hodge's new book, The Mendacity of Hope. In it he describes how America's founding generation especially feared the kind of corruption that occurs when the private ends of a narrow faction succeed in capturing the engines of government. James Madison and many of his contemporaries knew this kind of corruption could consume the republic. They knew that the life cycle of previous republics -- their degeneration into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy had been inescapable, which prompted them to heroically erect, in our Constitution, safeguards against such degeneration. This time, private and narrow personal interests would be prevented from overriding those of the general public. Or so they thought.

In fact, their efforts failed. Hardly a century passed after the ringing propositions of 1776 than America was engulfed in the gross materialism and political corruption of the First Gilded Age, when Big Money bought the government right out from under the voters. In their magisterial work on The Growth of the American Republic, the historians Morrison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg describe how in that era "privilege controlled politics," and "the purchase of votes, the corruption of election officials, the bribing of legislatures, the lobbying of special bills, and the flagrant disregard of laws" threatened the very foundations of the country.

And now the Gilded Age has returned with a vengeance

It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a "massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich." As author Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10% captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush, with those huge tax cuts for the rich, which are now about to be extended -- because both parties have by now been bought off by the wealthy. By 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. And today, a small fraction of the 1% of us at the top take more money out of our system than the bottom 120 million of us.

You will hear it said, "Come on, this is the way the world works." But no, it's the way the world is made to work. This vast inequality is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand; it did not just happen; it was no accident. As Hodge drives home, it is the result of a long series of policy decisions "about industry and trade, taxation and military spending -- decisions by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in concrete-and-steel buildings." And those policy decisions were paid for by the less than one percent who make the lion's share of our capitalist democracy political contributions. Over the past 30 years, with the complicity of Republicans and Democrats alike, the plutocrats, or plutonomists, have once again used their vastly increased wealth to assure that government does their bidding.

Remember that grateful Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on the side of plutonomy? To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don't walk, to the theater nearest you showing Charles Ferguson's new film, "Inside Job." Take a handkerchief because you'll weep for the republic.

Looking back, it all seems so clear, that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. One of the few journalists who did see it coming -- Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post -- reported that "business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. They funded think tanks that obligingly churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. And their political allies in the conservative movement cleverly built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who zealously waged a cultural holy war that served to camouflage the gross economic assault on working people and the middle class.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also tried to warn us. He said President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, eventually admitted the same thing. Senator Moynihan was long gone before the financial catastrophe on George W. Bush's watch. And David Stockman waited too long before he spoke out. Plus, not enough of us were listening to him.

The plutocrats who soaked up all the money now say the deficits require putting Social Security and other public services on the chopping block. You might think that Mr. Bush today would regret having invaded Iraq on false pretenses at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and counting, but no, just last week he said that his biggest regret was his failure to privatize Social Security. With over l00 Republicans of the House having signed a pledge to do just that when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Bush's vision may yet be realized. In fact, all of Washington now expects that it will. Fourteen of the 18 members of the new Deficit Commission are fiscal conservatives and have pledged to make sure that social security benefits are cut. As far as they're concerned, it's okay to borrow hundreds of billions to fund more tax cuts for the top 1%, but social security benefits must be cut -- to help pay for these obscene tax cuts for the super rich! And so it is that an unprecedented transfer of wealth from all the rest of us to the rich continues and expands.

In his book Neoconomy, Daniel Altman described a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in completely different financial worlds. "It's coming to America," he wrote. Most likely he would not have been surprised recently when firefighters in rural Tennessee would let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.

More completely than ever, plutocracy buys off America's "democratic" system

On November 2nd, we witnessed the biggest commercial transaction in the history of American elections. Once again the plutocracy bought off the system. Nearly $4 billion was spent on the congressional races, including multi millions coming from independent tax-exempt organizations that can collect unlimited amounts without revealing the sources. The organization Public Citizen reports that just l0 groups are responsible for the bulk of the spending by independent groups: "A tiny number of organizations, relying on a tiny number of corporate and fat-cat contributors, are spending most of the money on the vicious attack ads dominating our airwaves." These are the words of Public Citizen's president, Robert Weissman. The Federal Election Commission says that two years ago, 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed the names of their donors. This year it was only 32%.

Socrates again: To remember a thing, you must first name it. So let's name it: Slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin' names like American Crossroads, which is one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his grand effort to revive the era of the robber barons. Laughably, Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as "grassroots" -- even though 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires.

Rove, other conservative groups, and the Chamber of Commerce have together created a "shadow party" or parallel government that is determined to be the real power in Washington, just like Rome's Opus Dei in Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code." In this shadow-party/parallel government, the plutocrats reign. We have reached what the new chairman of Common Cause and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the perfect storm that threatens American democracy. It consists of:

an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top;

a record amount of secret money, flooding into and thereby corrupting our democracy; and

a public that's becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get people back to work.

In short, democracy is being replaced by plutocracy. Right under our noses, while most of us sleep. That small fraction of one percent of us who now take from our system more than the bottom 120 million of us includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup's "plutonomy," and together they are buying our democracy and by that means are in the process changing it into a plutocracy all without most people even having a clue as to what is going on.

How could this happen? The answer is that early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are "persons" with the right to "speak" during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. But corporations are not people, you say; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They're not permitted to vote. They don't bear arms (except for the "nuclear bombs" they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges, corporations now have the privilege of "personhood" to "speak" -- and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.

Does anyone really think that this Court's coup de grace against democracy is consistent with what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind?

You'll recall that soon after the Court's landmark decision, President Obama raised the matter during his State of the Union speech in January. He said the decision would unleash a torrent of corrupting corporate money into our political system. Sitting a few feet in front of the president, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, obviously in total denial, defiantly mouthed the words, "Not true."

Not true? Terry Forcht knows otherwise. He's the wealthy nursing home executive in Kentucky, one of whose establishments is being prosecuted by Attorney General Jack Conway for allegedly covering up sexual abuse. Conway is running for the Senate and Forcht was able to spend more than $l million to defeat him. Surprise, surprise, moneybags Forcht is the banker for one of Karl Rove's two slush funds, American Crossroads, which has spent nearly $30 million to defeat Democrats across the country.

What's that, Justice Alito? Not true, you say?

Ask Alan Grayson about this. Until his recent defeat, he had been a member of Congress. Here's how he sized up our predicament: "We're now in a situation where a lobbyist can walk into my office and say, "I've got five million dollars to spend and I can spend it for you or I can spend it against you. Which do you prefer?" Now recall Karl Rove's slush funds, including American Crossroads. Alito was either disingenuous, naïve, or deluded. He can't be in this world without knowing that he and his four fellow corporatists were giving big donors the one thing they most want in their campaign against working people: an unfair advantage.

Come with me and let's visit Washington's red light district

I refer, of course, to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the plutocracy's prostitution of politics. The Chamber boasts that it represents more than three million businesses and approximately 300,000 members. But in reality it has almost nothing to do with the shops and stores along your local streets. The Chamber's branding allows them to disguise their political agenda as a coalition of local businesses . . while it does dirty work for corporate titans. When the Supreme Court came down with its infamous ruling earlier this year, the Chamber responded by announcing a 40% boost in its political spending operations. After the money started flowing in, the Chamber boosted its budget again, this time by 50%.

After digging into corporate foundation tax filings and other public records, the New York Times found that the Chamber of Commerce has "increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors" -- the plutocracy's senior ranks -- "to finance much of its legislative and political agenda." Furthermore, the chamber "makes no apologies for its policy of not identifying its donors." Indeed, "It has vigorously opposed legislation in Congress that would require groups like it to identify their biggest contributors when they spend money on campaign ads."

Now let's connect the dots

While knocking down nearly all limits on corporate spending in campaigns, the Supreme Court did allow for disclosure, which would at least tell us who's buying off the government. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell even claimed that "sunshine" laws would make everything okay. But after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed, McConnell turned around and lined up every Republican in the Senate to oppose it. Hardly had the public begun to sing "Let the Sunshine In" than McConnell & Company went tone deaf. And when the chief lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce was asked by an interviewer, "Are you guys eventually going to disclose?", the answer was a brisk "No." Why no? Because those corporations are afraid of a public backlash. Like bank robbers pulling a heist, they prefer to hide their "personhood" behind sock masks. Surely that tells us something about the nature of what they're doing. In the words of one of the characters in Tom Stoppard's play Night and Day: "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in places where everything is kept in the dark."

That's true in politics, too. Thus it turns out that many of the ads being paid for secretly by anonymous donors are "false, grossly misleading, or marred with distortions," as Greg Sargent reports in his website "The Plum Line." Go to Sargent's site and you'll see a partial list of ads that illustrate the scope of the intellectual and political fraud being perpetrated right in front of our eyes. In a nutshell, money from secret sources is poisoning the public mind with toxic lies in order to dupe voters into giving even more power to the powerful.

On another site -- "thinkprogress.com" -- you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers -- also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters -- are recruiting "captains of industry" to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch's "secretive network of Republican donors' are two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That's right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so!

Something else is going on here, too. The Koch brothers have contributed significantly to efforts to stop the Affordable Care Act -- the health care reforms -- from taking effect. Justice Clarence Thomas has obviously been doing some home schooling, because his wife Virginia claims those reforms are "unconstitutional," and has founded an organization that is fighting to repeal them! Her own husband on the Supreme Court may one day be ruling on whether she's right or not. But there's more. The organization Virginia Thomas founded to kill those health care reforms -- also a goal of the Koch brothers, remember -- got its start with a gift of half a million dollars from an unnamed source, and is still being funded by donors who can't be traced. So you have to wonder if some of them are corporations that stand to benefit from favorable decisions by the Supreme Court. Inevitable conclusion: all three branches of our government are now owned, lock stock and barrel, by big corporations and the financial elite. While the vast majority of American voters and citizens were asleep at the wheel, they converted our democracy into a plutocracy, or plutonomy as they now proudly refer it.

Time to close the circle

Everyone knows millions of Americans are in trouble. As Robert Reich recently summed up the state of working people: They've lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings. Their grown children have moved back in with them. Their state and local taxes are rising. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling; gas pipelines are leaking and even breaking, setting fire to their neighborhoods; schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

So why isn't government working for most Americans? To reiterate the obvious, it's been bought off. It's as simple as that. And unless we somehow manage to get clean money into elections, we're not going to get clean elections; and until we get clean elections, you can kiss goodbye government of, by, and for the people. If so, welcome to plutocracy.

The Supreme Court was lost long ago, so don't go there looking for justice. As Howard Zinn reminded us, "The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than l2 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, and defy the law, the courts, the police, and then create a great movement. That's what won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to get justice."

So what are we to do about Big Money in politics buying off democracy? I can almost hear Howard throwing that question back at us: "What are we to do? ORGANIZE! Yes, organize -- and don't count the costs." And some people already are. They're mobilizing. There's a rumbling in the land. All across the political spectrum, a good many people oppose the escalating power of money in politics. Fed-up Democrats. Disillusioned Republicans. Independents. Greens. Even Tea Partiers, once they wake up to realize they have been played for fools by their off-scene bankrollers, who have no intention of ever sharing the wealth they are cleverly, methodically and surreptitiously stealing from the rest of us.

Veteran public interest groups like Common Cause and Public Citizen are aroused. There are the rising voices, from web-based initiatives such as http://freespeechforpeople.org to grassroots initiatives such as "Democracy Matters" on campuses across the country, including a chapter here at Boston University. Then too, http://MoveOn.org is looking for a million people to fight back in a many-pronged strategy to counter the Supreme Court decision.

What's promising in all this is that in taking on Big Money we're talking about something more than a single issue. We're talking about a broad-based coalition to restore American democracy -- one that is trying to be smart about the nuts-and-bolts of building a coalition, remembering that it has a lot to do with human nature. Some will want to march. Some will want to petition. Some will want to engage through the web. Some will want to go door-to-door -- many gifts and aptitudes, but the same spirit. A fighting spirit. As Howard Zinn would tell us: No fight, no fun, no results.

Author's Website: http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=JCpLDBUAAAC

Author's Bio: Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 6 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.

Nov. 10, 2010

www.opednews.com/articles/To-what-shrinking-extent-d-by-Richard-Clark-101110-280.html