Last year at this time the Supreme Court rendered its unprecedented decision in Citizen’s United v. FEC, officially declaring the rule of Big Brother, Inc.. and turning speech into a commodity. Corporations are people, and they can spend all they want to influence democratic elections.
We’ve seen what’s happened since then. We’ve seen our gentlemanly and conciliatory president rolled by the forces of big money and personal destruction. We saw financial reform start but not finish, and saw health care reform crawl malnourished from its cradle. We saw a Recovery Act that spent more on tax breaks than infrastructure repair, and saw millionaires get tax cuts while calling for deficit reduction. Now we see Social Security, the fiscally sound premiere social insurance program, being wheeled out for "repair" by Wall Street billionaires (Pete Peterson).
So what can we do about it? Here are some collected ideas to help salvage our drowning democracy.
Move your money. Find out if your bank is owned by one of the giants, and move it if it is. (I’m in the middle of such a move; stay tuned).
Amend the U.S. Constitution so even the Supreme Court can see the difference between people and corporations. It won’t happen overnight, but it has happened 26 times already. Start by signing the petition at Move-to-amend or Move-on.
Join a union (no, unions aren’t thugs with bosses, they are the working people’s route to collective action; unions pool people the way corporations pool money). If you don’t have a union at work, join Working America,, the union for people without unions.
Sign the Campaign for America's Future’s petition on Social Security and chase the president off the third rail.
My own book, 2044, starts where George Orwell’s 1984 left off. The problem isn’t Big Brother and the leviathan government. The problem is Big Brother, Inc., and the all-powerful marketplace. Like Orwell, 2044 is meant as a warning, not a prediction. We need to work to give it a different ending.