Just saw an email from MoveOn about a very important step we can all take toward reclaiming our political voices from the forces of corporate power, wealth, and greed.
If you haven't signed the "Fight Washington Corruption" pledge, you still have a day to add your name to the hundreds of thousands that MoveOn members will individually deliver to local Congressional offices nationwide at noon on Thursday, to fight the impact of Citizens United.
From the email:
The pledge is a three point plan to curb the influence that giant companies have over our democracy:
- Overturn Citizens United: Amend the Constitution to protect America from unlimited corporate spending on our elections.
- Fair elections now: Pass the Fair Elections Now Act, providing public financing to candidates.
- Lobbyist Reform Act: Pass legislation to end the overwhelming influence of corporate lobbyists.
Link below, as well as the message (which I'm actually pretty proud of) that I included along with my name. Sorry, couldn't fit the link in the intro.
Here is the link that you can click on to be directed to the petition for your representative.
And here is my message. Sadly, my rep is Dave Reichert, so I kept that in mind while writing it. And yeah, I know it's long and he won't read it, but once I got into my groove, it was really, really hard to stop. I think all of this needs to be said, over and over and over.
I am not a rabid liberal. I am a solid, center-left citizen (currently a math teacher, formerly a corporate litigator and business owner) who is concerned that in order for a democracy to function, each person's voice has to have equal weight. Our current system does not allow for that:
- Lobbyists have far greater access to our elected officials than do the individuals those elected officials are actually supposed to be representing.
- Under the Citizens United ruling, the individual decisionmakers in for-profit corporations have access to money that actually belongs to MANY people -- i.e., all the shareholders of that corporation. Citizens United gives those decisionmakers authority to use unlimited corporate funds to promulgate a political message that may or may not represent the beliefs and values of all of the people to whom that money belongs.
If there was a requirement that corporate money could only be donated after a vote of all shareholders, and the money would have to be spent in a way that proportionally represents the stated interests of all the shareholders, then there might be some fairness in this process. But that is not how it works.
Moreover, the corporate decisionmakers in control of bundled corporate money do not have any incentive to make their decisions based on what is best for our country. In fact, they are expressly prohibited from doing so. Instead, they have a legal, fiduciary duty to make decisions based on what will maximize the financial return to the shareholders. This is true even if the corporation's best interests are diametrically opposed to those of individual Americans.
We have seen many examples in recent months of how well this works for our nation: the Wall Street firms who destroyed our economy by gambling with investors' funds, knowing they would be bailed out by the taxpayers. The lives lost in a West Virginia coal mine. The breathtaking destruction visited on the region of my birth, the Gulf Coast, by a foreign oil company that is known for ignoring safety requirements. There are many more examples of this corporate practice of privatizing profits while socializing the real, external costs of their business decisions.
The Republican party is continually claiming that the American people are afraid and angry because they see the deficit expanding.
That is not what THIS American is afraid of. I am afraid and angry about something much more fundamental to what this nation is about: I am afraid and angry because day by day, month by month, I am watching our democracy being destroyed, and I am feeling the frustration and rage induced by my voice being entirely drowned out by the voices of concentrated power, money and greed. The Citizens United case gave those voices a Supreme Court blessing to vanquish my voice even further.
You are my elected official. You are elected to represent my interests, not the interests of multinational business organizations whose loyalty to this country is best demonstrated by their record of shipping millions upon millions of jobs out of this country in order to boost their bottom line. I expect you to do everything in your power to ensure that my voice has an equal place in our political system with the voices that are destroying my country.
Rep. Reichert, I want my country back!
NOTE: As of Sunday when the e-mail was sent to me, the total # of signatures received nationwide was 340,000, and my district was 37 names short of its goal of 16,000. As of today when I signed up, the return message I received said that my district is 682 names above its 16,000 goal. If that same progress has been duplicated nationwide, they've probably added another 15,000 names to the previous 340,000. DKos alone could push that up to half a million if we all really worked at it. Sign up and pass it on to all your friends!