This is my first diary, so please be gentle - I'm a fast study, but I'm bound to make some errors, so I'm hoping you will bear this in mind and keep the criticism constructive.
To paraphrase a favorite film from my youth: Sometimes you just gotta say WTF. WTF gives you power. Power brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.
So, in this recent election the Dems have managed to take a giant step toward restoring our nation to rule by the people. Retaking both houses is no mean feat and it has shown us something about what we can do. That’s a good start.
Now what are we going to do? Congratulate ourselves? Sure! Sing the praises of the people who got us this far? Absolutely! Speculate about ways to approach the '08 elections? Fine, let’s do it...
But hold on a second...Just how much damage can our least-esteemed-president do in the next two years? Well, alright, no, he isn’t that bright and his corrupt puppet masters must surely understand what has transpired, even if he does not. They are all, I’m sure, a bit frightened of what might happen next. Should we be happy about this, or worried?
See the extra-long screed below the fold:
What can we expect from this powerful, wealthy, and not-too-bright group that is afraid of us? It isn't as if we progressive liberals had any nuclear weapons (and we all know that the surest way to protect yourself from the U.S. government is to have "the bomb") and these people still have two more years in which to ignore the legislative branch and push through executive order after executive order to get what they want. They have secret prisons in other countries and the capability, however clumsy, to "disappear" those they term "enemy" into them. The groundwork has been laid for the current administration to do a great deal of damage by intent or by simple neglect (even without a rubber stamp legislature). Remember, this is the Commander-in-Chief we are talking about (as ridiculous as it is, it’s still true) and the military is trained to take orders first. We might hope the good folks who are dutifully serving our nation would refuse to do anything to get us into even deeper trouble on the international front (like attacking Iran, for instance) or to harm the citizens they are supposed to be defending, but I’d rather not see the members of our military have to deal with the pressure of making those kinds of decisions. Who would? It’s great that we are excited about the prospect of finally cornering this bloodthirsty beast, but it’s essential that we keep this in mind: we are cornering a bloodthirsty beast. This is dangerous business and t’were best done quickly.
So, as long as we have some momentum, are we really going to sit back and wait patiently for the ‘08 election campaigns to provide us with the next opportunity to actively work to protect ourselves from this bully? This terrorist? This usurper who has stolen power from this nations’ rightful leaders, the people? Are we going to sit idly by as this administration continues to rob us of our freedom and our dignity? As they continue to ensure the longevity of the class system status quo? As they steadfastly refuse to address the obvious threat of global warming? As they keep us embroiled in a poorly managed conflict, started for the wrong reasons in OUR NAME? Well, perhaps a greater being could allow this to happen, and say nothing, do nothing, but I’m only human, and I say no! No more! I am so very tired of being ashamed of my government.
Now I have heard the arguments made about the Constitutional imperative of impeaching Bush, and I have read vehement posts by Kossaks who have made valid points both in support of impeachment and against it. I admit that personally, I would very much like to see GW impeached, however, I’m willing to sacrifice that pleasure for the greater good as long as I can be certain that he and his cronies will face the war crimes charges against them in an international court, because the world deserves the opportunity to make these criminals pay for their crimes. Yes, we do need to make sure that the right thing is done, but we need not be redundant about it. Our time and resources are limited and we need to make the best use of them possible.
It seems to my mind that our first order of business should be reducing the damage BushCo can do to a minimum. Perhaps the best way to do that would be to force them to concentrate their attention and resources in areas where they can’t do harm. To do that, I suggest we take a page for GW’s own playbook and focus our attacks on the puppet masters instead of the puppet. Threaten the whole neo-con political machine and they will be forced to divert their attention from victimizing the world to simply protecting their own backsides.
What could possibly create such a panic that they would be forced to do such a thing? In my opinion, it is campaign finance reform.
There have been a number of suggestions about just what we expect to see from our newly hatched congress in the "first 100 hours" but what I have not seen is any plan that will guarantee that our congress remains our congress. I believe that it is time to push hard for real campaign finance reform. If we can halt the institutionalized government corruption that is our current campaign finance law, we will free our representatives to govern in the interests of the people. Imagine what that could mean for progressives. I honestly believe that the current campaign finance practices are the "gateway drug" of political corruption. They are coercive in nature and advantage the wealthy. Let’s be sure to take whatever time in necessary before the next election to fix this problem.
Addressing the issue of finance reform will effectively bring the BushCo political machinery to a screeching halt. Done properly, this could change the entire face of politics in the U.S. It will force a radical change in political tactics. It would doom the neo-cons. The Bush Administrations’ politicking branch would be effectively paralyzed dealing with the threat campaign finance reform represents to their precious status quo.
It won’t be easy, I know. The recent proposals for finance reform (the McCain-Feingold bill, for example) are woefully inadequate. What we need is something that will level the playing field without impinging on our individual right to free expression. The very nature of our nation’s current political machinery is geared to work against such a change. There are too many "old-school" politicians in Washington who are addicted to the current system to make this anything less than a major uphill battle. Even if we were, by some miracle, able to push something through congress, we all know that "the Decider" would veto it without a second thought (or even a first thought, for that matter). What to do...
We’ve seen how effective people power can be. We know that is in the interests of the people to make substantive reforms in the way politicians play the campaign finance game. How to we focus the light of the shining beacon that is "we the people" into the laser scalpel that will cut away this cancer of corruption that infests our political system before it can metastasize to infect our newly cleansed DNC in the way that it has engulfed the DLC? I suppose it could be argued that the DLC was designed as a way to spread the infection throughout the Democratic party in the first place. They did some good things, once upon a time, though so I’m willing to believe they really thought this "fight cancer with cancer" therapy would eventually result in remission. Even the Clinton Administration, that bastion of DLC pride which they continue to point to when they are trying to convince us that they know what they are doing, revealed populist ideals when they began to push for national healthcare. I believe they were thwarted in their attempt because they didn’t address campaign finance reform first (how could they, after all). In fact, I doubt that any of our progressive hopes for the future of this country have much chance of success until this issue is taken care of properly. So what can we do to make it happen now, when things are skewed so much more against us than they were when Bill Clinton first took office?
Alright, this is where I have to admit that I am not well versed enough to come up with a viable strategy on my own. My intuition tells me that the key is in denying corporate entities the ability to exercise rights which ought to be reserved for individuals. This would be a great boon for the advancement of populist/progressive ideals, so perhaps that is where we need to start our push. The internet is rapidly becoming the fifth estate. The greatest advantage we have is that it’s nearly impossible to keep us completely in the dark about the activities our beloved blokes-in-black-hats are currently engaged in. Well, that and it’s going to be damned difficult to shut us up.
Would it be possible to push these reforms through at the state level? I think that we might be able to bypass the obvious blocks to this goal entirely if we drafted an amendment addressing campaign finance reform issues and were able to get it passed and ratified by 37 states. I don’t think it would be a very tough sell, to be honest. Politicians at the state level are less likely to fight this measure and a large portion of them might actually stand to gain by instituting finance reforms. The U.S. Constitution provides the states with the means for doing this in Article V. I can’t think of a better way to exercise our "government by-the-people" ideals than to take such a measure as this.
It does come with its own set of possible dangers though, which should be addressed. There are a lot of fringe political groups that are anxious to see the state-driven Article V process brought into play so that they can try to advance their agendas. Some of them are eager to use it to ram through amendments which will open the door to the persecution of gays and other minorities on the "anti-gay-marriage" platform. Yet others are certain that the process will result in tearing apart the entire U.S. Constitution and plunging us into our own civil war (which would certainly make the dominionists happy – anything to pack more people into their lemming-like rush toward the "end times"). There is no proof the Article V process would make possible any of the various predictions of doom which are made every time the subject comes up in open debate, but there is also no reason to believe that there are not people crazy enough to jump the gun and attempt to make these predictions come true, if we did start the process either. So if we were going to use this method, we would need to have a detailed plan for going about it and getting it done quickly before we could really begin.
I can’t deny its attractiveness as an option, though for the threat it represents to the greedy ruling faction that is waging a vicious class war on the rest of us. Marx made a big mistake publishing The Communist Manifesto. It gave the ruling elite enough advanced warning to implement measures to slow the inexorable certainty of his predictions to a crawl, and while his conclusions are still the most probable outcome of our current economic game, the intolerable conditions which will spark change now appear to coincide with the greatest impending environmental disaster in recorded history, meaning we may be in for a very, VERY bumpy ride. Ah, what a curse it is to live in interesting times. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen what horrors the artificially induced Communist states have endured and I have grave doubts about the viability of that system even when brought about under "ideal" circumstances, but I can still read the writing on the wall. It’s coming, and quickly. The smartest move we can make at this point is to delay that revolution just a bit longer, still, until after we have insured our future generations can survive it. This brings me back, again to campaign finance reform, which I think is the best shot we have to maintain some semblance of our capitalist system and still ease the class tensions which are so palpable at the moment.
So I’ll admit that we should probably save the obviously revolutionary tactic of the Article V state-driven amendment process as a last resort, for use after our other options (if we have any) have been exhausted, but I still think it would be prudent to draft a realistic plan for implementing it if it should come to that. The mere knowledge that we have a viable plan to pull it off might be all we need to prod the Congress into properly reforming the current campaign finance game into something that won’t stain the hands of everyone who comes plays it. In any case, I’m certainly open to other suggestions.
One thing is absolutely certain: We need to push for change. We need to make waves. Big waves. There are enough knowledgeable Kossaks to draft a plan to pull this off and enough activist Kossaks to spread the word across the entire blogospehre. Let’s find out what our fifth estate can really do. So, we’ve got the skills, we’ve got the tools and we’ve got the momentum... WTF.