I watched and listened to you on Bill Moyers’ journal Sunday night. You discussed the stranglehold the financial giants have on Congress. You reviewed the medieval redistribution of wealth Congress created when it bailed out banks and left U.S. citizens in foreclosure. You railed against the arrogance and invulnerability of the bankers, since the destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act. And when you discussed possible cures for these terrible ills, Representative Kaptur said we have to get the corporate money out of Congressional campaigning, and Mr. Johnson said we have to have more bloggers doing the research and writing – the muckraking – that journalists used to do.
I think if the only bulwark between the marketocracy and democracy is bloggers, we are doomed. We have got to come up with something besides a volunteer cadre of part-time muckrakers, however dedicated, because we all have to earn a living. After 30 years of volunteering, and working for non-profits, and living in poverty, I got too old. You can’t participate in this economy without sufficient income, and that means you lose your free time. I know from having been a journalist how long it takes to research and write a careful, accurate article. I know that to write this letter now is costing me the time I would otherwise be practicing music or preparing for tomorrow, a work day. Bottom line: we can not count on unpaid bloggers to do the job journalists gave up doing.
As for getting corporate money out of politics, good luck with that. It will take massive effort. We have not begun to get serious about it. I am in favor of overturning Buckley v. Valeo, but I doubt if this Supreme Court will do so. In fact, we have a little legal protection about corporate campaign spending right now – McCain-Feingold – and the smart bet is that the Supreme Court is about to gut that.
Restore Glass-Steagall? With what Congress, the one bought and paid for by the corporate C-level executives who quite reasonably wonder who all these voters are and what they are doing importuning Congress, which we bought and paid for?
Some while ago, I wrote about the marketocracy - replacement of representative democracy and its consent of the governed by rule of corporations with no consent of the governed. I traced its history to both the 1971 Powell memorandum and to the Roundtable of Chief Executive Officers meeting in 1971, in which transnational corporate officers who were intermittently cabinet members stated their intent to turn the world into a shopping mall and do away with nation states, which were inconvenient. I wonder if Justice Powell would be pleased with what he wrought.
As for my credentials, I was born in Chicago in 1945 – my father was from Cleveland and Toledo. My aunt Kelly Adams was a big D Democrat in the Ohio Democratic Party and a member of the Shaker Heights city council. I have a Barclay’s Bank credit card that donates 1 percent of all my purchases to the Ohio Democratic Party. I’ve been a member of the California Democratic Central Committee, and a co-founder of its Environmental Caucus. I was raised in D.C. in a very political family. My father wrote the Kennedy tax cut and 20 years later, the Reagan tax cut. He was Reagan’s Treasury undersecretary. I worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce, EPA, and now for the California Public Utilities Commission. My most recent expenditure of time as a volunteer was as co-founder of Buyblue.org, started right after the 2004 election to show people how to vote with our wallets, and not support the companies that use our money against us.
So now that we know how serious we are, could we all please have a serious conversation about what it will take to wrest Congress from the power of banks and corporations, which I call the marketocracy? What can we do that is realistic? How shall we work it? Because relying on getting corporate money out of politics and relying on bloggers to do the journalism until we need to make a living is not sufficient to save democracy. And people, that is really only part of what is at stake. In fact, the marketocracy has brought us global warming, and the future of this earth and its ability to sustain us is at stake. So can we talk? I’ll be happy to meet you any time, any where.
Very truly yours,
Martha Elizabeth Ture