By Ma Kettle (Carol van Strum)
For five years, I have signed every petition that comes into my e-mail, have written and called legislators on every occasion demanded, have joined marches and sent donations I couldn’t afford — sadly, with effectively zero results. For five years, despite massive marches, on-line campaigns, call and write-in campaigns, despite revelations of treasonous lies, corruption, and crime in the highest places, NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
We are still murdering wholesale in Iraq, we are still holding prisoners without due process, our civil rights have been unilaterally nullified, we still have the most ineffective and expensive health care system in the world, poverty continues to increase, nothing is being done to stop the juggernaut of global warming — the list could go on and on. As if that were not bad enough, any hope of change through the ballot box is nullified by rampant, unchecked fraud in both electronic voting systems and the election process itself.
The reason we have no impact, no matter how large and growing a majority we are, is that the federal government in its entirety is controlled not by the electoral process but by and for corporate money. Furthering this usurpation is corporate control of the media, thereby literally manufacturing both our consent to be governed and the electoral process itself.