{"id":75516,"date":"2014-04-05T03:34:32","date_gmt":"2014-04-05T07:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=75516"},"modified":"2014-04-05T20:32:42","modified_gmt":"2014-04-06T00:32:42","slug":"bent-and-bleeding-but-not-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/planet-waves-fm\/bent-and-bleeding-but-not-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Bent And Bleeding, But Not Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Representative democracy is suffering a bloodletting. Those with the love of money and power, greedy to see it die a death from the thousand cuts that began under Nixon, found purchase in the growing fundamentalist movement under Reagan and have, with a fanatic devotion to duty, delivered us into the hands of the oh-so-elite one percent. Worse, according to lefty pundit and activist, Cenk Uyger,\u00a0thanks to a corruptly ideological Supreme court, that is now\u00a0only 0.00024 percent. Those with extreme wealth can contribute as pleases them, and pay well for the power they purchase. Uyger repeats Thomas Jefferson’s warning, “The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”<\/p>\n

\"Political In the summer of 1981, Ronald Reagan made a public showing of good faith negotiations with overworked and underpaid members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), who had staged a strike. PATCO was one of a slim handful of unions that had supported Reagan’s election to the presidency, personally assured that he would be\u00a0their friend and advocate<\/a>\u00a0well into the future. Little did they dream that only a short while later, his administration — poised on opening a vein into the circulatory system of American populism — would pull the plug on their demands. He was sorry to have to do it, he advised them, but he was invoking the Taft-Hartley Act, which supersedes the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act to enable injunctions against strikes that endanger public health and safety. In short order, Reagan fired all 11,345 air traffic controllers, replacing them with half that number of hastily-trained scabs. St. Ronnie the Reagan had busted the unions.<\/p>\n

That was the beginning of the decline of worker protections in the USA, the eroding of bargaining power, and a watershed moment in the GOP’s heartfelt desire to destroy the labor movement and shift power back into the waiting hands of big business. In the 1950s, around 35 percent of the country belonged to a union, providing stability to the middle class and ensuring worker rights and benefits. Though the individual unions were sometimes heavy-handed and belligerent, corruptible and defiant, they wielded enormous power. Their demands alarmed the business community, who knew the union bosses held the winning hand, lest they direct their members to lay down their tools in solidarity and strike, ending manufacturing production. It was a fiscal stand-off that built the middle class.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At their height of power, unions provided a no-nonsense buffer between American employers’ tendency to gain excessive profit\u00a0while providing despicable working conditions and meager salaries, and the needs of a united workforce of skilled laborers and their families for a decent life. The decline of unions in American culture and the rise of public lethargy regarding labor issues have led us to the worst income inequality of any country in the developed world. Our incomes continue to fall while corporate profits soar.\u00a0Without advocates, those with jobs won’t rock the boat, despite the fact that it’s slowing sinking out of sight.<\/p>\n

Stagnation of personal income has widened the breach between the business class and the working class, leading to a political system that has been weakened unto anemia from decades of chip-chip-chipping away at the laws and regulations that kept corruption at bay. Assertions from FOX News that if you have an air conditioner or a cell phone, you are not poor, raise the specter of the “let them eat cake” era of elitist excess that lost many a plutocrat his head. We have regressed back into an American Gilded Age, and maybe this accounts for Hillary Clinton’s\u00a0recent commentary<\/a>\u00a0that “excessive partisanship flowing through the nation’s political system is causing the U.S. to march backwards instead of forward.” (I hope every once in awhile she busts the Big Dog’s balls for NAFTA, but I’m not holding my breath.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps there wouldn’t have been a NAFTA, shipping jobs off willy-nilly and driving a stake through the heart of American manufacturing, if unions had continued to be the gold standard for the working class. They now account for an all-time low of 11.3 percent of all workers. Limits of their power are evident in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s shameful yet\u00a0successful coup on collective bargaining<\/a>\u00a0in the public sector, leading to a serious decline in public works and employees nationwide. And perhaps if we still had hard-nosed advocates for worker rights and salaries, we wouldn’t be sending\u00a0chickens to China<\/a>\u00a0where they can be processed for mere pennies and shipped home in frozen cargo holds, to be sold to unsuspecting citizens sans labeling (and let me simply add, buyer beware!)<\/p>\n

If the people still had an advocate, as they did when unions protected their jobs — if they still had a voice, not silenced by those who game the system with purchased influence and favor — if they still had the guaranteed government protections and corporate oversight they could depend on —\u00a0 perhaps the percentage of people relying on government benefits in the last decade would not have reached a historic high. You remember them, don’t you? The “takers?” Otherwise known as over 50 percent of the United States population?<\/p>\n

Now, believe it or not, I’m not necessarily pro-union, but I am pro-fair. Over the last forty or so years, all the rational laws put in place to protect the public have been systematically eliminated, bit by bit, pecked away, mostly when we were not looking. Without the unions, there isn’t “fair” to be found in the workplace. And if this is what the Republican privatization process looks like, following the phantasmic whims of the money hounds and the free market, it’s no wonder we’re all keeping a low profile, awaiting\u00a0the next footnote to our great national decline, the next disconnect with rationality.<\/p>\n

Like the one we got\u00a0this week, thanks to four right-wing Supreme Court activists and one swing vote justice who hasn’t got the sense God gave a goose.<\/p>\n

The GOP, which has made an art form of projecting its own internal demons onto others, has gone at every Democratic Supreme Court candidate, sniffing at them like bomb dogs, seeking some sign of “activism from the bench.” It should be no surprise then, that the Roberts court is the most activist court in recent memory, shaving away the edges of established laws they dislike and whittling away an earlier century’s progress. At issue in the recent ruling on\u00a0McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission<\/em>\u00a0was the amount of money a wealthy person could contribute, should s\/he wish to give the maximum to each candidate in any given party.\u00a0Citizens United <\/em>had already established a definition of “corruption” that looked past the obvious and decided that huge giving was in no way a corrupting influence between the giver and the receiver of such largesse.<\/p>\n

Justice Kennedy, ironically and unlike his fellows, is not ideologically predisposed to favor conservative issues exclusively. But in the 2010 Citizens United case, he revealed his disconnect with reality on the ground after the Bush years (which, in my opinion, changed everything) by writing, “Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” and, “That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.”<\/p>\n

Ummm<\/em>, wait — say what? NOT cause them to lose faith? This man doesn’t just live in a gated community, he’s cloistered! And that was just in\u00a0Citizens United<\/em>. In McCutcheon<\/em>, Kennedy has once more decided that millions of dollars passed into the eager hands of political candidates won’t result in the appearance of corruption, let alone pay-for-play itself. The cap on aggregate political giving has been raised to as much as 3.5 million dollars, argued\u00a0Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This has been likened to money laundering, where the action of the middleman washes intent and culpability out of the end product. No harm, no foul, decided the right-leaning Justices, because — money equals speech and corporations are people, and dark money and PAC money and yadda, ad infinitum.<\/p>\n

Alito, Roberts and Scalia get the full brunt of my disgust. They’re corporatists, and while ultimately, I can’t judge their intention, I can surely disapprove their method. Here’s what\u00a0Jon Stewart has to say<\/a>\u00a0to Scalia, ditto from me. And Thomas, who wanted to eliminate ALL caps? Who can explain that one? White coat, sleeves that tie.<\/p>\n

Now, I expect that you and I can agree that money has corrupted our political system and that the only daylight we could have anticipated — given the rogue capitalism moving like a virus across the planet — was an enthusiastic demand for\u00a0renewal of campaign finance reform. But any defense of\u00a0McCain-Feingold<\/em>\u00a0restrictions on campaign contributions would no longer fly under the\u00a0Citizens United-McCutcheon<\/em>\u00a0corruption standard. Thanks to five of the nine, we can stick a fork in campaign finance reform, dear to the heart of liberal (then) Senator Russ Feingold and maverick-conservative Senator John McCain, who attempted to limit the influence of money in elections with bi-partisan legislation. Dreams of public money limiting the obscene spending of an election year are behind us, at least for the moment.<\/p>\n

So what now? Amendment. We are left nothing else. I agree with Cenk Uygar, who tells us, “Every generation of Americans has amended the constitution that we may have a more perfect union. Except one. Us. We must get money out of politics. We must amend.”<\/p>\n

To that end, he and his fellows over at\u00a0The Young Turks<\/em>\u00a0have created a group known as Wolf PAC, its only purpose to amend the constitution in order to “get the corrupting influence of money out of politics.” Uyger is dead serious about what he calls its “unstoppable mission;” his group is already fleshed out with volunteers and a history of wins. And if the thought of amending the constitution feels too big to wrap your arms around, consider the\u00a0specifics of his pitch<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Our founding fathers were geniuses. They put a certain provision in the constitution because they knew that a day like this would come. We have never had to use it yet. But we have threatened it many times and that threat has been incredibly effective just as many times. The clause is Article V of the constitution and it says that you don’t necessarily need 2\/3 of Congress to propose an amendment. You can have 2\/3 of the states circumvent a corrupted Washington and propose a convention to get the same amendment. You don’t need Washington at all. 34 states propose a convention for this specific issue. 38 states ratify that amendment. And we have our democracy back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sounds do-able, easier than getting the gawd-forsaken congress to agree on anything. As Uyger says in his article, stranger things have happened (like women getting the vote). You can read the plan, volunteer, sign an amendment petition, and\u00a0contribute skills or resources here<\/a>. At minimum, read what\u00a0the group\u00a0has to say. We don’t have a lot of options now. We’re painted into a corner, and we all know how dangerous that can be.<\/p>\n

This nation is built on a triad of equal powers: the executive, the judicial and the legislative. The judicial and legislative have lost all credibility, and the executive is, to put it mildly, struggling. When all three legs of the republic begin to twitch, it’s time for the citizens to rethink their priorities.<\/p>\n

We Americans are a reformist society, constantly changing and morphing into the next iteration of ourselves. In the eye of the hurricane that is the coming Grand Cross, the activation of awareness of our shattered political system is only one of the important insights we can pull into our heart chakra, flood with the alchemy of love, determined to offer ourselves a better solution and a kinder, more productive future than the one we’ve made thus far. Now is when we must act together, to help heal our world.<\/p>\n

The daily exchanges of energy we read about here at Planet Waves show us a detailed picture of the options being offered up by the universe. We’ve come to that point where we each must choose to step into our power, for the sake of all we hold dear. We think it’s politics we’re discussing here, but it isn’t. Remove the political from the conversation, and we’re talking about community health and education, mutual challenges and neighborhood causes, the well-being of acquaintances and loved ones. We’re talking about feeding ourselves and our neighbor, about flourishing or foundering. These are topics we all share concern about, investment in, politics be damned. Let’s each bring our best to the table, starting here and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Representative democracy is suffering a bloodletting. Those with the love of money and power, greedy to see it die a death from the thousand cuts that began under Nixon, found purchase in the growing fundamentalist movement under Reagan and have, with a fanatic devotion to duty, delivered us into … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1735],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}