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Thursday, October 17, 2013

WE THE PEOPLE DEMAND POLITICAL REFORM TO PREVENT ANOTHER SUSPENSION OF DEMOCRACY

This post is a copy of the petition I created on Credo, found here:
We the People, in order to prevent one party, one group, or one philosophy from holding our government hostage against the will of the greater populace, ask Congress, as the duly elected representatives of the American people, to enact into law in the Constitution of the United States, the requirement that no individual, no person, no corporation, no group, no entity however entitled or constructed, be allowed to sway the tide of political influence such that it unbalances the scales of democracy as we have recently seen borne out by the Tea Party’s actions, resulting in the government shutdown and the threat of debt default.

This cannot be allowed to happen again.

These actions have cost the People of the United States billions of dollars, amity among neighbors, and the respect of the world’s financial institutions. These actions were taken by a tiny minority of the wealthiest US citizens, the so-called 1%, against the good governance and common weal regarding all who call themselves Americans.

This cannot be allowed to happen again.

These actions have jeopardized the good credit ratings of the American people, the default of whose loans, caused by the actions of a few, would have magnified the debt and deficit. 

These actions were taken by a handful of proxies, elected to Congress by the people of their districts in the mistaken belief that they acted for the good of all, but whose actions served none but the purposes of their wealthy benefactors. 

This cannot be allowed to happen again.


We the People implore our Federal elected officials, the Congress of the United States of America, to cause to be written into the Constitution, such law or laws as needed to prevent the purchase of political power by any body, singular or plural, representing business, labor, government, religion, or other philosophy. 

To this end, we ask Congress to enshrine in the Constitution an Amendment such that no body, singular or plural, may contribute to any political cause, party, political action committee, or other group whose interests lay in changing the course of American politics, more than the sum of $100 at any time during any election cycle, and that a publicly available list be made accessible for viewing, both physically and online, kept updated, and clearly posted for viewing by one click from an organization's splash page on their website.

Why is this important?

As we've recently seen, wealthy special interests have commandeered the process of governance and wrested control from the majority. This has to stop. Already, during this one shutdown, we will lose an estimated $28B. If we had gone through the debt default, every person in the United States would have to pay more for everything they buy, for loans, for credit, and for general goods, since everything we buy is affected by credit at some point. 

All because a wealthy few persuaded their Tea Party proxies in Congress to hijack the normal diplomatic route to governance and suspend democracy.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Government Shutdown and Debt Ceiling Dickheadery 'Splained

This blog post is in response to John Cassidy's article from 8 October 2013 in the New Yorker, found here.

Why America Doesn't Need a Stock-Market Crash:

John Cassidy makes some good points in this article, but his conclusion is wrong. He suggests that a major market drop would convince Congress to get its act together, and he's right, it would. And that's precisely why we don't want this to happen - the stock-market already wields too much power over Congress, witnessed by the fact that banksters still infest the back alleys, boardrooms, and other places of ill repute on Wall Street. If the market had no power over government, things like the Great Recession, a tool created to crash the middle-class and damage the machine that threatened to place the upper-middle uncomfortably close - within arm's reach - to the least wealthy of the ultrawealthy, couldn't happen. 

Oh, sure, a lot of people lost a lot of money in the Great Recession, but here's how that works: If I have $1000 and you have $100000 and we each lose 90% of our wealth, I'm down to $100 while you still have $10000. Now, I have to work for whatever shit wage you want to pay, buy your shit products whose prices didn't drop when the F(ing) Bomb went off in the market, and you profit from...well...every part of the crash; you still sell just as much crap at the same prices, and I have to take a second job - also at shit wages - to make ends meet, churning out more crap products...and the great market Ouroboros swallows its tail and the cycle continues like a giant printing press minting specie and banknotes for the market whose power is increased because of the crash.

A crash is good for the market and increases power over government because, ultimately, the government has to go to the markets with hat in hand and beg a loan to pay itself. 

Some of these financial guys are standing too close to the elms to see the forest. Hand the market a crash and you hand it the keys to the Treasury, and...oh, hell...do I really need to explain this any further?

I didn't think so.