New America Foundation's Barry Lynn (author of Cornered), has a very important article in Washington Monthly called:

"Who Broke American Jobs."

In my view, all of our problems, from campaign financing, to media consolidation, to the government dysfunctionalism and hyper partisanship that is breaking down anything that ever made American a worthwhile experiment, can all be seen as breaking not just American Jobs, but America itself.

A rampant, unchecked monopolization of nearly everything has powered a winner-take-all, crony Capitalism Gone Wild environment that infects every aspect of this nation and our world.

And the giant corporations behind it all are perfectly happy to have us shrug, feel it's beyond our control, or just some containable by-product of an invisible hand that will sweep us along and everything will turn out well in the end. Uh, ya..  good luck with that.

So inform yourself:  Watch the video of Barry on Washington Journal today.  Force other people to watch it. Capitalism provides useful tools for providing the basic goods and services of our civilization.  But this criminally stupid conservative myth that capitalism can only exist in this totally unregulated state is as childish as it is reckless and irresponsible. Only a suicidal culture would allow it to continue this way, especially after a global economic meltdown has just illustrated nicely just how bad things became while we were playing video games, listening to iPods, learning how to blog, and building Wal-Marts and Starbucks on every god damn street corner.

We have to understand this basic change to how things are now working and find some way to make them work differently; to reinsert some of the checks and balances that once existed. Nothing less than the future of this country depends on it.

Video

On C-Span's Washington Journal, March 8th 2010 — Barry Lynn Discussing the national and global monopoly problem, and how Wal-Mart and other big US corporations are driving our bus, and how we might stop them.

There IS hope: Be absolutely sure to see the end, where he discusses how WE have the power to control the corporations.

Other reading

Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction

Through stories of real people and real industries, Barry C. Lynn shows how monopolies threaten independent businesses, squelch innovation, degrade the quality and safety of basic products, destabilize our most vital industrial and financial systems, and destroy the very fabric of democracy. Avoiding the partisan cant that has poisoned virtually every important American debate in recent years, he explains how, over the past three decades, leaders of both parties and thinkers across the political spectrum have encouraged and enabled the growth of monopolies.

US Chamber Builds Political Operations

The LA Times reports today on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s growing “large-scale grass-roots political operation” that is being “funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.” In 2009, the Chamber spent $144 million on lobbying and grassroots organizing, “well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.”

About Barry Lynn

Barry C. Lynn is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written for Harper's Magazine, the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the American Prospect, among others. He has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, the BBC, and C-SPAN. He is the author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation.


This is the very essay I was going to try and tackle this week. These fine folks have done a superb job of writing it for me.  You must read it, and then see my note that follows:

How To Do Effective Political Activism: What Always Worked And What Never Did — by Peterson Park Blog

While young liberals and progressives were sitting in coffee shops tweeting, emailing and updating their Facebook status, embracing the tools of the “new activism,” tea baggers were disrupting town hall meetings and staging credible rallies and marches on the halls of power. While the left embraced the delusion that new media technologies have changed the rules of political and social activism, mossback conservatives and libertarians were effectively applying the same techniques of political protest that have worked and worked and worked since the dawn of history.

Now please..

Don't just read the above essay, maybe make a bookmark, and then promptly forget it. Take a few minutes and think about how many you might share it with by employing just the smallest amount of effort.

I don't just mean Retweeting it. Got email lists?  Got phone? Got a neighbor? Got a blog?

The social side of social media makes it so easy to organize voices, but it's getting those voices into the streets where they are really heard by politicians, employers and the media that will really make the difference. And that's the hard part. But social media makes it so much easier than it ever was before.  It provides the multiple megaphones with which we can drive the herd, and the herd can provide the warm bodies in the streets. But that herd must still go there when called upon. And the only way it will, is when it's been educated, enraged, engaged and excited. That's where YOU come in.

You personally may not be able to take to the streets, but you can compensate for that by making so much noise that it helps fire up so many others who might.

Wingnuts get active, and it's why they win. Even when they don't hit the streets, they keep their conversations and narratives alive with constant regurgitation and redistribution, which reinforces all their memes and messages.  It sinks in. The left–and all of us on it–must learn to do this too.

It's not that we don't all want to do it. It's that we simply DON'T do it.  We simply have to find a way to change that.  And very, very quickly. The only way we can start… is to just start.

Look at what @MLsif just do with #demandQuestionTime. That entire effort, as described here,  http://bit.ly/9uTPTU took just a few days. Yes, it's only an online effort at present, but he could very easily issue a call to action which might translate into action offline. It's just one small example of the powerful weapons we have. We just need to start using them. 

SO DON'T JUST NOD YOUR HEAD. 

  • Do your part. (Any part is better than no part at all).
  • Tell someone. Educate, Enrage, Engage and Excite someone
  • Make our narrative happen (and stop echoing theirs so often).
     
  • PROGRESSIVE PASSIVITY is what allowed the right to seize this county.
  • Change that, change our world.

Background

The Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission is seen by many as probably the most frightening and destructive decision in the history of the Supreme Court and the United States of America. Far worse than the Dred Scott decision, which was horrific and some believe led directly to the Civil War. Here is some reading to help frame this fiasco. I'll update it as more gets said. Citizen's United vs. Federal Election Commission (Overview)

The Court's decision struck down a provision of the McCain-Feingold Act that prevented corporations and unions from spending freely from their own treasuries in the final days of political campaigns.

How It Came To This (See: The Powell Memo, Here) How the Corporate Personhood Lie Became the Working Law of the Land – -Thom Hartmann

Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t just be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”

Analysis and Commentary

Citizens ruling: an intellectually dishonest power grab — by Ruth Marcus *Must Read*

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

That the majority would stoop to this claim underscores the weakness of its case — and the audacity of the result it has inflicted on the political process.

How will SCOTUS decision affect corporate media? – Media Matters for America

How the Supreme Court's decision will affect the corporate media's policy governing corporate political advocacy remains unclear, which is precisely why I contacted the major cable and broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC/MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News — with a few simple questions. First, will the networks announce clear policies for corporate political advertising? Second, and of equal if not greater importance, do the networks' corporate parent companies plan on taking advantage of the high court's decision by spending money for and against candidates for office?
 

Thom Hartmann:  Welcome to Mussolini's America

In a ruling that has overwhelming implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that prevents corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.In a 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case,  the door is now wide open for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

This Week In Crazy — Andrew Leonard, Salon

"Thomas went along with the majority in agreeing that corporations and unions can once more be permitted to spend freely on political issues, thus driving a stake through the heart of the democratic process in the United States. But he dissented in part, because he didn't think the ruling went far enough. Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them."

How the Citizens United Case Affects Money & Politics — Sunlight Foundation

Ellen Miller writes:  The ramifications of today’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC are breathtaking – opening the floodgates of political money such as we have never seen before.  If you thought Congress was ‘for sale’ to the highest bidder, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of our campaign finance laws is demanded as a result of today’s decision.

Public Interest Groups Condemn Court's Ruling on Money and Elections – Freepress.org

The public interest groups say that, since the late 1970s, a divided Supreme Court has transformed the First Amendment into a powerful tool for corporations seeking to evade democratic control and sidestep sound public welfare measures. For the first two centuries of the American republic, the groups argue, corporations did not have First Amendment rights to limit the reach of democratically-enacted regulations.

Video Blogging Heads: Mark Schmitt and Heather Gerken

Heather seems to agree with Salon's Glenn Greenwald, that the court "got it right," and that it's not the end of the world. But both of them seem to feel that things can't be much worse than they already are. I think both of them are unfamiliar with what Blackrock and the Swiftboat Funding Network are all about, and how this decision completely removes any remaining complications in their devious strategy of empowering any 3rd rate partisan flake to spend unlimited amounts of money without having to worry about the messy business of message crafting or media distribution.

24 States’ Laws Open to Attack After Campaign Finance Ruling — NYTimes

“One day the Constitution of Colorado is the highest law of the state,” said Robert F. Williams, a law professor at Rutgers University. “The next day it’s wastepaper.” The states that explicitly prohibit independent expenditures by unions and corporations will be most affected by the ruling. The decision, however, has consequences for all states, since they are now effectively prohibited from adopting restrictions on corporate and union spending on political campaigns.

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment

What Can Be Done

That's still shaking out. I will be posting regular updates as they come in.

Laurence Tribe on Citizen's United and What Might Be Done

But there will be plenty of time to dissect the several lengthy opinions in this case and to opine on the merits, and it’s not my purpose in this brief comment to add to that growing body of commentary. I would say only that I share neither the jubilant sense that the First Amendment has scored a major triumph over misbegotten censorship nor the apocalyptic sense that the Court has ushered in an era of corporate dominance that threatens to drown out the voices of all but the best-connected and to render representative democracy all but meaningless.

Citizens United and Transparency: A Look Ahead — Dan Schuman (Sunlight Foundation)

Looking to transparency — disclosure of who funded the ads — only Justice Thomas (who dissents in part) would strike down measures requiring disclosure of donors. But the majority and minority have very different views on the usefulness of transparency in addressing money-related problems. They also leave open a big loophole to knock down transparency laws in the future.

What You Can Do To Fight

Sign every one of the petitions you see that support those who are taking on this fiasco.

Petition: Move to Amend (The Constitution)

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. Be sure to see who backs this petition, including Bill Moyers.

Petition: DCCC/Alan Grayson's Effort

We have filed six bills to reverse this assault, the "Save Our Democracy" platform. Sign this petition today, and show your support for saving our democracy. Together, we will move these bills forward and prevent the sale of our government to the highest bidder.

Petition: Moveon.org Petition: Public Citizen

Humor

Dont' Sell Out America (Funnyordie)

Related

What George Carlin Had To Say On All This (R.I.P. George)