18 Comments

Thank you . The truth will set us free, but first it will make us miserable. We need to move on from the misery.

Fight like hell to get our Democracy back. Vote.

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founding

Ending "Money Is Speech" Is the Only Way to Restore Democracy -- yes -- it was such an obviously insane notion to begin with. OK now I'll go read the piece, but thanks for the typically blunt and on-point headline, Thom!

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Oct 21, 2022·edited Oct 21, 2022

That and corporate constitutional personhood. We can only restore/create democracy when We the People get to vote for candidates who represent us. And that starts, not with general elections, nor with primaries. It begins with eliminating candidate recruitment based on their ability to self-fund, and it requires the elimination of leaderships' efforts to stop progressives from running.

Ranked Choice Voting can help, but won't do the job all by itself. We really need a constitutional amendment that will clarify for good that corporations are not persons with the constitutional rights of real, living, breathing individuals and that the spending of money on election campaigns is not free speech. In the last several congresses, the only proposal that does both is House Joint Resolution 48.

With its passage and ratification, democracy is possible but not inevitable. We have a major problem that lies behind those two legal doctrines -- BIG MONEY. The very existence of BIG MONEY is a major part of this authoritarian dilemma. Monopolization and neoliberalism (AKA consolidation or concentration) have created, without correction of any serious nature by Congress, a continually declining middle class and a massive chasm between rich and poor, probably the largest ever (among white Euros) in this country's history. BIG BUSINESS must be broken up into pieces that do not dominate every city of any size and every rural area, especially agricultural, in the country. Then we can pass laws restricting corporate money from infecting campaigns of all sorts and limit individual, trust and family foundations from screwing up the works.

That still leaves the Marbury v. Madison decision that needs reversal and the restriction of the SCOTUS' jurisdiction to matters of "Law and Equity" as stated in the Consitution.

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Thom,

In blue states if we begin chipping away at Citizens United (in the same manor forced birth did with Roe) we can tear it down. The blue states are the engines of our economy, and in due time residents of red states will wonder why they have no control of their legislatures. This is an easy lift in light of the right's embrace of states rights. Even the most ardent Trumper thinks money should be chased from politics. The question is: Can we defeat the National Association of Broadcasters who will not want their ox gored/cash cow slaughtered?

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For Trick or Treating this Halloween, hand out Democracy Awareness Möbius Ribbons with your candy and cookies.

One Simple Trick to save our democracy is believe in America and Vote this November 8th! We are only a few Senators away from filibuster reform and repealing Citizens United.

#DemocracyAwareness 🇺🇸♾

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This is precisely why I’ve said since Bush 2 that today’s GOP isn’t conservative, they are #CORPservative - in servitude to corporations and billionaires. They cling to unjust power by being pious with a corporate bias. They’ve crafted a #SwissCheeseChristianity conveniently absent of The Golden Rule and “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” This is how hate and division have been harnessed to manipulate the electorate into voting against their best interests while payola gushes towards politicians on the take in a feedback loop of greed.

These dynamics have been around for decades, but thanks to the Citizens United SCOTUS decision these threats have been optimized, crafted for the greatest maximization of the GOP’s secret mantra: “Move all the money to us!” It’s not just the tax cuts; this model also features the starvation of social programs, the EPA, and regulatory agencies preserving workplace safety. And without restrictions on monopoly capitalism, every Main St. in America will continue to see legacy private businesses closed for good.

Those are the primary goals, with hate necessary to harness the electorate to them. And thus the fight against a woman’s right to chose, along with valuing the individuality of everyone and their lifestyle choices, and even the freedom of expression in books, all are just effective collateral damage to help suck the hope out of everyone who seeks to move America towards her best incarnation.

Oddly, all this power has come primarily from a clearly hypocritical stance on abortion, where the consideration of the welfare of a baby conveniently ends when he or she can actually cry. To Republicans, after its first breath, a child is reduced to a potential burden on society. Otherwise 6 weeks of paid maternal leave, low cost daycare and pre-K, and a livable minimum wage for the new parents would also be priorities. They aren’t.

Today’s GOP could ultimately be judged as #PlanetKILLERS, the ones who ditched democracy for #RepubloFascism and pushed humanity past the brink of civilized survival.

Unless we keep the House and the Senate in a couple of weeks.

Imagine the euphoria of a 53 to 47 split in the Senate, where the filibuster is replaced by the talking filibuster, including a 48-hour window of holding the floor, in the first week of January, 2023. The shackles will be off for progressive changes to cement the rights of women to control their own bodies, moving quickly away from fossil fuels, ending all means of preventing actual democracy, and breaking up the monopolies so we finally shed the worst permutations of capitalism.

This shift in our destiny will come to be seen as deploying #22ndCenturyThinking. And the proper taxing of billionaires and corporations will fund everything from free healthcare to Universal Basic Income to curb homelessness. This is the future that we know we’re capable of. Put it this way:

Vote Blue for Your Children’s Children

Vote Republican for Your Boss’s Boss

But this is not to say that Republicans can’t have a voice in our best future. Democrats need to not vilify the tens of millions that got caught up in the Trumpian fervor. Instead, show the kindness of an intervention in many cases and state calmly the following:

“The Republican Party that you grew up with vanished. Anyone with a shred of integrity and an inclination towards honesty saw their careers ended in recent primaries. If you want that integrity back on your side of the aisle, you must purge all your current Republican representatives and remake your party with integrity at its core, without the hate and division because those things don’t yield America’s best intentions.”

We need all of America, or at least the 75 or 80 percent still capable of rational thought on politics, to work together on this next phase. As Democrats, we need this majority of self-described conservatives to see that their current leaders don’t demonstrate that legacy, they are #CORPservatives. By differentiating between these two factions, we give space to those who need to realize that they don’t need to become Democrats to vote blue for a couple of election cycles to purge the sludge from their party.

This is how we frame the path ahead. The choice couldn’t be clearer this #ROEvember. And with a blue Congress, ultimate justice will come to those who conspired to make secure, fair elections a quaint remnant of our heritage, one that could be blotted out over time.

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Just 10 minutes ago I saw a patient who was accompanied by a relative from Sweden. They pay higher taxes and of course receive health care and higher education and virtually no cost. Both parties have campaigned to scare Americans away from a national health care system and free higher education, which is why to have any semblance of a democracy we need a change in the media landscape that largely supports such narratives and betrays critical thinking in favor of political expediency and profit.

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At this late date, word-salad political punditry is even more useless than normal. The purported "intellectual" debate is down to the coals. Politicians on both sides are on their well-padded knees desperately pleading with their hopelessly ignorant constituents to please, please, please get off their fat asses and vote, goddammit! Oh yeah, and send lots of money!

Nobody can predict the future. After all, the polls and pundits were famously wrong in 2016. But if (and when -- 16 days) they're right and Democrats barely hold the Senate while losing the House, fully expect a supercharged shit show for the next two years.

And then it's on to the White House in 2024 ...YEEEHAAAHHH!!!

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The FOR THE PEOPLE ACT is essential to reverse our backsliding democracy because, without it, the morbidly rich will continue to exploit the legal fictions that they bought from SCOTUS. If you assume that the purpose of election campaigns is to conduct a public debate between qualified candidates, our election processes must be 100% publicly funded and the candidates must get to use equal amounts of money to conduct their campaigns. In addition, these candidates must be able to receive 100% matching public funds to debate and rebut private-sector campaigning and electioneering regardless of the media. Those matching funds would cover the cost of refuting the propaganda paid for by private sector opponents (especially religious institutions). I believe that the oligarchs and billionaires who do things adverse to our rights and communities’ interests won’t spend as much as they do now if they know that the targets of their grift get matching public funds to rebut their corporatist BS.

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Every time a Republican politician wants to talk about election security, the Dems could counter by saying they want to talk about it too. The whole "money is speech" is the real basis for election theft, not a few former felons in Florida. This is the type of argument we should be hearing on the floors of Congress and the state legislatures. Pounding home the hijacking of elections by the injection of dark money and foreign influence needs to be part of every Democratic debate.

Dems, let's point out MAGA Republicans are so busy vilifying their neighbors, poll workers, and their duly elected county clerk, that they have let the real election theft and corruption flourish.

I don't want to hear my money speaking, nor do I want to hear from politicians bought by money from Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia.

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This article is so compelling, and the comparisons with other countries demonstrate that our country could truly function for all Americans. In particular, I love the idea of every child born in America being given an identification that is a combination birth certificate and voter registration!

Tom Taft

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Speaking of money…

“U.S. budget deficit cut in half for biggest decrease ever amid Covid spending declines.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/21/us-budget-deficit-cut-in-half-for-biggest-decrease-ever-amid-covid-spending-declines.html

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Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022

Yes, Thom, you are right. But I see no possible avenue of reversing this. Money is power. And power begets money. The FTPA was a drop in the bucket compared to what we need, and even it couldn't pass. We on the left make small gains here and there, but by and large we are neutered, and have no control or influence any more.

IMHO, there is only one solution. Secession. We are so polarized, completely divided between the left and the right- the only nuance is there is a centrist left and a progressive left, and a centrist right and the MAGA right. But largely our politics is strongly divided in two, and these two sides are irreconcilable. And these two divisions are strongly characterized geographically. While we might be able to return a democracy to, say, Cal-Or-Wa, it will never happen in the South. I say let them have a fascist government in the old Confederacy, and Nebraska, and Idaho. We will build our own society.

But that will never happen either, so I'm moving to Canada.

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I live in Oregon. As my sister likes to say, not my problem. The biggest downside to secession is that there are people on the left in MAGA states who may get stranded like being on a desert island. That is an issue. All I can suggest is that, after we form the Western Democratic Republic of America, we guarantee refugee status and relocation assistance to everyone who wants to flee the remaining US.

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