Sorry for the delay but I wanted to think about this one a bit-this topic is one that is important to me. I am not one of DU's deepest thinkers nor am I one of her political wonks.... I am over 60 so like most folks my age I do have my strong opinions, here is mine.
In discussions with my conservative friends, it becomes apparent that we share a deeply held feeling that the American citizenry should be the ones in charge of our government. They all agree that currently this is not the situation. When asked, they quickly admit that the politicians they vote into power do anything but the bidding of the citizenry.
As we here at DU see it, Republican politicians and many of our own Democratic politicians represent the major corporations that lobby them ($$) to do their bidding. Obviously if that politician admitted that it served the corporitists first and the citizenry last, that politician would find itself looking for a new career. This tells me that most of the citizenry prefer to elect politicians that represent their needs moreso than the needs of the market. There is even a California proposal to force their politicians to wear patches showing off which corporations they must represent, a proposal I suspect won't get much traction among those politicians.
For me there is something deeper, something from a specific perspective that I would discuss here: equality. Of course equality gets much discussion, especially recently but it doesn't seem to get much discussion from the viewpoint of our democracy. I believe that my input into our democracy is 100% 'equal' to any other citizen's vote. Religion, race, gender, financial status and even imo criminal status should not alter that equal input into our government. I don't always get agreement on this notion from those I say this to but so far, nobody has told me that having the 'best government money can buy' was a better idea!
Having that 'best government money can buy' undermines our democracy. It translates into those with the most money having a stronger voice into our government than I do-we are not equal! Let me be clear, my issue with economic inequality is not one of the economic distribution itself, that is a whole different topic, my issue of inequality here is in the citizenry having an unequal input into our democracy depending on their monetary worth. It would not surprise me to learn that most citizens of our country agree, they treasure their notion/paradigm of equality into our democracy every bit as much as I do.
I listened to the democratic debates last night with Todd and Maddow moderating. BTW I thought those two did quite well, far better than expected. Here was the most important item I took away from that debate: One candidate told me that it was ok for politicians to take money from 'the market' saying that as long as that money could not be proven to purchase influence then that was ok. I challenge our fellow DUers reading this: if a Republican politician said that would you be ok with it? Would you be Ok if our current Speaker of The House made the exact same assertion?
Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Military Industrial Complex, well fill in the blank from the corporate world, they march to We The Peoples drums, anything less is not a democracy and we citizens will fight for our democracy! That's what this fight-this 'revolution' is about!
Thank you malaise for letting me post my 10,000th post on this topic. With our democracy, there is little our society or We The People can't do given enough time. Without that democracy, there is very little society can do for itself while being controlled by the market.
I'll choose the people thank you.
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