Ask Auntie Pinko
June 6 , 2002

Dear Auntie Pinko,

As individual voters, the general population can in no way compete with corporations in their ability to influence legislation. In your opinion, what tools do we voters have collectively to effectively reverse this trend of having to live with the whims of big business?

Sincerely,

Kim
Pismo Beach, CA

 
Dear Kim,

Five stars to you for asking what may be the most important question anyone has asked Auntie since I started writing this column for the nice folks at Democratic Underground. It's a question bigger than this website, bigger than the current political climate, bigger even than the American nation. How can the relatively powerless take on the relatively powerful, and win?

The Greeks of Athens in the fifth century BCE (Before the Christian Era) had an inkling of the answer-they realized that no one person can ever be as powerful as the united will and action of a multitude of people. Their attempts to apply this concept, albeit in a painfully limited way, produced such a radical change in how humans thought about themselves that twenty-five hundred years later we are still tinkering with the notion.

But it's a very big subject and the long history and many related topics go far beyond the very practical spirit of your question. So let's stick with that. Theoretically, in America at the dawn of the third millennium CE we have some form of political self-determination. Yet it always seems that in our system, money (of which businesses have a great deal) speaks with the loudest voice. What can we do about that?

Auntie Pinko suggests that we look for successful models. There have been times when the American people have been able to trump big business' dollar signs. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, no one would have bet a nickel on the chance that laws enabling workers to form unions and bargain collectively would ever be passed. In the middle of the twentieth century, the idea that a "war" hugely profitable to the military-industrial complex could be ended because a lot of ordinary people thought it was wrong was laughed at.

But in both cases, the will of the people triumphed over the will of the stock market. That's the good news. How did it happen? Well, that's the bad news. It took two things: Organization, and time.

Organization isn't easy. It requires people to make sacrifices of their personal energy, time, and money. Sometimes they have to put aside some cherished part of their personal agenda in order to achieve another part that is equally cherished by their neighbors. It means that instead of going home and relaxing after a hard day, they have to go home and then work again, this time on the organizing-meeting, writing, talking, traveling, whatever organization demands.

And the really discouraging part, for us instant-gratification-conditioned Americans, is that even with all the effort and all the organizing, change doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't even happen in a year, or two years, or ten years. America is a huge country. Trying to change its course is like trying to steer a vast river-you have to wade in and get wet, dig and dig and dig some more, despair when a flood undoes your work but bend your back to the task of doing it again. And ultimately you can succeed.

I'm sorry I couldn't come up with an easier answer for you, Kim, but Auntie Pinko doesn't want to respond to such an important question with anything less than the most realistic, truthful assessment my experience can encompass. Thank you for asking!