[Editor's note: Richard Galloway has been a tireless activist for the Network of Spiritual Progressives. His article below adds to the discussion of our forthcoming strategy conference in D.C. June 11-14, 2010. After you read it, please read some of the specific proposals we have about Constitutional Amendments on our website: www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/20100216121716334 You'll see how his reasoning meshes with the strategy we've developed. We hope you'll come to our conference to jump start this process, but if you cannot come and cannot donate to help others with less money come at www.spiritualprogressives.org, you can at least take the Amendments to your friends and use them as a basis for a deep conversation about American politics.]
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The Levee Analogy
The Levy Analogy
“We Don’t Have Free Speech. We Can’t Afford It”
By Richard S. Galloway,
Founder
A levee is a barrier designed to hold back the destruc-tive power of floods and to protect all those who live and work on the other side. Creating levies to protect its citizens is an absolute requirement of our government. Enormously expensive, only government can create levies for the protection of our common good, virtually everything on the other side – homes, schools, businesses.... If levees fail, all is lost.
To be effective, it must be strong enough and high enough to block the worst flood imaginable. Many of our levies today are old and weak. Designed in earlier times, they are unable to stem today’s floods. They are being undermined by dead tree roots [rotting vegetation] and burrowing rodents [rats].
If you want to fix a levy, you have to fix the whole thing. It’s not enough to make it high enough in one place only to be overtopped in another or to fix one hole caused by “rot or rats” burrowing through it in only one place. It only takes one leak to destroy the whole levy.
Picture this: Imagine Congress surrounded by a levy – a very high, impenetrable wall made of money – with those who provide that money on the “protected” side and all the rest of us on the outside floundering in the flood. We’ve lost our homes, our jobs, our retirement funds… When it comes time for Congress to do the work of government…to create the laws which are supposed to serve and protect the public, who has access and their ear?
We all know who. They are the Wall Street brokers who wrote the toxic mortgages, refinanced them with bogus derivatives, took their money off the top and left the rest of us to pick up the pieces. They are also the ones who took our bailout tax dollars and then gave themselves $20 billion in bonuses. They are also the ones who are blocking meaningful health care reform in order to continue their record profits while people die for lack of proper medical treatment. The list goes on, but you know the rest.
There is a strong levee made of dollars around Congress, but it’s the wrong levy. Years ago, I was with a group of twenty ordinary citizens who had come to Washington at our own expense to plead for our Congressman’s support of a critical environmental protection – something very much in the public interest. We were savvy enough to have called ahead to make an appointment and were promised at least fifteen minutes to present our case.
We sat in his foyer for several hours past our appointed time as one after another well-healed lobbyists came in and whispered in the ear of the receptionist. They were immediately ushered into his office and remained for long periods of time. When we were finally allowed in, our Congressman apologized that he was so busy that he could only give us five minutes to present our very complex issue – two of which he spent on the phone assuring what was clearly a business interest that they had his total support.
We ended up with about two minutes to tell him why we were there. At that point he abruptly interrupted our presenter in the middle of a sentence, and rose to usher us out while offering his platitude that he would “look into it.” Okay, that was credible.
That’s how it works and we all know it. The primary issue is – “We Don’t Have Free Speech. We Can’t Afford It.” The recent Citizens United Supreme Court case allowing unlimited corporate funds to buy campaigns and political ads has finally aroused public rage from right to left. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 76% of Republicans, 81% of independents, and 84% of Democrats opposed this ruling. If the public is energized enough to vote on this basis this fall, that’s enough support to force a fundamental change in the way our government works.
Many old and new organizations are already making free speech, election reform, and limiting huge corporate contributions to campaign slush funds. Most are insisting on a Constitutional Amendment to fix the problem. The problem is most of them are concentrating their efforts too narrowly on only one group of rats burrowing into the rotting vegetation and undermining the levy. A Constitutional Amendment to change the definition of “corporate personhood” so that it does not include free speech is far too narrow an approach. No. When you fix a levee, you have to fix the whole thing or all your efforts are in vain.
First of all, we have to completely tear down the levee of money around Congress and the White House. Only then can we begin to replace it with a levy that protects the citizens of our country from the flood of selfish interests. That’s the job of our government. That’s what the Constitution is supposed to protect.
To build a new levee that protects us from the worst flood we have to concentrate on the whole picture. How? It’s time to break the link between money and free speech altogether. The Bill of Rights protects the citizens’ right to speak our minds and to petition our government to redress our grievances without fear of reprisal and the freedom of the press and religion. That’s all! Everything else is based on laws, case studies and court opinions. All of these can be changed through the far simpler legislative process.
The Constitution does not protect the ability of big money to convey its selfish interests in ways that overwhelm the citizens’ voices. The right of free speech is not the same as the ability to control the delivery of that speech through the ability to buy it. That’s not “free” speech; that’s “bought” speech. When well healed lobbyists talk about delivering “free speech” to our representatives in ways that substantially control the outcome, that’s normally called a bribe – let’s call a spade a spade. It’s time to take bribes completely out of the process – no leaks in that levy at all.
The reforms we need have to be comprehensive. Because the link between money and free speech is not constitutionally protected, the fix can be accomplished through legislation which redefines free speech breaking this link. By doing so, it makes it possible to implement other reform such as public financing of elections, eliminating big money’s ability to buy propaganda ads on public issues and a host of other reforms that can then be proposed on the basis of the merit rather than the money thrown at our representatives. The success of all other reforms depends on this fundamental issue.
That’s how our country is supposed to work. That’s what our founding fathers envisioned. It’s the American way. We can do this if we unite in "one voice" – from right to left – to insist that our representatives do the work we elected them to do. This needs to become “the single touchstone issue” in this fall’s elections. Every candidate – whether Republican, independent, or Democratic – needs to know that they will not get our vote [drown in the flood] if they don’t get on board our boat. We will throw the whole lot of them out otherwise and replace them with candidates who understand what we elected them for.
The polls clearly indicate we have this power – if we can only translate that potential power into votes. If we really want it, we will have be prepared for the fear big money interests will try to use to defeat us – as most assuredly they will. The Internet is the tool we can use without trying to outspend the billions corporations can throw at it. You can be a part. Spread the word. If we want this to happen, our effort needs to begin now. One voice. Nothing less will do. We have to fix the whole levy.
Richard S. Galloway is the founder of the Fundamental Reform Network. This Internet-based clearinghouse is designed to allow the widest coalition of individuals and organization of every political persuasion to unite in support of comprehensive reforms. Its only purpose is to fundamentally change the way our government works and allowing citizens a meaningful voice in our own government and to fund necessary programs in the public interest.
Annotated Table of Content
Next: The Problem -- Why we feel so bad: Because the world is messed up and we don’t know what to do about it.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Introduction: the Fundamental Reform Network
-- John Stuart Mill
The truth is that there is a very small body of extremely wealthy people and radically conservative intelligentsia – the only real elites in our society – who have been eminently successful in implementing their plan to gut what they call the problem of “big government” through a “bait and switch” program they call “starving the beast.” In the words of Nobel Prize winning economics Paul Krugman:
"Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government's fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit."[1]
What they carefully hid from the public eye is that the tax cuts they implemented cut their own tax rates from maximum 70% prior to Reagan's tax cuts to a mere 35% today -- in half! The tax give-back "they bought themselves" nearly bankrupted the federal budget and gave them the money to continue and expand their purchase of our government,the media, college professorships, a host of ultra-conservative think tanks and more. They sold the rest of us on these cuts through bare tokens amounting to a few hundred or thousand dollars in savings per year; their cuts amounted to amounted to tens of millions of dollars each. Their tax cuts on the very top incomes robbed upwards of $2trillion per year from government revenues. That’s the truth. Does that make you angry?
In order to sell a program from which they are the only meaningful beneficiaries, they have used outright deceit and propaganda to create mistrust, fear and hatred of government itself supposedly run by or catering to communists, socialists, elitist and monarchists terrorists, homosexuals, minorities or immigrants, labor unions, liberals, progressives, reformists, the creators of restricting regulations that strangle business… [all of which have been applied to President Obama and the Democrats]. The tactic is name calling and it is used by those who cannot make a rational argument to defend their position. They are designed to control people through their ignorance, beliefs and fears.
Recently, Glen Beck, one of their most highly successful propagandists, lead a panel discussion denouncing all “progressives” and even the word "progress" itself declaring such programs to be un-Christian, unconstitutional and evil. They stated boldly that reform itself, any attempt to make the world better, is somehow bad. They made claim after claim all made without any attempt to explain how things like the progressive tax are in fact unconstitutional. Why? Because they can't. Their arguments won't stand up to the test of fact. It is scary to think how many people actually believe them, but they do. If we are going to change things, we have to confront their tactics clearly and boldly.
They have convinced many that only unfettered profit and the free market can create a thriving economy to the benefit of us all. That all taxes and regulation are bad, restrict creativity and small business and depress economic growth. They are wrong. These are all “beliefs” unsupported by the fact. Contrary to the way they espouse them, it is their beliefs which are un-American, fascist, elitist, undemocratic, monarchical, often unconstitutional, and tyrannical-- that is they are all the things that they claim all who disagree with them are.
At this point, they have succeeded in driving our government into deficits that threaten our ability to sustain our government at all – from Social Security and Medicare to any and every other function of government – highways, schools, police and fire protection,… It’s true: As things are the way they created it, "We don't have free speech. We can’t afford it." That's the truth.
They are now in the horns of a dilemma: Again in Krugman’s words,
"Since they're adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they're still not willing to do that."
Since under the circumstances they have created they can have no viable plan to solve our nation’s problems, their current strategy is to be “obstructionist,” to block every action, bill and appointment so as to cause the Democrats to fail and then to blame them for the failure. They are counting on public frustration with the gridlock that they themselves have caused to sweep them back into power in coming elections. That's their only goal: To regain the direct control of our government. Buying favorable results is not enough for them. They want to own the entire process. Does that make you angry?
Our economic and political problems today are not accidents but the result of very conscious and intentional actions to re-establish the unfettered right of the economic elite to dominate our country through the power of their wealth as they did before the reforms of the past century which have limited that power in favor of the public interest. To a very large degree they have been highly successful and that is the major reason the world is in an economic crisis.
That’s what we are up against – a large number of intensely self-interested people who have usurped the reigns of our democracy. What they have done is the evil Mill makes reference to above. Tinkering here and there won’t solve it. If we are to regain power for the citizens of our country as are supposed to be protected by our Constitution, it is necessary to eliminate every avenue for them to purchase our government, our economy, our media [free press].
We further need to confront their distorted beliefs by which they justify their actions directly. Progressives often wonder why the extreme right wing people on the lower economic scale often cannot be reached by logic or debating the objective facts of the matter. It is because the beliefs they hve been systematically taught by their many front organizations organize how they see the world. Any fact that does not fit into a narrow belief system is automatically and unconsciously rejected. As long as people believe as they have been taught that all reform and government and taxes are bad, there can be no solution.
The reforms necessary to accomplish the goal of unseating this conservative cabal are not new, not unconstitutional or un-American. The necessary actions represent the highest of the American ideals and were the basis of the reforms leading to the last century of economic and social progress. They have a proven history. They substantially broke the power of the ultra-rich to control everything and allowed our democracy to prosper. If we want to unseat their power, we need to re institute and rewrite the economic and regulatory reforms of the past century -- updating them as necessary to take into account of innovations which have affected how we communicate and make decisions. The most elemental of these reforms must focus on the process of how decisions are made and to eliminate the ability of the ultra-conservatives to control the process through the power of their money. All other reforms, all progress on the crying needs of our broken world depend on this fundamental effort.
