Why is the left so weak in this country and the right so strong? There are many reasons for our sad situation, but one of the most important is the monetary advantage held by the right. This is a difficult problem to solve, but one vitally important piece of the solution has to be passing a constitutional amendment to undo the Citizens United decision. Corporations should not be able to pour unlimited money into elections and call it free speech. Corporations are not people, they should not have free speech rights, and money is not speech! That is just common sense.

I personally believe the American people will get behind the effort to pass such a constitutional amendment, but there is good news and bad news. The good news is that there are already movements afoot to spearhead that effort. The bad news is that these movements do not seem to be working together as fully as they could.

Earlier this week I contacted the Green Party in my state to see what they are working on, and I was directed to the Move To Amend website, which reads as follows:

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.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

* Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count.

* Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. We Move to Amend.

It is hard to imagine ever being able to move the country in a progressive direction without such an amendment. Unless we can put constraints on the ability of corporations to buy elections, we do not have a chance. Consequently, I signed the petition on the Move To Amend website.

But of course the people at Move to Amend are not the only ones working on this issue. As most followers of Tikkun are aware, the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) has put forward the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution, which calls for holding corporations accountable and subordinating their rights to the rights of actual human beings, among other things.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, the originator of ESRA along with Peter Gabel, does a great job explaining what ESRA entails, as well as the ramifications of the Citizens United decision in this You Tube video. I have signed the ESRA petition and hopefully all Tikkun Daily readers will do the same.

It is important to note that NSP has already succeeded in getting Rep. Dennis Kucinich to introduce ESRA into the House of Representatives as House Resolution 156.

But these two efforts are not all. Public Citizen is also spearheading a campaign to amend the Constitution in light of Citizens United. I am sure there are other efforts emerging as well.

While the focus of Move to Amend and Public Citizen is narrower than the focus of ESRA, contemplating these initiatives did get me thinking about what I believe is a second serious reason for the weakness of the American left: a lack of coordination. While it is great to see a lot of activity on the left, the proliferation of organizations and efforts sometimes renders the whole less than the sum of its parts, as an old professor of mine used to say.

This is not to imply that there is not some cross-pollination on the amendment efforts. I know Rabbi Lerner has signed the Move to Amend petition, and I have signed all three, but I have not compared signatory lists, so I am not sure how much overlap there is. However, it seems to me that the three efforts could be combined for better effect.

Be that as it may, fragmentation has always been and continues to be a problem on the left and in some ways this is inevitable. Because we respect dissent and do not expect people to walk in lock-step, we will never be as unified or as well organized as the right — although conservatives have their own divisions.

One of the goals of Tikkun is to bring people together to create a religious left that can act in concert on issues of shared concern. I fully applaud that effort.

Historically, however, the left has looked to a party to unify its multiple parts, and I think that is an important idea as well, to give a common institutional grounding to left-wing movements.

We need a progressive party — which leaves us with two options. We can either take over the Democratic Party and force it to the left (just like the Christian Right and the Tea Party have taken over the Republican Party), or we need to create (or embrace) a new party to replace one of the two existing parties. The latter choice will require long-term planning. It took the far right 15 years (1964-1980) to gain dominance, and it might take the left just as long. But we need to figure out how to synthesize our efforts to better advance our goals, and we should start that work now.


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