What if we all as a nation stopped selling American designed weapons, like airplanes, ships, subs, missiles, helicopters, tear gas, et cetera to foreign nations and groups?

What if we brought home all of our overseas troops, no matter where they are, discharged all of them except the ones we need to secure our own borders, and sent all of them to University or Trade School?

What if we create a new kind of entity called a Corporation that had to die after 75 years? All the corporate patented and trademarked assets would become public domain, and physical assets liquidated and distributed to shareholders.

What fs we taxed at 100% all estates above a certain threshold, and ensured that a hereditary oligarchy would be stopped in its tracks?

What if we increased the highest tax rates to 65% of income or capital gains or any kind of investment income?

What if we became a single-payer nation for health insurance, and reinvested in creating upward mobility by making our public Colleges and Universities the inexpensive wonder of the world they once were?

Just imagine if the purpose of government was to provide for the general welfare and common defense by taking care of certain things like infrastructure, environmental regulation, education, and health care so that people could focus on the more important things in life, like becoming the best, most creative, generous, kind and loving person in their work and personal lives, fully invested citizens. If we all recognized that we are all in this together, that “E pluribus unum” are words by which a great nation should live.

We can make this progressive dream happen.
Doesn’t that world, where all pursue their dreams because all the stuff that government does really well are being taken care of sound great? The only way to make it happen is to pay attention, wake up, organize, and vote!

Photo by Pam M.

Today, hundreds of people gathered in Cesar Chavez Plaza today to protest against the excesses of the Corporations and Super-rich, and a call for reform. With various issues, but mostly a sense of serious dissatisfaction with the current state of the country and economy and society. The government has stopped working for the citizenry and instead for the corporations. The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, and an entire series of decisions going all the way back the 19th-century Santa Clara decision have given corporations more and more “rights” previously reserved for real human beings. The idea that cash is equal to speech is abhorent to natural human rights, and to the idea that all citizens are equal. If a corporation or super-wealthy individual can drown out all other conversations and ideas, then the best idea may not get heard, and the country cannot progress.

The “unemployed” former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, in Iowa a few days ago:

Corporations are people?  It’s this kind of thinking that is causing the downfall of the middle and working classes.  Even if corporations are run by people, they don’t make the same kinds of decisions that individuals – corporations are interested in profit, and how they achieve that is amoral.  If to make more profit they eliminate thousands of good paying jobs, well too bad, so sad.  If they move jobs overseas to lower-cost labor markets?  Again, too bad, so sad.

This is exactly why we need an amendment to the US Constitution eliminating corporate personhood.

If Wisconsin’s protests are any indication, the Teapublicans are in for a very long two years. They want nothing less than a return to feudalism with a destruction of the middle and working classes.

We just saw a short period of expansion of our rights, and now there’s some push-back. We need to push back even harder – I hate to have to feel like I have to become a single-issue voter, because the world is so much more complex than that, but human rights are at the foundation of society. I will not support any candidate who does not support full equality for gayfolk, and you shouldn’t, too, no matter how otherwise qualified he or she is.

Let me say that again: human rights are the foundation of society. They underpin all transactions that people can perform. We know all this already, but one cannot hear it too many times.

I will not volunteer for or donate to any candidate who does not support full equality for all people. I don’t care if they are the perfect abolish-corporate-personhood-single-payer-healthcare-withdraw-our-troops-from-everywhere-let-the-teachers-teach candidate. If they do not support full civil rights for gayfolk, including full marriage, employment, housing rights, then screw them. I will not support apartheid. This is the absolute highest priority issue for me. Even though I don’t want the government in the marriage business at all, if a government sanctioned institution is available to some, it must be available to all.

As Keith Olbermann said last night, let’s get rid of the phrase “Public Option.”  It does no one any good, and provokes fear.  If it’s public, does that mean there’s no private?  If it’s an option, can it be taken away?

Instead, let’s start saying “Medicare for Everyone.”  Everyone already knows what Medicare is, and as it seems, everyone seems to like it.

We should, in all likelihood, just open up the rolls of Medicare to everyone.  If there are still deficiencies in coverage, then we could have supplemental policies, much like they do in France, and here already in the United States.  There would still be a private insurance industry that way, but they would be largely de-fanged.

What are the benefits?  Well, it seems likely that costs would go down, as Medicare payments are a known quantity.  Payment to doctors and hospitals would become much more streamlined, as there wouldn’t need to be huge staffs of people who’s job was to deal with the balky insurance companies, saving money.  The uninsured wouldn’t need to visit Emergency Rooms for non-emergencies, another savings.  And I’m sure there are probably lots of other ways that the system would become less expensive, too.

Why can’t we do this?

The GOP doesn’t have much sense of humor – they can dish it out, but they can’t take it. So the false outrage of the Republicans over Representative Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) recent floor speech where he said “The Republicans have a back up plan in case you do get sick … This is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly!”

Meanwhile, although the public option amendment was voted down in the Senate Finance Committee, momentum is still building for it outside the beltway, as people realize more and more how important this fight is for universal health care.

Call and write your Congressional Representatives in the House and Senate today and urge them to support the public option!

In her very first appearance as a Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor struck right to the very heart of the matter:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Going back to the question of stare decisis, the one thing that is very interesting about this area of law for the last 100 years is the active involvement of both State and Federal legislatures in trying to find that balance between the interest of protecting in their views how the electoral process should proceed and the interests of the First Amendment.

And so my question to you is, once we say they can’t, except on the basis of a compelling government interest narrowly tailored, are we cutting off or would we be cutting off that future democratic process? Because what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court’s error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.

But we can go back to the very basics that way, but wouldn’t we be doing some more harm than good by a broad ruling in a case that doesn’t involve more business corporations and actually doesn’t even involve the traditional nonprofit organization? It involves an advocacy corporation that has a very particular interest.

Although she tailored her remarks to the case at hand, very narrowly, just the idea of questioning from the bench the notion of the correctness of corporate personhood is like a clarion call in the chaos.  Corporate personhood is why we have the mess in Washington, D.C. that we do.  We need corporations to be for the public benefit again, and not immortal, and unable to lobby or donate to political campaigns.

Thank you, Justice Sotomayor!

What can you do today, right now, to ensure health care reform that includes a public option?  Call your congressional representatives, call your friends and ask them to call.

And Clinton inadvertently sent the bloggers a very different message. Lane Hudson interrupted his speech to challenge him on the unconscionable “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military. Clinton’s famed temper flared as he defended himself:

“You wanna talk about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I’ll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn’t deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military, and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting some support in the congress. Now, that’s the truth.

“Well, not quite, since many of the bloggers in the audience were teenagers or younger when this debate took place. But the former president provided clear strategic insight for the current moment. We don’t want a former President Obama to say, a decade from now, that the reason we didn’t get a public option was that we “couldn’t deliver” any support for him in the Congress. It’s time to deliver that support.

So no surrender; no retreat. Don’t start embracing “half a loaf,” or thumb-sucking about the reasons for the demise of the public option. Real reform has the support in the country, the Democratic Party, the House of Representatives and the White House. It has support of a majority of Democrats in the Senate. Now it is time to deliver the president the votes he needs for the public option he favors. Full court press on the handful of Democrats that are standing in the way, and then real pressure on the two or three Republicans who have yet to surrender to the obstructionist extremes of their party.

Pull out the stops. Do whatever you can think about doing to weigh in at this time – and then enlist your friends to join you. We are very close. We don’t have to overcome a presidential veto, or the opposition of the congressional leadership. All we need to do is to get Democrats and a couple Republicans to commit to giving the president a majority vote on this critical reform, and then get 50 members of the Senate to join the majority of the House in supporting it. Forget the naysayers. This is in reach. Let’s make it happen.

via Robert L. Borosage: Health Care: Let the Majority Be Heard.

I was calling my congressional representative, Nancy Pelosi, this morning to express my opinion about keeping the public option, or better yet, single-payer health care, and as I started to say hello, the aide who answered the phone put me on hold and transferred me to voicemail!

This is horrible service and a terrible way to treat one’s constituents.