Forget Millionaires—A Few Billionaires Are Stealing Our Country
In the serious business of politics, a little humor can be your best friend. I saw its impact thirty years ago in Austin, Texas, when a group of young, irreverent democracy activists decided to try limiting corporations that were drowning our local elections with their special-interest campaign cash. The upstart group called their grassroots effort at campaign finance reform a name that was a bit whimsical, yet pointed: “Austinites for a Little Less Corruption.”
It caught on. Even though the entire corporate, political, and media establishment united in furious opposition to the reform, 72 percent of voters joyously shouted, “YES!”
Now, more than ever, we need to rally grassroots Americans in a high-spirited, openly rebellious campaign to save our people’s historic democratic values. An autocratic coterie of plutocrats with unlimited corporate funding already dominates our elections, public policy, agenda, and highest courts. It’s not a secret conspiracy—they’re quite open about it!
But forget the days of million-dollar donors; the arsenal of the systemic corruptors has now been nuclearized. For example, Charles Koch has just injected $5 billion into his 2024 political operation. Tim Dunn, an ultra-rightwing Texas oil baron and GOP sugar daddy, has just sold his oil company for $12 billion, gaining a new gusher of cash to weaponize his intention to impose laissez-faire rule over the United States.
It’s hard to visualize how much more anti-democratic firepower one gets by spending billions instead of mere millions. Think of the difference not in terms of dollars, but rather time. If you have a million seconds, that’s eleven-and-a-half days. But a billion seconds—that’s more than thirty-one years!
We can have no progress—no democracy—without getting corporate money out of America’s political system.
A New Road to Farm, Food, and Climate Progress
“Arkansas Traveler” is an old-time song with folk humor that describes a well-heeled dandy who gets lost while traveling across the Ozark Mountains. He comes upon a backwoods farmer and shouts out: “Hey, farmer, where does this road go?” Without missing a beat, the farmer says: “I’ve lived here all my life, stranger, and it ain’t gone nowhere yet.”
It’s a corny joke, yet the current U.S. Congress traveled that same nowhere road all last year in a fruitless attempt to reach agreement on a rewrite of America’s basic Farm Bill. This failure is a very big deal and wholly irresponsible.
The bill is a five-year, $867 billion package (over a ten-year budget window) that not only doles out federal crop subsidies—which have largely gone to huge agribusiness operations—but also provides food stamps for millions of poor families, money for vital agricultural conservation programs, and economic development work in numerous rural counties.
So why the dead end? It’s caused by the same plutocratic/theocratic nuttiness of Republican lawmakers who put their extremist rightwing ideology and corporate servitude above all the other needs of regular people and our country. Because of their internal chaos and political grandstanding, the old, status quo Farm Bill had to be extended for another year.
Yet, that’s not all bad news, for a whole new constituency has begun rallying to write a truly innovative, forward-looking farm, food, labor, and climate bill that fosters the common good above the exploitative greed of today’s monopolistic, narrow-minded agribusiness complex.
Let’s turn the dead-end year into a positive opportunity to build public support in 2024 for fundamental democratic change in America’s food direction. The way to get there is not through more backroom Washington deals, but by going straight to the people, mobilizing family farmers, food workers, consumers, climate activists, and others behind a revitalized system that works for all of us.
Source: progressive.org
