There is a movement afoot to pass a constitutional amendment for the practical purpose of overruling the Citizens United case. In Citizens, the Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that a corporation is a person, and that money is speech, and therefore the amount of influence exerted by wealth would be limited only by wealth itself.
I do not oppose this effort. I do want to point out, however, that it begs the question, because the real issue is the incredible influence of corporate wealth and power over the government.
An amendment to cancel Citizens United deals with a symptom. Consider this: the last 30 years of deregulation, caused by corporate lobbying, led directly to the current financial debacle and all that happened before the Citizen case.
What this means to me is that it is nearing the time for Occupy Wall Street to consider formulating a strategy and design the tactics to follow. Tactics devoid of an overall strategy will eventually dissipate the beautiful energy whose wave we are currently riding.
Before all other issues is triage: there is a plethora of problems, from regulation of the financial sector to dealing with the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex (lest folks think this is a trivial issue, look at Deadly Monopolies by Harriet Washington-Lake County Library), etc. The health care issue remains problematic: A friend of mine, who has health insurance, is getting big bills, because her coverage does not cover.
All of these issues may be moot if we don”t deal with global warming and its corollary, oil.
Ironically, even as oil ruins the planet, running out of oil will wreck our food delivery system: no fuel for transportation, tractors, and planes to drop pesticides, etc.
In the 1970s, Robert White, then head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alerted President Nixon to the phenomenon of climate warming.
Thirty-five years later and the government is still asleep at the wheel.
This “short list” of problems can seem overwhelming. There are so many people working on so many issues, from Guantanamo to saving the wolves.
This can be overwhelming. If we feel overwhelmed we will be frozen, and continue in our daily lives denying the reality that our values and our future are in danger. So, I am arguing for a more centralized structure of dissenters, and a coherent strategy.
Nelson Strasser
Lakeport
