For Coffee Club Forum Topic... Constitutional Amendment Level Campaign Finance, Electioneering, and Lobbying Reform...

...
A Call For Constitutional Amendment Level Campaign Finance & Electioneering Law Reform
A Political Action Committee that calls for a Constitutional Amendment on Campaign Finance and Electioneering Law Reform is bedrock to the Call for an evolutionary, progressive, grassroots, and Democratic transformation of our politics, economy, society, and culture. Such a focused movement is needed because:
The overwhelming corrupting influence of money in our politics- along with the radically increasing concentration of wealth among the upper few per cent of our citizens- has created a critical and fundamental crisis in our Democracy and by extension in our domestic, foreign, and military policy.
Elections and campaigns have largely deteriorated into competitions in fundraising, which inevitably leads to the interests of disproportionately wealthy individuals and corporations being best represented- almost to the point of exclusively so- in the political arena. Campaign spending turns into just a tidy little windfall for private media empires. Hey, that’s no way to use the “public” airwaves.
There is ample evidence that "our" media and news information sources- vital cornerstones to any meaningful freedom of speech and press, not to mention Democracy itself- are more and more dominated by ever fewer mega merged "media empire" conglomerates. The result being that “our” public dialog and political debate is largely being framed by “their P.R.” agenda for privatization, low taxes for them, weak to non-existant public sector democratic governance of "their" shenanigans, and free market fundamentalist corporate libertarian globalization.
That these truths are ongoing, worsening, and self evident should be (but are not) a part of every news story and deeply imbedded into our political dialog and debate. Instead we have increasingly narrow discourse dominated by infotainment, celebrity obsession, and political spin doctoring- which all contribute to the acceptance as legitimate of devolving and self serving extremist hard right macho careerist posturing among complicit “mainstream” politico hacks along with the dominance in government at all levels of a Corporate and Business Culture which brings consistent and predictable results:
Ever more to those with the most: a steadily spiking disparity between rich and poor even as working and middle class people have struggled to maintain any kind of secure quality in their work, families, and communities.
Plenty of scuffling, antisocial stress and dysfunctional life for those at, near, or in fear of slipping closer to the bottom.
The operation of government mainly as a subsidy, service, and spoils system for the wealthiest individual and corporate "citizens", while everyone else is encouraged to believe that a favorably unregulated climate for the resultant corporate "Owner of Everything" class will create enough of a "trickle down" effect so all will be right in this “best of all possible worlds”.
All of which is of course pretty much entirely disingenuous smokescreen and hollow hoodwinking. While there is no one simple quick fix to these complex circumstances a good start might be for:
The American people to take responsibility for where this “drift” has been and is still taking us;
“We the people”, acting as informed citizens, start to reassert genuine Democratic control over our country in order to change the fundamental direction we are headed.
Nothing short of Constitutional Amendment level reform is needed to address this ongoing and worsening crisis at the heart of our Democracy so that we can re-determine what our vital national security interests are or not.
We need major Constitutional Amendment level Reform of our Campaign Finance, and Electioneering, and Lobbying Laws to address the growing rigged dominance within our Democracy by an ever narrowing elite segment of our citizenry.

Back at it : Internet and Blogging potential to effect meaningful Progressive Re-Democratization...

...
Th07Jan10, 4:25 PM.

“Blogging and Internet Potential to Effect Meaningful Progressive Democratic Change”

More and more as I gear up, ramp up, amp up my blogging toward real world real time right here right now “JDI just doing it y’all time” I think- where this all can lead has to be something more than what it’s doing so far. There seems to be two main camps on the “Potential” democratizing effects the Internet in general and the roll of blogging specifically might or should have on things. Meantime if you look around the Internet and read blogs of various partisan stripes you will find that everything under the sun is “out there”. One can pick and choose from all manner of quality and partisan niches.

So just because something is being blogged about don’t really matter. It don’t mean squat. But the big thing is the potential for a different kind of “Citizen Journalism”- yeah sure that- to evolve but also along with it new kinds of capabilities for citizen activism to emerge which might ideally level the playing field and ultimately take money out of the ultimate equation enough so that the interests of the American people might be put first rather than marginalized in the interest of serving the needs of the biggest players in Imperial Global Capitalism.

Somewhere somebody once said that if only the people who actually benefited and thrived under the policies of Ronald RayGun’s administrations had voted for him he’d have gotten maybe 5% of the popular vote. Now I think that may be a wee bit of an exaggeration but still… even if 15% could be argued the fact is that the conservative majority has been built on a foundation of duplicity, false advertising, election stealing, wholesale crooked and anti Democracy gerrymandering, and buying elections with their almost unfathomable material resource advantage. Which is only worsening as the “Income Divide of this New Gilded Age” (formerly linked here to dialogD Web Page on Unequal Wealth) gets worse with every newly occurring shakeout or adjustment in the “Global Economy”.

When will it become obvious enough that there can be no meaningful Democracy, economic justice, or much of a civil society (outside of the gated communities and corporate green zone bunker communities of the one percenters) when the wealthiest 1% of a country owns or controls 60+% of the wealth? Or at least obvious enough for the American people to wake up from there delusion that we’re all in this together and that our National elites are operating in the best interests of all of us out here who are just scuffling to get by? And by waking up I mean taking the kind of civic and Democratic action necessary to get us onto a different path with significantly more heart than the one displayed by Faux Macho Neocon insanity or their other side of the aisle, complicitous, limp wristed, “bipartisan opposition”- the incrementalist mainstream Democratic Party.

That’s where the potential of blogging and the internet and more efficient and coordinated progressive grass roots organizing can come into the mix in a more profound way than ever in the history of the Union. Because, as Martin Luther King once said:
"Those who love peace must learn to organize as well as those who love war."