Joyce L. Arnold, Liberally Independent, Queer Talk, equality activist, writer.
One reason I started thinking in terms of “We the Electorate,” though “We the People” is much more appealing, is because we aren’t actually seen as people, with real lives and perspectives. We aren’t seen as individual voters, but in terms of how we add or subtract from the total needed to win an election, keep a state red or blue, or “swing” it. We aren’t seen as persons who are unemployed, but as a statistic used to support the position of both parties. We aren’t recognized as a human being in need of health care, but as a number in the health insurance equations to maximize profits.
We’re a vote, a consumer, a number and statistic, to be manipulated by the Duopoly, in service to the Oligarchy, to the .01%. Corporations as People get much more personal consideration than all of the 99% combined.
There’s absolutely nothing new in anything I’ve just written, but apparently the sequels keep selling.
Lambert Strether, commenting at a Vast Left Facebook post: “The single best thing we can do as citizens is to stop believing lies, even those – especially those – told by our own tribe.”
That’s always the harder part: challenging the thinking and direction of your “own tribe.” We the Electorate fairly often handle that problem by further sub-dividing the “tribe.”
Below are a few thoughts about where “We the People” are in 2012.
At Nation of Change, Dave Johnson:
Here is Why Our Elites are Not Fixing the Economy
When we had democracy, We, the People made the rules and we ran our country and our economy for our benefit. Now that we are a plutocracy things are different. …
The reason our leaders are not doing anything to fix the economy is because, from the viewpoint of our real leaders, the economy is working just fine.
From Larry Pinkney, at OpEdNews:
The Terrorist Government of the United States
… In the fallacious name of protecting an essentially non-existent everyday people’s U.S. ‘democracy,’ this U.S. governmental corporate / military crime syndicate wages an unending propaganda and economic and political war of terrorism against the struggling people of this nation. In so doing, BOLD the ordinary people are deliberately and perpetually kept ignorant, in fear, and in disarray – easily manipulated, controlled … .
Pinkney writes about the “terrorism” of the “corporate hegemony,” “austerity,” the Wall Street “bail out,” the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. His concluding section includes:
We must stop believing in the lies, distortions, and omissions emanating from the gate keepers of this political system and start believing in ourselves and our own creative capacities. We must understand that … we MUST band together to develop and nurture a serious everyday people’s movement which is about the concept of WE-ness not the systemically induced virus of ME-ness. This must be a collective struggle to change (not merely reform) an irretrievably corrupt corporate controlled U.S. political system.
At TruthOut, William Rivers Pitt writes:
America Must Declare War on America
… against the fusillade of divisive nonsense that passes for political discourse these days, provided with full corporate sponsorship by a small cabal of rich people via the ‘mainstream’ news media they own … .
Ralph Nader, at OpEdNews:
Jolting the Democratic Party from Its Stupor
The Democrats should be landsliding the worst Republican Party in history. …
It is not happening. …
The coming days await a new and open jolting push by prominent outside Democrats who fervently want to wrench their party back from the abyss … .
At Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller:
The Source of Barack Obama’s Power to Trick Us Comes from Our Willingness to Be Tricked …
We as people can break this spell, and speak to our own dignity, as citizens. We can learn our own power, if in no other manner than in saying at the voting booth and in public, ‘I do not accept your lies, … I will not grant you my consent willingly.’ … We can work to organize ourselves … , with those of us who understand that power is something that must be taken, with money, organization, but most of all, with moral courage. It is not something that politicians have except through our consent, consent we have been giving for decades, to a rotten political class. This is what they truly fear. This is why they spend tens of billions on propaganda, on advertising, on symbols and personalities and celebrity. This is why they hide the workings of our government and banks and institutions of power in the language of boring bureaucrat-ese.
And this is why Occupy and related movements must be silenced. The astounding amount of police presence sent into “Occupied” territories makes that clear. Watching what happens at the Two Party national conventions may very well provide more evidence.
Does any or all of this sound extreme? We’d never allow ourselves to be taken over, be taken in like this, would we? Would We, the People, the actual people, allow this to happen?
In the post quoted above, Pinkney – long time, long-haul activist that he is, and that I so respect – quotes Frederick Douglas:
‘Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.’
Oh why don’t you stop quoting those dead black guys ( joking). It would do Americans good to spend some time reading the business section of the NYT or WSJ to understand that what you say is true; were just consumers who are here to be manipulated. The British called us ” Rabble in the Pit. ” In the business pages you see phrases like, ” the consumer is stretched thin, ” ” the consumer is feeling flush, ” ” the consumer is tapped out, ” ” the consumer is pulling back. ” This kind of thinking has now taken over politics; it’s all marketing. What was it Bush’s chief of staff told the press about when the Iraq war would begin, ” You don’t roll out a new product in the summer or something like that. This is something that has troubled me for sometime, this idea that marketing is now everything, that were just a product, not human. Voters haven’t made it any harder for politicians not to treat them that way; politicians throw every indignity imaginable at them while also treating them like children and they just sit there and take it. It really does remind me of the politboro in the old Soviet Union. To them the people were just a bunch of scum who did what they were told or got thrown in the Gulag. An old drinking buddy of mine who also happened to be a communist ( a gay communist, actually) said that the only way to keep politicians honest was to take one out every month and shoot him. Hey, you live in Texas, they would go for that, wouldn’t they ?
Hey fangio, great stuff. I don’t know what all is involved in the apparent willingness to accept the assigned roles as consumer, number, etc. In part maybe it simply fatigue. For so many folks, getting from week to week, if they’re fortunate to have a pay check, takes about all the energy they have. At some point, though, I still have hopes enough people will reach the “I’ve had enough” moment, and “band together,” as Pinkney says.
Priceless, fangio.
Heya Joyce, I quoted that piece from Nader (imagine hell freezing) over the weekend. Not clocking Republicans by now is stunning when you think very long about it.
Classic Stoller. Naked Capitalism is always worth a read.
http://www.jillstein.org/cheri_honkala_vp_candidate?utm_campaign=honkala&recruiter_id=145452&utm_medium=email&utm_source=jillstein
I got the email announcing Cheri Honkala as Stein’s running mate. Thanks for providing the link.
Both of quoting Nader within a few days of each other must mean something. I don’t know what, but something
Aargghh … I had my eyes dilated this morning and I’m still unable to focus clearly, so that’s my excuse for typos today. …
Maybe the worst Republican party in history can’t be landslided by the worst Democratic party since the White Supremecist Southerners were running it?
Maybe it’s true that you really can’t beat somebody with nobody? Maybe people are so discouraged that they simply don’t believe the “Its the End of the World if the Other Guys Win” garbage anymore?
Maybe we’ve caught on to the fact that the Democratic Party’s only interest in the Occupation Movement was in using it as a means to very different ends? And that when they realized the Occupiers could not be turned into Obama Army 2012, they joined with the Republicans in denouncing and killing it?
Maybe we’ve picked up on the fact that “Progressive” voices- Schultz, Maddow, Hartmann- are actually just tools of the Corpo-Democrats, and will ignore Jill Stein and real progressive issues in the service of President Obama and the DNC?
Just maybe?
I wish you were wrong, but of course, I don’t think there’a a “maybe” about it, at least for a lot of people.
I heard a “liberal” caller to a “liberal” radio show today who warned that Obama and Romney appear to be “dead even in the polls.”
The “liberal” radio host replied “that doesn’t matter; Obama is ahead in the swing states. He could lose the popular vote and still win, he’s got a pretty solid margin in the electoral college..”
If only we could get rid of that anachronism, this race would actually be interesting, because every vote would truly count. If you are a Republican in Washington, DC or Maryland, you are a Nonperson. If you are a Democrat in Idaho or Wyoming or Mississippi, same thing. The first step toward bringing a little Democracy back to this country would be to dump the elitist, destructive Electoral College, a bad idea in 1789 and an absolutely horrible one now.
I am so with you on the Electoral College. Just in case you aren’t aware of Fair Vote, one of their projects is related to getting rid of the EC.
http://www.fairvote.org/national-popular-vote
Sounds a bit like whistling past the graveyard to me. If the popular vote changes enough, Obama won’t be ahead in those swing states anymore. If he’s already dead even, with lots of bad economic news ahead through the fall, I wouldn’t be feeling too confident if I were on Team Obama.
I’d forgotten that Frederick Douglass quote. It’s an apt one.
One of my favorites, that quote.
‘Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.’
Good Morning
This is the sum total of what our original democratic idea of “voting” has become………..
the shameless, deliberately kept ignorant…”zombiefied”, fear induced…manipulated…controlled and abused ordinary citizen of the United States of Confortable Amniesia! And it has been kept that way “election”, after “election”, after “election”…generation after generation since the 70′s…by a bulls!#@t created “loyalty” to this idea that we have to support this system via “voting” or “else”.
I am not the against the “IDEA” of voting…understand…But I am against the system!!!!
IT WON’T WORK!!!
Why should any of the powers that(we’ve handed over) be change at all…when we ourselves won’t change the way we do business with them either…every “election” its the same behavior, support, support, suport…WHY SHOULD THEY CHANGE???????