Here in Asheville, NC, the police department is updating an ages-old concept in their attempts to discourage unwanted behaviour: public humiliation. As was recently announced, Asheville police have begun posting on their website and on the local television channel names and photographs of individuals charged with prostitution or soliciting for prostitution.
Now read that again, carefully: charged with
Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.
This is a campaign which has stated its determination to fight for Michigan and Florida being included in the DNC because “every vote should count”, but all those votes in all the 21 states aside from Illinois which Obama won…are insignificant? Perhaps what Senator Clinton’s campaign is trying to say is that they care about the voters in Michigan and Florida because those states are significant. I guess I can see it from her perspective.
But then there’s how she claims she really cares about the middle class, the “everyman”, if you will. And yet, she rents out her donor lists cheap to a megacorporation whose CEO has helped her out in the past. It’s just weird, and I can’t quite get my head around it. Somehow her populist message isn’t sounding very populist. Perhaps corporate friends are more significant than mere citizens.
So, we’re on to talking about Texas and Ohio, two states which are significant and in which by all accounts Senator Clinton must win big if she is to continue to be significant herself. She is counting on the support of the Hispanic community (commonly ignored as insignificant, but not in election season), particularly as she seems to be losing ground with the (also normally insignificant) black and women demographics. Somehow, though, despite the recent change in staffing for her campaign and her declarations that she’s not done, yet, I don’t feel like Hillary is getting it. This whole grass-roots support concept that Obama has so successfully built his campaign upon is not trouncing her because their stated intentions are so very far apart. It’s because Obama makes each one of us feel significant.
As I have stated previously, democracy is not a bad concept for a governing system, but it simply doesn’t work if the people stop having input into the system. The concepts sort of cancel each other out like that. So the real problem in this country, the problem underneath all the other problems, is that the people no longer have any real input. We can vote, but the election system is now so vulnerable that it cannot be trusted to supply a valid result. Even if it could, we live in a nation where the vote of the people can, and has been in the past, overridden by “more powerful” people in a system designed to keep those “in the know” able to direct our elections “for our best interests”. Even apart from that, we only have elections every couple of years, and that leaves a lot of time in between for our representatives to spin their more dubious actions in a better light. And even worse, most of their dubious actions happen behind closed doors, out of sight of the people, and are rarely reported.
If we are going to take back control of our country from the corporate interests currently running it, we need transparency. We need video and audio recordings of every single committee and conference meeting in which our government officials take part. We need to either outlaw federal lobbyists, or we need a set time and place where they can present their cases to our representatives (read: us), which must also be open and documented. Every person in the United States is not going to care about every issue, but each person must be able to follow all actions related to any issue they choose to investigate. All these recordings should be available to anyone seeking them.
All pending legislation must be made available online for all Americans to read, at least two days prior to it being voted into law. This legislation should be hyper-linked to any previous legislation which it references. All representatives must have a means for their constituents to send commentary on the legislation readily available, and staff whose job is to read the comments and convey them to the representative.
We must divest corporations of their illegitimate legal status as “people”, and begin holding them accountable to the actual people. Our media organizations must begin actually investigating the events happening in both our nation and others and reporting accurately and without bias. Our school systems must teach each child the actual structure of government, and must attempt to teach history and current events as accurately and broadly as possible. We the people must have the right to question everything, and must remember to do so.
If we can implement these few things, we can have our country back. Granted, it will be a long and arduous path getting there. We will have to fight like hell to make these things happen. But that, after all, is what a revolution is all about.
Well, the only other option is revolution.
As Super Tuesday is upon us, the arguments over which prospective Democratic candidate should be chosen has grown steadily more heated here in the United States. Along with the candidates themselves engaging in pointed sound-byte rhetoric (all of which seems to come down to Hillary’s “experience”, and the massive parcel of baggage that said “experience” has earned her), citizens all across the country have also begun to dig in on each side of the contest. Predictably, much of the “reasoning” tossed around by the loudest and most adamant of the supporters on both sides is really nothing more than baseless emotional appeals and inflammatory muck. It is time we got past such nonsense and got down to the real two questions in this election: what are the meaningful differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and could either of them survive the general election to gain the chance to put their ideas into action?
