dated 2/14/02
from Cameron Spitzer:
MoveOn.org is a Democratic Party store front. It was set up to cajole the public to lobby Congress to "move on" past the Clinton sex, influence peddling, and perjury scandals. Later it organized some of the "Nader Trader" Web sites that tried to scam people into voting for Gore in "critical" states by promising someone else would vote for Nader in a "safe" state.
The "progressive people" who fall for MoveOn's nonsense are the ones who think there is a "progressive" component to the Dem party, or don't realize who Moveon is. See:
from unknown responder:
There are those who will throw out the baby with the bathwater. Who cares if a person is affiliated with whatever party. Why not look at the record of each on their own instead of being prejudiced against a whole party. Are all democratic or independent politicians worthless because they are not Greens? Many democrats are fighting for the same causes as the Greens. Nobody is going to agree on every single issue but if the Greens wait for people to agree on every single issue they will stay where they are instead of progressing to the position of third party of record.
I for one am glad that some group – MoveOn or whoever took the lead in helping to stop the impeachment of a President for the impeachable crime of what? Having sex? And all those other hypocrites on the hill who have done the very same thing throwing stones. It was disgusting and had to stop. If there was something else in Clinton's record that was impeachable that would be a different story but that wasn't what was being pursued.
No one can agree on every idea or proposal or vote put out by a congressman (and most of them are for the war which is horrible) but how about giving some credit to
Barbara Lee
Dennis Kuchinich
Gerald Nadler
Maxine Waters
Charles Rangel
Patrick Leahy
Jim Jeffords
Ron Paul
and others of their ilk
The Campaign Finance Reform bill is only a FIRST step in the long process of getting corporations deep pockets out of our government policies.
from Rhio:
I agree with the second writer (unknown) above. Moreover, some politicians, like Dennis Kucinich, stay in their party because they believe in the party's original founding principles. The Democratic party used to be the party that most represented the needs and interests of the people. It seems to me that Kucinich, and other Democrats in the minority, are trying to reform the party, both back to its original principles and forward into a better representation of those principles and platforms.
What we need is decent, honest politicians, working through all parties and affiliations for the common good. It's not the party that matters so much, but the ideas that are held within the party. And as the unknown writer states, "No one can agree on every idea or proposal or vote put out by a congressman" but if we were to have politicians with integrity, then we could move closer to our ideal of a democracy. Our political duty as citizens is to be informed and watchful of what our politicians are doing in our name, and when we see them go astray, to reign them back in. We can do this in a variety of ways, but when politicians are incorrigible and unresponsive, we need to vote them out. If we believe they will be responsive, we can write letters, go to see them, do protest and civil disobedience, write letters to newspapers, magazines and TV producers and engage in other peaceful methods to make our views known. And most importantly, we need to regulate the media so that it is representative of ALL viewpoints, not just the selected, narrow and repetitive few. We need to spread the communications wealth around and not allow media monopolies like Clear Channel to exist.
As the unknown writer states, one very crucial factor in getting our government to be responsive to common people is to stop corporation money from influencing our government policies (through limiting or eliminating corporate lobbyists and their monetary influence in Congress) and by not allowing corporations to contribute to political campaigns. Corporations are not people, but have almost all the same rights as people under our Constitution. I believe this has to be changed too. As a government ideally "by the people and for the people", the corporate influence needs to be minimized or eliminated and corporations should not have the same rights and privileges as people. Most corporations are in business only to make money – they sacrifice everything else to their "bottom line" and do not demonstrate a social conscience, or responsibility towards the environment, or to people's health, or to many other issues that are of primary importance so that we may aspire to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
These types of concerns affecting all of humanity are what used to be known as "the Commons". The Commons included things that our human communities need as a whole and could share in freely, like the right to clean water, the right to uncontaminated food, the right to a share of the land, the right to share in knowledge for the universal good.
In our times, multinational corporations are buying up or trying to buy up or stealing all the water in the world which they then sell back to us. What we once had freely they think should be in private hands for a profit. Multinational corporations are trying to corner the market on food production with their genetically modified seeds which cannot be replanted, either by design (terminator seeds) or by contract, so that all the farmers will have to be beholden to them for their yearly supply of seeds. Multinational corporations with their governmental minions have stolen the lands of indigenous peoples all over the world (ref: the Enclosures Movement) and chased and crowded millions of people into the cities, creating unhealthy ghettoes, and since people need to eat, supplying ready workers for exploitation in the corporation's low paying jobs in factories, etc. Multinational corporations would put a meter on our intake of air (oxygen) if they could figure out a way to attach it to our nose.
The CEOs who run corporations may do the "right thing" on their own, but unfortunately it is a rare occurrence. In the absence of corporate responsibility, our reps will have to pass laws with teeth that regulate all the actions of corporations which are detrimental to "the Commons."