It's not an illusion--mega-corporations have gotten more politically powerful and are warping the system more than in the past. The public was enraged about the bank bailout and wanted serious action to punish those who created the mess, and new rules to prevent it from happening again before handing out any money. There were little spontaneous street corner demonstrations all over the country. At least in the couple of decades after WW II, Congress would have listened, held hearings, given us some of what we wanted, and the worst banksters wouldn't be allowed to continue in charge of ruined banks. A token bank president might even been picked to go to jail.

This time it was just railroaded through and the party that stood for change went on to put the bad actors in postions of highest power in gov't.

Maybe it has to do w/ the phony e-voting machines, or the new atmosphere of a constant on-going military emergency that allows them to greet peaceful demonstrators w/ nightmare weaponry that won't kill you but could truly maim you, or maybe the utter compliance of the monopolized news media to the corporate agenda that doesn't report on any of this stuff, but it sure looks like they're not afraid of us voting them out of office.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the period during which most of the protections for the middle class were passed coincided w/ the existence of the "Fairness Doctrine". That was an FCC regulation which said that TV and radio had to offer equal time for a community member to rebut if it aired a political opinion. A Fox News channel or dedicated right- or left- wing talk radio station didn't and couldn't have existed then. People actually had to listen to each other--by law.

During those times, Dick Cheney would have been put behind bars for threatening Congress w/ martial law if they didn't approve the bailout, b/c the press would have reported it and explained to the public why such an action was a serious threat to democracy.

We oldsters are a little bewildered as to how a trickle of things going in the wrong direction under Reagan, got us all the way here in ~30 brief years. We sure didn't do it, and we thought we were paying attention to the actions of "the establishment". Gen-X and some of the unions even tried to roll back the hold the multi-nationals had on gov't by opposing NAFTA and similar trade agreements.

We see the world you're inheriting and wish we had some good advice to offer as to how to reverse this mess, and all we can say is, "Good luck", and mean it.

Many people on DU, while initially skeptical of mandated private insurance w/o a competing public plan have read Ezra Klein's rebuttal of Jane Hamsher's "Top 10 Reasons..." and found themselves swayed. DUers have been following Ms. Hamsher for a while and know that she has tracked the details of the proposals and wants real relief for Americans. Most of us don't know who Mr. Klein is other than that he works for the Washington Post. I looked into what Mr. Klein has written during the debate, and found another article for his WaPo column containing at least two major points that make me leary of his opinions. The article is Five cost controls in the Senate health-care bill.

Among what Ezra Klein considers cost controls is one of the most dangerous provisions in the Senate bill. Medicare has stood as a relatively intact effective program with a solid public portion b/c it is so massively popular that Congressmembers have not been able to reduce its coverage or whittle away the public portion w/o risking their re-election. The "cost control" that Ezra Klein finds so useful is a provision to create a group of medical "experts" (some members can be from private insurers and/or Big Pharma) appointed by each incoming President but unrecallable, who would produce a package of changes to Medicare regulations each year that would automatically become law unless vetoed by Congress w/i 30 days w/o debate or amendment. The package can include essential cost and/or elegibility adjustments along w/ poison pills, for instance, phasing out the public portion for people above a certain income. Can you imagine what the last administration's appointees would have done to the public portion of Medicare w/ this power? Can you imagine who Pres. Obama will pressured to appoint?

He also thinks the very best "cost control" in the Senate bill is the excise tax on high value health insurance. For some reason, in the atmosphere of mandated coverage, he thinks this will cause insurers to lower the price of their best plans, not simply to replace good, taxable plans w/ plans that cover less, have more deductibles and copays and thus avoid the unpleasant taxation. He calls this "competition" (?).

His analysis in rebutting Hamsher's "10 Reasons" is very misleading. Yes millions more will be put into Medicaid, but he doesn't seem to know the downside of having to use Medicaid. It's no longer a "public program" in that in most places its been outsourced to private insurance cos. It reimburses providers at such a low rate, that only in urban centers are the #s of primary care physicians adequate. There's a critical shortage of specialists everywhere, so that people die waiting to be properly diagnosed and treated, and a serious shortage of even primary MDs outside the urban centers. This leads to long waits in clinics and rushed 2nd-rate care--an inequality that does not exist in other 1st World nations. Then there's the question of just who is going to pay for this expansion of the new, privatized Medicaid (w/ a cut going to private insurers)? That's right, the same people who are forced to pay for everything in this country--the middle class through their taxes. The same goes for the subsidies for the middle-class. There is nowhere near enough bloat in Medicare to pay for them, so what is given w/ one hand will be taken away by the other in the form of increased taxes to subsidize exhorbitantly priced private plans. (As in "we're going to give you a tax break of $5K for health insurance but your taxes are increased by $7K".)

As for those w/ coverage now, there is a large disincentive for private insurers to continue offering the full-coverage plans some currently have. With a mandate they can and will charge for inadequate plans w/ large out-of-pocket costs what they previously charged for the better plans. When the current plan your employer gets now is priced out of existence, you will get the overpriced inadequate kind. So, Mr. Klein, the "you" who are already covered will be affected. If taxes on good coverage is the best cost control in the bill, there are no effective cost controls. The status quo is that if insurers price their coverage too high, people and businesses don't buy any. This "cost control" will be abolished in 2014 w/ the mandate. This is one way the situation after the law goes into effect will be worse than if it hadn't passed. In this economy, more and more employers have to drop coverage to stay afloat. If they are not allowed to drop coverage, some will go out of business altogether. Tying health insurance to employers continues to be a ball and chain around the economy of the U.S. leading to more unemployment.

The scenario Klein invented, of someone paying the 2% fine then becoming ill or getting injured and, poof!, buying insurance in time to cover the medical costs is LUDICROUS. Instead the person whose finances were so tight that they resorted to paying a fine rather than buying insurance will face eonormous financial stress and possibly medical bankruptcy, because in addition to the bills accumulated while he/she was uninsured, the insurer will charge up to 300% more for coverage than they would for someone w/o a "pre-existing condition".

As for insurance ditching its worst practices, this bill does nothing to stop insurers from fraudulently declaring an expensive treatment "experimental" or "elective". There is no agency created to monitor these practices. Sure you're allowed to appeal a denial in court but you're more likely to run out of money and/or time than to get relief.

The bottomline is that given the inadequate price controls and lack of clear definition of "medical costs" to use in the medical loss ratio requirements, the costs will rise astronomically while providing little to citizens for their money, as happened in Massachusetts. Medical bankruptcies will continue among the nominally insured as well as the remaining uninsured.

The most erroneous part of Klein's article is claiming that passing this will lead more quickly to better regulation and reforms than not passing it. The way it will actually play out is that if passed, a)Congress will consider their job done until at least 2015 (probably later) when the entirety of the dreadful flaws in the law are begin to manifest, and b)the hugely increased revenue stream to the private insurance companies will give them even more vast sums w/ which to buy the favors of Congress. This cartel will use its influence to reduce rather than increase regulations on them and block the creation of structures to enforce compliance. Instead of this being a step toward a solution, the faux reform will have successfully stymied real reform. On the other hand, if the bill is defeated because progressives in Congress declared it a step away from a solution and voted "nay", the pressure from the grassroots for real reform will not decrease. Congress WOULD revisit it in the next session b/c the public would stand for no less. Some serious consideration of ways to limit costs and gaming the system would have to be done to get those progressives on board. His description of the politics of the situation was written to fit his predetermined conclusion, not the political reality.

to write all the examples that show what is wrong w/ saying what I actually heard Sen. Sanders say yesterday, "We have to remember that at least millions of more people will have "healthcare". I was trying to think how I would explain to DU that having insurance is not the same as having health care, especially when a mandate is enacted. If mandated private insurance doesn't have strict price controls, the incentive for the companies is to price full-coverage plans until they are prohibitive for businesses and out of reach for all but the wealthiest customers. Then they can charge just about everyone else for mandated limited plans what they used to charge for full plans. The mantra yesterday was that at least if people are insured, they won't be faced w/ bankruptcy due to medical bills. This flies in the face of what has happened under the similar Romney-care in Massachusetts, where medical bankruptcies are still all too common.

I don't know whether your examples were taken from your experience w/ poor policies your patients had in Texas, or from research about the Mass. situation, but I think you must have helped many DUers to understand what they have at stake in not having a bad bill pass--to foresee the actual consequences.

Whenever I hear someone say "The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good", I think, "Faux reform stymies real reform". In this case it threatens to be not even faux reform, but enactment of legal extortion. This applies even if we have a privatized public option, since unless the price controls and coverage requirements are in place and firmly enforced, the "public option" may only be useless plans partially subsidized.

Again, I am grateful for all you put into the research and writing of this piece. Perhaps you can also get it published in a newspaper as an op-ed.

isn't tilted even more toward the interests of the mega-corporations as is the case now w/ corporate campaign donations essentially legal. The message of a progressive can be blacked out by the MSM and the opposition's amplified w/ corporate $$. Progressives' ablility to organize w/o our leaders being arrested as "terrorists" is also in question. What do you think would happen if the head of a progressive coalition called for the most effective European tactic, the general strike?

If we want to reduce the divide between grassroots and most elected Dems, we have to fight really hard for structural reforms. I mean harder than we even did for healthcare reform, because that, and anything else we want depends on it. We have to push the limits like getting behind someone who will escalate to the gen'l strike when milder methods don't work, even if it means persecution. We have to put ourselves on the line for structural reform to re-empower the grassroots as we did during the labor movement, b/c at least at much is at stake.

At this point, I think we have to look for a "Ghandi" and act as bravely as his followers did.

Very loooong straw man argument, since it doesn't actually address the OP.

What she said was that justifying a war by saying that it is about fighting "evil" is alienating b/c war is a drastically destructive action that needs specific imperatives for a moral person to promote it. Identifying the enemy as "evil" doesn't meet the moral burden since, depending on orientation, the term could and is used against just about every ideology, nation or group of nations in the world.

Besides, soldiers don't shoot at or bomb "evil". They bomb and shoot at persons. It would be nice to know exactly what it is about these particular persons that makes killing them an unavoidable necessity. Especially when the idea of reintegrating rank and file Taliban who are willing to stop fighting is being advanced. (They were the embodiment of "evil", but once they stop shooting our military in their country, they're not?) Seems to me that goal could be advanced a lot more cheaply and easily by us not being in their country in the first place.

We know the kind of destruction and blowback the previous war against "evil" in Iraq has been causing. It is understandable to feel put off again hearing our adversary identified in this next war w/ the same amorphous term.

Rep. Alan Grayson created a site for us to send letters to the White House appealing for peace. It had a prewritten message, but encouraged users to modify it.

I chose to write my own, emphasizing less the idea of broken promises, and more how the President had the power to change the world w/ his choice.

Some other people might be stronger on the need for the peace dividend--what we lose we every day of a war. Others might emphasize the tragedy of broken lives. Still others might talk about the cynicism about representative democracy that is growing, especially among the young, when the peace candidate becomes a President who leads us into longterm war.

Here is the site for whatever letter you are moved to write: http://salsa.mydccc.org/o/30019/p/dia/acti...

And here is mine:

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/even...

Webcast of a discussion with Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-Conn.) about why they sponsored the Fair Elections Now Act, and what they see as the road ahead in wake of the Citizens United decision.

Durbin has been trying to get this off the ground since 2005, but in light of the upcoming ruling expected in the SCOTUS case "Citizens United" v. the FEC", which is expected to legalize must corporate campaign donations by ruling that they are protected political speech, his efforts are being supported by a consortium of public interest organizations:

• Brennan Center for Justice
• Common Cause
• Democracy Matters
• Public Campaign
• Public Citizen
• U.S. PIRG
• Center for American Progress

You can sign his online citizens' petition, but more importantly, please support the work of the groups fighting to re-empower the citizenry, and make a point of contacting your representatives in both houses for their support.

This, and a ban on e-voting and counting could go far to restore the power of the vote.

Although the robber barons of the 1890's ran roughshod over the public, that was before much of the regulations that promoted the rise of the middle class were enacted, so it can't really be said that they "overthrew" anything.

After labor laws and the social safety net of the New Deal came into being, some balance of power between the classes was restored. Then the inheritors of the robber barons flexed their muscles regarding the VietNam War. They were relatively satisfied w/ their power during the Nixon Presidency, and plotted Carter's demise, but settled for a covert veto when their expansionist plans were thwarted. I'd say the coalition for the coup gathered in earnest w/ the group backing Ronald Regan's first Presidential campaign. These were the elites who found segments of the Republican Party willing to carry out it's agenda to "drown {gov't} in a bathtub", as one of its members later said--the purpose of course being to let those mega-corporatists in private power run things their way w/o the pesky interference of a publicly elected gov't and the programs designed to keep the public from the ignorance and poverty of the old robber baron era.

What's coming home to many folks now is that even after much of the public woke up and strongly repudiated that orientation, and elected a President and Congress nominally committed to reversing course, the course can't seem to be reversed.

or more like Vista as it would operate domestically, advising small to medium business and community groups on how to reduce carbon footprint, etc.

are the most knowledgeable and best advice for "raising all boats" (improving the global economy). Perhaps he thinks that temporary pain to 1st world workers somehow benefits the huge numbers of people in the rest of the world. In other words, he's a sincere neo-liberal. Quite a few otherwise brilliant people have been oblivious to the real world impact of the class loyalties of the extremely knowledgeable and intelligent international financiers. Even the destruction of the Argentine economy in the 1990s can't seem to disabuse them. Remember, his prime campaign advisor, who gave him excellent political advice, was Austan Goolsbee, a business economist from the legacy of the "Chicago school". It would be easy to become convinced that someone who steered him so right politically was also a top-notch source of economic advice, and Goolsbee worshipped Rubin and protegees.

I fervently wish that Obama could see that putting the rest of the world's "ordinary" people under the thumb of international corporatists, and thereby curtailing if not abolishing chances for true representative democracies, leads inexorably to the consolidation of wealth and utter devastation for the majority of people everywhere. I believe that he has been convinced that efforts to regulate multi-nationals and limit their power will adversely affect economic development to the point that he can't see what the reverse is actually doing.

and continued to provide VR w/ videos related to the election. That makes them the sources, not Kimberlin. The MSM could have gone to them directly. The most logical reason to explain their refusal is that Connell had pointed in the direction of Rove et.al. before his death, which would have to be part of the story or there would be no story. TV networks just won't imply the guilt of someone in a murder on that basis alone when the accused has close ties w/ people who have both enormous power and much wealth, and has shown he can kill w/ impunity.

When it came to breaking the Mafia, it was not TV and radio networks that led the charge. It took in the case of Chicago in 1929 a sudden loss of income due to the gradual rollback of Prohibition to make them vulnerable to the charge led by Eliot Ness. In the 1960s - 1980s, the activities against them were spearheaded right from the top by Pres. Kennedy's brother Bobby, later backed up by Congress with its passage of the RICO Act in 1970.

As the Republican Party has been the main beneficiary of the electoral misdeeds, it's hard to imagine Congress this time proceeding with a similar resolve. Also the guilty in this case involve the upper echelons of U.S. power in a way mobsters could only dream about.

Our best chance of ending these abuses lies w/ citizens working through their state gov'ts to eliminate the means of stealing elections w/o detection, to separate electoral officials from direct control by the political parties, and to crack down on corruption starting from the local levels. I don't imagine that there ever will be a national "vote integrity case".

I would accept the 4% income tax increase that PNHP says would be the cost of single payer health care because the costs wouldn't spiral out of control like those generated by this bill would. (This bill doesn't negotiate w/ Big Pharma or providers, it sets % of revenue spent on "medical loss", which means for patient benefits, at even lower than it is now, and specifically prevents the "public option" from paying providers less than private insurers do whatever that turns out to be. The political will for keeping up in subsidies w/ spiraling premium costs makes it questionable that expenses for non-wealthy individuals will remain affordable. Even at the outset, some analysts figure that the permitted deductibles, copays, and unsubsidised premiums would make medical care a hardship for many. There would have to be effective political will in the same Fed gov't that is getting its campaigns paid by private insurers to bring anti-trust cases when price fixing occurs.)

Medicaid already makes health care for the truly poor almost free in exchange in many areas for a shortage of doctors, especially specialists, and in many cases second-rate care. This bill mandates the uncovered near-poor also enroll in Medicaid unless they are exempt from filing taxes. It doesn't prevent important abuses like mischaracterizing expensive essential treatments as "experimental" as a way of denying them. Most of the uninsured will be covered by law or fined, but the real question is covered for what? In MA a similar law led to pseudo-insurance masquerading as "catastrophic coverage". Medical bankruptcy is still significant.

You won't always be young. When this program degenerates as the private insurers become even wealthier as a result of the mandate and more important as campaign financers, how will your generation of then 40-somethings exercise any leverage to improve things?

I guess this is a particularly apt topic for election day, though not a happy one.

SCOTUS is expected to announce this week that it has ruled in favor of Citizens United in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The decision will overturn a section of the law passed in 2002 specifically prohibiting corporations and unions from spending money from their treasuries to electioneer during certain periods before primaries and elections. It also sets a precedent to overturn or reinterpret parts of other laws going all the way back to 1907 that limit corporate financial participation in election campaigns.

On July 9th of this year, the ACLU posted on its website that it had filed an amicus brief in support of Citizens United in that case. http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/citizens-u...

According to the post:
"Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 prohibits unions and corporations (both for-profit and non-profit) from engaging in 'electioneering communications...The ACLU has consistently taken the position that section 203 is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it permits the suppression of core political speech, and our amicus brief takes that position again."

The case had originally come before the court as a narrow issue of whether or not a particular cable video, Hillary: The Movie, was electioneering. At the time of its production, Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner.

According to the Bennan Center for Justice here's what happened next.



SCOTUS, rather than rule on the narrow issue of whether or not Hillary: The Movie was an "electioneering communication", in effect gave the plantiffs (the corporate group "Citizens United" ) extra time to prepare a broader argument on corporate campaign contributions in general, and a heads up on which precedents might be problematic and have to be answered for them to prevail. The ACLU filed its amicus brief in time to help Citizens United prepare and argue the larger issue.

According to Cenk in his Sep. 9th show, this action of SCOTUS was almost unheard of and "pure judicial activism".

Last week after the likely disposition became known, Sen. Feingold spoke on the Senate floor about the devastating ramifications, calling the decision "a wholesale uprooting of the principles which have governed our elections for so long".

Common Cause points out in yesterday's press release that the expected broadly-based decision



In a report on their website, Common Cause also notes that

(emphasis mine)

In plain and simple language, if you think our elected officials are already too beholden to corporations and too dismissive of the needs of the public in general, you can't overestimate how much worse it can get. The input of individuals will be utterly drowned out.

The rationale for allowing "free speech" for corporations, and which has been floating around for years, is that corporations are "persons" under the Constitution, and as such have a right to political discourse as absolute as humans have. Most academic Constitutional scholars think that's a stretch to put it mildly. I pointed out in one of the first entries I posted to my DU journal that the logical extension of that would be to let them vote. The fact that they don't have this privilege to me indicates that deep-down no one actually believes this absurd assertion. The other glaring argument against giving corporations "free speech" is that the humans composing the corporation can't by law speak freely when representing the corporation. They are constrained to speech which advances corporate financial interests because of their legal obligation to shareholders, no matter their personal beliefs on the issue or candidate under discussion.

As Common Cause points out, the only remedy is to institute, quickly, some form of publicly financed campaigns for all federal elections. Since Congress would have enact a law to bring this about, time and money are against us. More on this soon.

Thank you so much, ACLU.

I remember years ago I used to look at someone like Pete Seeger who had worked, say, 40 years by that time for important causes and thought, "Where is his outrage? Why does he seem so optimistic? Doesn't he understand how entrenched and systematic the evil is?"

I thought back then that his efforts to clean up the Hudson River were naive and missing the big picture. A lot of older activists struck me that way. They tended to know only one or two issues in depth, though they kept up casually on current events.

I think now that he was still an activist who continued to get results because he had moved to a different phase of activism than I was in at the time.

When we first open our eyes to the world of public policy and politics, it is generally because we have been inspired to join a political campaign. There's a certain glee in finding out how our candidate's positions are superior not only to his/her opponent's, but to what has been achieved in Congress or the state legislature or wherever the candidate is headed. We get a sense of superiority just knowing we back someone who knows better and who will improve things. We knock ourselves out campaigning and celebrate when we win. When the next candidate appears w/ a similar agenda, we back that person, too.

We want to see how much of a difference we made, so we start following what happens next, politically. This leads to the next phase--starting to pay attention to issues and current events in general. Perhaps we start getting newsletters from one or two issue-oriented groups. Or follow one or two blogs. Or become active in a party locally. We start to see how much more work there is to do than we were formerly aware of. But we dig in, call Congress when prompted, or hit the pavement each summer for our favorite candidate, and write checks when we can. We read in those newsletters or blogs how we have sometimes gotten a piece of legislation passed--how our efforts made a difference. Or sometimes our candidate wins. But we also start to notice how sometimes the bill was defeated or the court case lost, even though we'd been convinced that the situation was important. Sometimes our candidate is outspent and loses, and often can't get the promised reforms passed.

Then we try harder. We try to involve others. If our SO, or close friends are disinterested, we may get involved in recruiting strangers when we campaign door to door, phoning for the party, or writing motivational pieces for a blog. And our understanding of the broader picture increases. By this time we may sometimes watch C-SPAN. We see how the same politicians keep obstructing needed reforms. We learn how much more money the entrenched elite interests always have than the reformers. We learn about the huge, negative, worldwide impact on much we hold dear is caused by the unremitting actions of a small, powerful segment that cares only about its own advantages. We find out how few of our neighbors want to do anything more than vote every few years, and even then how few of those care to learn enough to make informed voting choices. Sometimes we hear even luminaries like Michael Moore say they're discouraged. We learn the devastating impossibility of making it all, or even most of it, right.

We think about giving up. We try to pay less attention to what's going on, but we can't unlearn the big lessons. Even if we only scan the front page of the newspaper occasionally, or see politics when it shows up on a satirical TV show, we know what it means in a way we didn't before we began the journey.

There are a number of ways people go at this point. Some get used to being bitter. They stay fairly informed, but the whole world becomes the enemy--part for perpetrating evil, the rest for allowing it. They disengage, and they get a sort of nihilistic satisfaction when the good side yet again loses. They feel their low opinion of the world is vindicated.

Others decide that they need to be more realistic. They decide their hurt is a painful lesson about how foolish it is to tilt at windmills. They move toward the "center" of the political spectrum and look for positions to advocate that won't get such hard pushback from the powers that be, such as carbon credits as opposed to stronger emissions regulations. They remain involved and feel they are sometimes making headway, but have little hope that the world will ever get much better than it is. They try not to look at the longterm picture. They get angry, even vindictive, with people who demand they back more anti-establishment measures. They tell themselves they're angry because "the perfect is enemy of the good", and those idealists are only derailing good compromises. But they are actually angry because the more progressive activists remind them of the hope they have lost.

A few, after having been knocked down, reassess things a little differently. They acknowledge how strong evil is and how powerless and disconnected with public policy most people feel in modern large societies. They admit to themselves that not only is progress slow, but that there is no such thing as an ultimate, a final, once-and-for-all win. As far back in history as it's possible to go, they see that there have always been people who have clawed their way into positions of power over others and who spend their considerable energies staying in power no matter the consequences to the society as a whole. They accept that there always will be. They wonder how, in light of that reality, some reformers keep going for a lifetime.

They look in history for examples of when there was a point to the struggle. What they see is that it took 80 years for women in the U.S. to become enfranchised. No one who was active at the start of the struggle lived to see the victory. From the Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution there were 572 years, and citizen empowerment in the U.S. continues to be endangered and needs constant shoring up. It took over a hundred years to abolish slavery in the U.S., and African-American citizens are still working to have the same access to opportunities that citizens of European descent take for granted. Perhaps most problematic have been labor rights, access to a comfortable standard of living for the majority of working people. We have not seen straight, upward progress. There's been a lot of three steps forward and two steps back, depending on whether the gov't has been backing economic measures that benefit working people and the economy as a whole. Still, a great many jobs offer a 40 hour week, more or less, two days a week off, workers comp if you get hurt, and the promise of Social Security in your old age.

Politically active people who get this far in the re-evaluation usually remain active. They see their goals differently. They think of themselves, however large or small a part they play, as a belonging to a much larger effort with an unknown destination. They know that what may not be possible in one lifetime may still bear fruit. They know that improvement, but not absolute success, is possible, and that it matters. They even know that the human race will eventually die, but that as a member of the species we have an allegiance to it--it's the way we are made; it's who we are. Anything less diminishes a person. We know that this awareness gives us a grounding and sustenance that the most elite and power-driven can't imagine. Think of the MLK "I have a dream" speech. See how Michael Moore pulled himself back up and set up a website to encourage people to commit to a certain number of actions a week--w/o knowing for sure whether or not anyone would respond.

People in it for the long haul pace themselves. They learn their strengths and their limitations. Each person's abilities are different. They look for the next action they feel they can take, big or small, that moves in the right direction. They look to ally with others going in the same direction, and they don't waste time worrying about those who aren't. To newbies they may appear naive. It doesn't matter. They know that sometimes they will evaluate situations incorrectly or make other mistakes. They know that they can only do their best and hope that sometimes they will be very right.

Though I don't have Pete Seeger's talent for motivating people to drop everything and devote themselves to a particular action, I do believe I now understand better who he was. And I hope my small daily actions are a tiny bit effective, and that they cumulatively have some impact. Perhaps you can find where in the spectrum you fit for now. And it can give you some peace despite the ups and downs of being engaged.

When you allow every individual to express themselves politically, what constructive purpose is served by letting a spokesperson for a consolidation of the financial interests of a group of people, that is limited by law to advocating only what will benefit the group financially no matter what the personal beliefs of its members, engage in the political process, especially by using their united wealth?