Getting Congress to act on behalf of the People’s interest – especially when it requires members to take a firm stand against the moneyed interests – can’t be done by saying “pretty please.” Congress is a beast – to make it move, you have to whack it with a big stick.
Our biggest stick is a riled up citizenry, and that stick is growing bigger and “rileyer” every day, particularly on issues of corporate arrogance and avarice. As we’ve seen this year, the American grassroots are catching fire – for example, at January’s protest by more than 2,000 people at the Koch brothers’ secret billionaire’s retreat in the California desert; Wisconsin’s mass rebellion against Governor Scott Walker’s venomous anti-worker legislation; November’s resounding 63 percent vote in Ohio to repeal Gov. John Kasich’s union-busting law; and, of course, the ongoing Occupy Wall Street revolt.
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America’s citizens uprising against voracious corporate power is clearly not going away. To the contrary, 76 percent of the people polled by Hart Research support a Constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s edict that corporations can make unlimited, secret donations to buy our elections. The same big majority supports an amendment to make clear that corporations are not people and do not have the rights of humans.
Congress is beginning to feel these grassroots rumblers – and beginning to move. In the past few weeks, three bills have been introduced in the House and one in the Senate to undo the Supreme Court’s damage to our people’s democratic rights, including Rep. Jim McGovern’s bill (H.J. Res 88) that specifically rejects the fiction that a corporation is a person. As he puts it, “People govern corporations, not the other way around.”
To be a part of this big stick of people power, contact www.wethepeoplecampaign.org.
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