From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/watch-out-plutocrats-progressive-pro-democracy-movement-savvy-and-gearing-take-citizens-united
There’s a sophisticated pushback against corporate power in the works.
By Steven Rosenfeld
November 23, 2012
Last Saturday in Los Angeles saw the most detailed, ambitious and encouraging discussion of exactly how to approach campaign finance and lobbying reform that I’ve seen in two decades of reporting on the decline of American democracy. There were constitutional solutions—not one but several—for the problems created by the Supreme Court. There was a long list of what Congress, the White House, federal agencies and state legislatures could do now. And there was growing evidence that millions of Americans of all political stripes want a renewed democracy—as surely as those multitudes who waited hours to vote on November 6.
A century ago, Progressive reformers reshaped American democracy by using every avenue available to them to take away power from that era’s robber barons and political insiders. Today, after the most expensive American election ever, democracy advocates have launched a modern counterpart with a bold agenda, new strategies, new coalitions and a growing grassroots base dedicated to unwinding political corruption’s many facets.
“A cancer does not cure itself. And this won’t be cured by dinky little reforms, tiny little ideas, tinkering, crumbs at the table, who are being proposed by people who think if we just do a little switch we will magically change this system,” said Harvard Law School’s Larry Lessig, opening A 28th Amendment? conference at UCLA Law School. “What it needs is a movement unlike any we’ve seen since the Civil Rights Movement or the Progressive Movement, taking on a corruption greater than anything we have seen since we ousted George III.”
“It’s not just money in politics—that’s one thing we have to fix—no question; we will not survive as a democracy, as a republic if we don’t fix that,” said Jeffrey Clement, co-founder of FreeSpeechForPeople. “But we will not survive as an Earth, as a democracy, as a republic, if we don’t figure out how to make corporations work for the people and be able to democratically, small ‘d,’ decide on the powers, rights, duties and privileges that these massive global empires, which is what they are now, have in our democracy.”
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/watch-out-plutocrats-progressive-pro-democracy-movement-savvy-and-gearing-take-citizens-united
