Fight for Your Democracy

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign he spoke to America’s anger and disillusionment of the rampant political corruption in Congress that has increasingly stifled America’s business.

The American educational system is in shambles; we have imprisoned more of our own citizens than at any time in history; the infrastructure is dilapidated; the poor, the disfranchised and the homeless reach historic numbers now.

Even before the greed-fueled, deception-ladened financial meltdown, the mass export of American jobs by unpatriotic corporations was in full gear.

A disenchanted America knows its problems all too well. As presidential candidate, Obama resonated with a disheartened America when he said both parties have allowed “lobbyist and campaign contributions to rig the system.”

It’s no wonder just forty five percent of Americans have “trust and confidence” in Congress, and just twenty five percent approve of how Congress is doing its job.

When hospitals and schools in America are closing and prisons are booming, gun sales and victims are at historic levels, and the very ones who caused this national failure are rewarded with taxpayer-funded spoils, then we know something is amiss. The taxpayer, meanwhile, is left starved, stranded, and stupefied.

The fight against undue corporate influence must begin today, right now. Put another way, the sale of American democracy must end today, right now.

For it is here that an ever appealing Obama expressed his most profound wisdom and challenge to you: “If we’re not willing to take up [this] fight, then real change—change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans—will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.”

As I record this ongoing history, over a year after these words were uttered, democracy, your democracy, is still under siege. Americans, taxpayers, citizens, all the ordinary people of this otherwise proud country, must come together to form a wave of change; today, right now!

Sources:

Lessig, Lawrence, How to Get Our Democracy Back, The Nation, February 22, 2010, pp. 11, 13, 19