My Hopes for Our New Congress – 10 Critical Priorities

Time for change

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Nov-11-06 08:11 PM
Original message

My Hopes for Our New Congress – 10 Critical Priorities

Like many or most other DUers, I have posted numerous concerns that our Constitution, our democracy, and therefore our country have been slipping away from us under the presidency of George W. Bush. Tuesday’s election results represent a big step towards countering the Bush administration’s efforts to turn the world’s oldest democracy into an imperial dictatorship. But it is only one large step in the right direction. And if this great victory is not followed up with aggressive measures to get our country back on course I’m afraid that history will record it as merely a blip on our road to tyranny. Here are what I see as the major priorities that our Democratic Congress will need to address quickly and aggressively in order to prevent that from happening:

# 1 – Don’t let Bush start World War III

Whether it’s because of the geopolitics of oil, war profiteering, George Bush’s great desire to be known as a “War President”, or simply because he’s a moron, it seems evident that George Bush is determined to take our country to war in Iran. He and his neoconservative cohorts have few or no reservations about getting our country embroiled in preemptive wars or risking the onset of World War III.

I don’t need to mention that an invasion of Iran could result in world wide catastrophe and mean the end of our country and our world as we know it. Our Constitution provides Congress with the power to check the President’s desire, and I believe that our Congress will need to be very aggressive about exercising that right if they are to prevent a world wide catastrophe of great magnitude.

# 2 – Take back our first amendment rights, including an independent press

Our first amendment has taken a terrific beating under the Bush presidency. Americans who wish to protest against their government are restricted to “first amendment zones”, with the obvious purpose of impeding the opportunity for other American citizens to hear them. The Bush administration routinely denies White House access to journalists who report what the administration wishes to suppress. They sponsor propaganda disguised as genuine news. And they even threaten to and actually jail reporters who report information that they don’t approve of.

To compound these presidential actions, our national news media has largely become a tool of the wealthy, replacing the independent news media that was facilitated by the passage of the Federal Communications Act of 1934. The philosophy behind the legislation was that the airways that enable communications via radio or television are public, like our water, air or public roads, and therefore they must serve the public’s interest. This concept of “public airways” protects our right to free speech and freedom of the press, and consequently to our need for the information required in a democracy.

The loss of an independent press in our country has resulted in a citizenry that is largely ignorant of numerous issues of great importance to them, including information on candidates for high public office. During the 2000 presidential campaign the corporate news media invented and propagated a myth about Al Gore being an exaggerator and a liar, while continuously giving George Bush a pass on the numerous and substantive lies that he told the American people. During the 2004 election they failed to publish the information that George Bush was wired to his handlers during the presidential debates with John Kerry. They ignored the substantial evidence that George Bush had failed to fulfill his National Guard duty, while acting as a megaphone for the completely unsubstantiated stories propagated by the “Swift boat veterans for truth” which denigrated John Kerry’s heroic war record. And when George Bush lied to the American people to justify his Iraq war the news media failed to point out the severe paucity of evidence for the administration’s case for war. With a responsible national news media there is no possibility that George Bush could have been elected as president of the United States, and once elected responsible news reporting would have quashed many of his irresponsible ideas, including the Iraq war.

Congress must challenge the Bush administration’s repeated violations of our First Amendment rights. They must attempt to reinstitute a version of the Fairness Doctrine, which was essentially discontinued during the Reagan administration. They must work on reversing the effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is largely responsible for monopolization of our public airways by a small group of billionaires and their powerful corporations. They must figure out a way to put back the wall that used to separate the commercial from the news aspects of corporations. In short, they must figure out a way to make our “public airways” once again serve the public, as they admirably but unsuccessfully tried to do in 2005.

# 3 – Take back our Constitution

George W. Bush has made a mockery of the laws of our country and of our Constitution. He has put himself above our country’s laws by using over 800 signing statements to claim his right to ignore laws passed by Congress. He has violated our first amendment rights by numerous actions, as discussed in priority # 2 of this post. He has violated our 4th amendment protection against unreasonable searches though his unexcused warrentless spying program. He has violated amendments V through VIII of our Constitution through his torture policies, his removal of our rights to be accused of a crime before being imprisoned, and his removal of our rights to challenge our imprisonment by government (habeas corpus), all which are now embodied in his Military Commissions Act. He has repeatedly lied to Congress and to the American people in order to justify his war in Iraq. And he has used the power of the Presidency repeatedly to punish his political enemies.

The Constitution of the United States provides one remedy for a President run amok. That remedy is impeachment. This is not a choice, rather it is a responsibility of Congress to protect our Constitution by exercising that remedy. That must be done if Congress is to acknowledge that our Constitution is a sacred document that defines what our country stands for.

Though I believe that Bill Clinton was a good President in many respects, he mistakenly thought that he was being magnanimous by taking a pass on pushing for an investigation of the Iran Contra scandals of the Reagan-Bush Presidency. That decision gained him no respect and no quarter from the criminals involved in those scandals or from their right wing supporters. But more important, it set the stage for the Presidency of George W. Bush. Let us learn a lesson from that and never let it happen again.

# 4 – Take back our elections

There is nothing more central to a democracy than its elections, and it is beyond my understanding how we ever got to the point where a private individual, group, or company would be given the right to count our votes in secret. That is exactly what it means when a company is allowed to write computer programs that count our votes and then prevent public access to those programs with the rationale that its machinery is “proprietary”.

It is easy to forget after the great election results that we saw this Tuesday, but it is highly likely that George W. Bush is running now sitting in the White House because of massive election fraud in 2006. Some people voiced the opinion prior to Tuesday’s elections that election fraud in our country is so bad that there is no point in addressing any other issue until it is corrected. At the other extreme, some will look at Tuesday’s results and believe that we don’t have to be very concerned about this problem after all. Both of those views are extreme and should be shunned.

Democrats did not take over the House and Senate because the thieves of past elections decided to give us a break this time or because the vulnerabilities of our election system have been fixed. We won this election because the popular mandate for Democrats was so great that it couldn’t be stolen. We must ensure that in the future Democrats don’t require an overwhelming mandate in order to eke out a 33 seat majority (or whatever it turns out to be) in the House.

What does the evidence say about election fraud in this election? We don’t have all the data in on this question yet, because voting activist groups are currently analyzing how their private exit polls compare with official results and other variables. But what do we currently know? For one thing, we know that Democrats consistently led in the Congressional generic ballot by 8 to 23 percentage points for several months prior to the election, averaging about 15 for last two months (though with an apparent slight down turn in the couple of days prior to the election), and yet on Election Day Congressional Democrats led Congressional Republicans by a mere 7-8%, as indicated by CNN’s so-called “exit polls” (which I’m certain were “adjusted” to match the official count before posting.) That is a huge difference, but easy to ignore in the excitement of taking over the House. We know that of the 21 seats where pre-election polls showed a Democratic lead beyond the statistical margin of error, Democrats lost 6 of those seats and appear to have lost a 7th one. And two of those were in Ohio (CDs 1 and 15), which was the site of massive election fraud in 2004 (Thank God Blackwell lost his race for Governor). And at least one more of those races was tainted by a massive robo-calling fraud.

As a poll watcher in Maryland, I encountered a Diebold machine that was missing the tamper proof seal that was supposed to cover access to the voter access cards. Yet the Montgomery County Board of Elections ordered that it continue to be used anyhow, despite pleas from Democratic lawyers that it be taken out of service, and at the end of the day it showed the highest percent of Republican votes of all the machines used in that precinct. Also I was told during the course of the day that due to substantial voter suppression in Prince Georges County large numbers of poll watchers were being diverted there, but that I should stay put because of the problem with the tamper proof seal.

Congress must enact laws to make our voting systems wholly transparent to all of our citizens. These laws must address not just what happens on Election Day, but our voter registration process and voter suppression tactics as well. State laws that disenfranchise voters by the equivalent of a poll tax must be over-ridden by federal law. And it must be made clear that all Americans have a right to vote, so as to prevent election thefts by our courts, such as perpetrated by thugs like Antonin Scalia and his cohorts in 2000.

# 5 – Make all bribery of elected officials illegal

In theory, bribery of elected officials already is illegal. But do 0.1% of our citizens contribute 80% of the money “donated” to political campaigns without the realistic expectation that they will be provided special favors in return? Have the corporate executives identified as “Bush Pioneers” contributed millions of dollars to George Bush’s presidential campaigns through the process of “money bundling” without the certain knowledge that they would be richly rewarded for those “contributions” many times over if Bush was elected President? Anyone who believes that is not living in the same world that I am. Yet these things are “legal” today only because of the officially sanctioned fiction that they can occur without influencing politicians to favor their donors with official acts – which is the very definition of bribery.

These things make a mockery of our “democracy” by ensuring that the wealthy will have a highly disproportionate voice in our elections. Our votes are anonymous for the specific purpose of ensuring that our elected officials will be unable to favor us or punish us for the way that we vote. Yet, individuals are allowed to openly and legally contribute hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to political campaigns with the expectation that they will be richly rewarded for doing so. If our votes can be anonymous why can’t political donations be anonymous as well? And what possible excuse is there for political donations not to be anonymous, other than to allow them to be used for the purpose of bribing our elected officials?

# 6 – Get out of Iraq

George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq war. The war has been a disaster, resulting in deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and almost 3 thousand U.S. soldiers and causing the eruption of a civil war. The Iraqis overwhelmingly want us to leave, and polls show that most of them even approve of attacks on coalition soldiers. Worst of all, our continued presence in Iraq serves as a magnet for the recruitment of new terrorists who hate our country.

Yet despite all this, the Bush administration shows no inclination to leave Iraq, while it remains unable to articulate a good reason for staying. The idea that “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is so absurd it would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. Does George Bush understand that the Iraqi people have an overwhelmingly unfavorable opinion of al Qaeda?

The American people are disgusted with this war, and that is probably the main reason why they voted for a new Congress. Democrats have put forward plans for getting out of Iraq. Now they have the potential to make those plans a reality.

# 7 – Get private corporations off the backs of our government

Ronald Reagan’s plea to “get government off the backs of the American people” was one of the most cynical ploys ever perpetrated on the American people. In a democracy, government IS the people, and it’s supposed to work for the benefit of all the people, not just the wealthy. What Reagan did and George W. Bush has accelerated is to replace government by and for the people with government by and for the corporations and the wealthy.

There are certain functions that are and must be an intrinsic part of government. Why? Because they represent vital public services that are so important that a society cannot afford to trust them to private individuals. Republicans may find this hard to believe, but sometimes private corporations are more concerned with making a profit than they are with the quality of their service (How else could CEOs ensure that they get a multi-million dollar annual salary?). And no, the two are not always the same thing, especially when the government routinely provides no-bid contracts to its cronies.

Examples of functions that must be run by government are our elections, primary education, the military, public health, and our prison system. Take our prison system for example, as discussed by Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich in “The Fox in the Henhouse – How Privatization Threatens Democracy”: Prisons run by private corporations are not required to comply with requirements for transparent decision making that government prisons are. Add that to their profit motive and you have an explanation for why physical and sexual prisoner abuse is higher in private prisons than in government prisons. And worst of all, private prisons actually have the gall to lobby for laws that increase the number and length of prison sentences, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why the United States has the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country in the world. In my opinion, private prison companies lobbying our elected legislators for longer prison sentences is an abomination to a democratic nation, and it isn’t a very far road from there to institutionalized slavery.

#s 8 and 9 – Increase the minimum wage and reverse the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy

I’ll discuss these two issues together because I see them as two sides of the same coin. The larger issue that binds these two particular issues together is fairness. Under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush poverty increased and the wealth gap widened considerably, with the average CEO now making 431 times the amount of money as the average working person.

These things did not just happen. They were bound to happen because of Republican policies, whether intentionally planned or not. The federal minimum wage has not been adjusted to inflation in almost ten years, so that a person working full time for a minimum wage is living well below the poverty level. The Bush tax cuts benefited the wealthy greatly and everyone else not at all. The massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the failure to pass laws that cause the minimum wage to keep up with inflation have contributed greatly to the widening wealth gap.

These policies are not fair and they facilitate neither freedom nor democracy. As FDR said in 1934:

Necessitous men are not free men. Liberty requires opportunity to make a living – a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

# 10 – Declare war against global warming

Actually, my use of the term “war” here is facetious, and meant to poke fun at Bush’s “War against terror”. But I do believe that global warming poses a much greater threat to our country and to the world than does Islamic terrorism, though I do not care to argue that point in this already very long OP.

There is a widespread consensus among reputable scientists today that mean global temperatures having been rising for many years, that this is largely caused by the world wide emission of greenhouse gases originating from human activities, that this is currently causing our polar icecaps to melt, and that if allowed to continue it will eventually (and probably not in the very distant future) result in human catastrophes of epic proportions, such as the world wide flooding of coastal cities. Furthermore, our president and Republican Congress have chosen to ignore the evidence on this issue simply because addressing it seriously would mean inconveniencing and alienating some of their wealthiest and most powerful supporters in the energy and transportation industry.

Addressing this issue would mean enacting laws, such as requiring increased fuel efficiency of our motor vehicles, that result in decreased emissions of greenhouse gases. I don’t have the technical expertise to go into detail on precisely how this should be done. So I will simply note that Democratic Congresspersons came up with a detailed plan to address this issue in 2005, which called for investment in research, development and production of alternative energy vehicles, fuels and technologies, rollbacks in subsidies and protections for oil companies, and protection of American consumers against oil company price gouging. Needless to say, this proposal was duly quashed by our Republican Congress. I very much hope that Democrats can now resurrect their 2005 plan or something similar so that we can begin to address this serious problem before it is too late.

Summary

I consider these ten hopes of mine to be much more than a wish list. Rather I consider them all to be highly necessary. I believe that prior to Tuesday’s election our country was traveling down a road to tyranny. I believe now that we are still on that road, but we may have turned a corner. I believe that successfully addressing priority #s 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are necessary for us to reclaim our democracy. And I believe that the other five priorities are necessary for our country’s military (1 and 6), physical (10) and economic (8 and 9) security.

So I will end now with a quote from the last chapter of a book that I just read today (the last chapter, that is), which sums up quite well how I feel about this. The book is “Losing Our Democracy – How Bush, the Far Right and Big Business Are Betraying Americans for Power and Profit”, by Mark Green:

Just as the world came closer than ever before to reaching a consensus … that only democracy confers legitimacy… the greatest democracy ever is becoming less and less democratic. And leading the war on democracy is a president lauding its virtues.

Now our Democratic Party has the opportunity to counter that war against democracy. I fervently hope that they make the most of it.