Remarks at the Lincoln Memorial, October 20, 2010
It's an honor for me to help welcome Robin Monahan and Laird
Monahan to this city, not because I can take any pride in this
place, but because we can all take pride in what they've done
and encourage others to do it. Walking across the country,
talking to people directly and through local media outlets and
through the internet, and walking here to the seat of our
misrepresentative government, is a model for us all.
Phoning in our concerns and expressing them in voting booths,
or taking part in Rorschach Test rallies where the demands are
so vague that no champions of corruption are in the least bit
threatened -- those are all good things, but not sufficient.
Walking and talking, educating and organizing are needed too,
and everybody can do a little bit of it even if they can't
walk the full length of the country.
But what if they did? What if we helped each other do it?
World War I veterans tried walking here and refusing to leave.
The military attacked its own veterans, but the result
included free college educations following the next global fit
of militaristic insanity. In many nations around the world
people have walked to the capitals and refused to leave when
the corruption had not yet reached our current level. Unjust
governments and laws have been overturned without violence,
but never without resistance.
It's an honor also for me to be supporting MoveToAmend and the
Backbone Campaign. We have to build a massive movement from
the ground up, and we have to enjoy doing it -- lessons these
organizations can teach.
Truckloads of money are being dumped into the upcoming
elections, and people seem to be especially concerned that we
don't know this time around where it's coming from. The hell
we don't. It's coming from the same
pluto-pentagon-corporatocracy it came from in lesser amounts
last time, and being able to identify specific culprits last
time didn't do us a damn bit of good. People are also
horrified because some of the groups funneling and laundering
the money take in foreign money as well as American. I hate
to break it to my fellow Americans, I know what fun xenophobia
can be, but the problem isn't the nationality of the money,
the problem is quite simply the money which -- there can be
very little doubt -- tends to come from people and businesses
that have money to spare. This marginalizes and even cancels
out the interests of those who do not have any money to spare.
That's most people in this country and even more people
outside of it.
There are people in this country who want jobs and who have
noticed that, rather than hiring new employees, corporations
are funding truly stupid and debasing political advertisements
that make us all meaner and more ignorant. And we, the owners
of the airwaves, don't see a dime of the money spent, which
all goes to other corporations to whom we have generously
given our airwaves. In an international study released last
weak that ranked our nation near the bottom among wealthy
nations in terms of enforcing the rule of law, we did score
fairly well in the subcategory of not allowing the bribery of
elected officials. Why? Because we don't call it bribery.
We call it human rights. We call it the human right of
corporate humans to freedom of speech for financial speech.
And the human right to bribery produces the same thing that
produces it, in a vicious cycle: ever increasing wealth for
the very wealthiest, and ever increasing unemployment, debt,
foreclosures, and poverty for others. Sure, our government
still offers minimal assistance to those out of work. But it
does not put them to work in education, infrastructure, or
green energy, as a majority of us want. Our so-called
representatives oppose the will of the majority on every
issue. We want Social Security left alone, though we wouldn't
mind seeing those with large incomes pay in at the same rate
as those with small. They want to start dismantling the
program. We want the wars and the military defunded. They
want to fight wars without end, using the excuse of exporting
by force our type of government, despite 86 percent of
Americans believing our government is broken. If the
democracy we pretend to be spreading is broken, is there
really a humanitarian side to our wars or are they sadistic
through and through?
Most of us could never run for office if we wanted to, unless
we knelt before the moneyed interests. Most of us, when we
look at the choices in the polling booth, have to vote the
evil of two lessers. And of course we should do so, but we
also need to follow the Monahan example. Not only is their
healthcare plan -- walking -- far more effective than any
considered in this town, but they have pointed us in the
direction of what is most needed: education and organizing
around fundamental principles of the rule of law, which is
rapidly being supplanted by the law of rulers.
We can't vote most congress members out no matter how
unpopular their actions. We can't compel them to subpoena or
impeach when called for, or to refrain when not called for.
We can't enforce or even know what laws have been created
through Office of Legal Counsel memos or presidential decrees.
We can't know who has been pardoned for what when the
president provides immunity or the Congress provides bailouts.
We've lost habeas corpus and due process. We've handed the
legislature over to the filibuster rule. Should we be
surprised when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declares
that,
"ordinary people stubbornly hold on to some old-fashioned
beliefs and one of these is the idea that the Constitution
means something, statutes mean something, and the role of the
judge is to interpret and apply the law as written."
We ordinary people will apparently have to amend the
Constitution to say that it means what it says, to say that
only people are people, to say that only speech is speech, and
even to say that "habeas corpus shall not be
suspended" means "habeas corpus shall not be
suspended." This could be endless. Because of that task
and because of what we're up against in Washington, we may
have to do this purely through the states and a new
convention.
But whether we amend the Constitution in one way or the other,
or rewrite it from scratch, or just bring some honesty to how
it is read as currently written, in any case we will need an
activist movement across the country to force this change.
Television comedians, good ones but still comedians, are
planning to hold a rally here soon to restore sanity, by which
they seem to mean quiet down anybody with a raised voice or an
insistence on significant and urgent change. The Monahan
brothers' website has a post invoking their predecessor, Paul
Revere. Imagine if he'd done his job quietly. I want to
restore sanity by restoring some fundamental ideas, the ideas
the Monahan brothers have crossed the country for. We all
need to climb up on rooftops and shout: Corporations are not
people! Money is not speech! Plutocracy is not a government
of, by, and for the people!
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