People power can beat too much money power

The Coffee Party posted on Facebook a cartoon of a politician at a podium on a plank out over a cliff.  The only thing preventing him from falling into the abyss is the number of people standing on the other end of the plank.  Except one person who is walking away.  The words on the cartoon are “The people don’t know their true power.”

I posted the following comment on Facebook.  If you have a Facebook account you can find it in context here.

“The problem with too much money in politics is too few votes to counter misinformation.  The cartoon is clever, but the person leaving should be walking to a politician's plank on solid ground.

“Let's show up each and every election day and get off-year turn-outs better than the Afghan turnout.  Too many of us don't bother because it's too inconvenient; the Afghani's stood in long lines at the risk of being attacked!”

If you don’t have a Facebook account or just want to see how often this has been published, search for “The people don’t know their true power”.  You’ll find hundreds of postings of this cartoon going back at least two years.  You’ll find many comments on it, but you will be hard pressed to find who created the original.

As I was adding “money in politics” to the keywords for this entry it occurred to me to have a keyword “people in politics” because the only way to get money out of politics is to get people into politics, even if it only to get more people to show up on election day.

Too much money or too few voters?

The best antidote to too much money in politics is larger turnouts.  If you don't show up, you are increasing the power of too much money.  If you don't show up and vote then you are increasing the likelihood you will be next on the list to be disenfranchised.

Remember that the aim of most political attack ads is not to get the viewer to vote for a given candidate but to get the viewer to not show up.

If you want to make a difference, don’t watch TV, always vote, and always vote what you believe.

Also, remember that the turnout in Afghanistan was over 50%.  Many of those people showed up at the risk they might come under a terrorist attack.  Can’t we do much better in the U.S. where our only risk of going to the polls is an auto crash?

Senate blames the cops, not the criminals

I left the following comment on Facebook on the Coffee Party's link to "Senators put federal regulators, not JPMorgan, on the hot seat", Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 2012-05-22.

What are all the complaints about?  We have the best government money can buy.

The 1 percent may have the money, but the 99 percent have the vote.  The problem is that too many of the 99 percent blame the money but never bother to show up.  Election after election has gone to Republicans because too many "Democrats" didn't even bother to show up - Florida, 2000; Wisconsin, 2010; New York Ninth District, 2011.  This last has 3-1 Democratic registration!

And money doesn't always win elections.  Meg Whitman outspent Jerry Brown by a wide margin, but Brown won the Governorship of California.

Whatever else you do, show up to vote, each and every time.  Vote Republican, Vote Democrat, Vote Third Party, Write somebody in, but vote.  The only votes that don't count are the votes not cast.

Occupy Democracy!

These were the closing words of Robert Reich in "The REAL Public Nuisance".

It isn't till we all speak up and vote that we can regain control of our country from big-money interests.

Maybe the first thing to do is to stop blaming big-money and start changing our own behavior. "As Seen on TV" does not define truth. As long as we vote for the big-money candidates or as long as we stay away, we just give more power to the big-money interests.

An ad for candidates with deep-pocket opponents

I thought up the following after reading about Meg Whitman spending $119 million of her own money for the California gubernatorial campaign:

Do you want the be$t candidate money can buy,
or do you want the best candidate.

BTW, I think it was Meg Whitman who said we needed candidates with experience in the real world.  Gosh, I wish I lived in her "real world".